Robotic technologies, health care, and ethics

Technologies of all sorts have always played a major role in the negotiation of a range of putative health deficits that are assumed to impede functionality or the expression of autonomous selfhood. Older mechanical aides still have an important place in normalising bodily performance, while the advent of digital technologies, and particularly AI, can serve to enhance the supposed shortcomings of neurodiversity, whether as a result of ageing, disability or ill-health, as well as assisting in many physical aspects of embodiment. The widely accepted claim that such technologies have a clear therapeutic value conjures the illusion of an unproblematised sequence of evermore complex devices leading to increasingly enhanced function and the support of continuing selfhood. My paper focuses on social robots – often called empathy robots – and offers a less conventional perspective that puts aside the desire for individual autonomy and opens up the question of the posthuman. Rather than prioritising the bounded self at the centre of humanist thought, I ask what is at stake when human embodiment becomes intricately entangled with non-human materialities and digital coding. Is the potentially radical change to healthcare provision to be welcomed? Beyond a merely functional usage, which is likely to dominate in the short term, urgent bioethical questions arise about the extent to which the category of the human can or should be sustained as the anchor of flourishing life. In exploring the practical, philosophical and bioethical implications of newly emerging robotic technologies, I endorse a posthumanism that in seeking to radically decentre the very notion of human privilege and hierarchical distinctions would revalue non-normative embodiment.

Professor Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor in Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University, she has also held academic posts in the UK, Ireland, Canada, USA, Finland and Australia, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto, Visiting Professor in the Dept. of Law at UTS, Sydney, and Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of Liverpool. Her research spans interdisciplinary gender studies and feminist theory, postconventional bioethics, phenomenology, posthumanities, science and technology studies (STS), critical disability studies (including cripqueer theory and practice), knowledge production within the biosciences, theories of the monstrous, prosthetic theory, psychoanalysis, retheorising women’s health, organ transplantation. Her books include: Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2022 Bloomsbury); Dangerous Discourses: Subjectivity, Sexuality and Disability (2009 Palgrave Macmillan); Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002 Sage); and Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics (1997 Routledge).

Venue: Institute for Safe Autonomy (135 Seminar Room).

Host or Publisher Department of Sociology