Studying the interactions between robots and social actors

This article proposes several research avenues to explore a pervading phenomenon: the proliferation of human-robot interactions in industrial societies. The first avenue consists in studying the diversity of human-robot encounters and relations, which are not generally reduced to “cooperation”. The second concerns the framework of analysis. A long temporal scale of observation might be adopted, and analysts could study interactions between robots and social actors in their own right, whether they are individuals or groups, rather than with interchangeable “humans” or “subjects”. Finally, as the link between robots and the “artificial intelligence” category is sometimes tenuous or reductive, other angles from which to analyse these interactions may be found, such as exploring the connections between social actors and conversational agents.