Technocultural research into robotics
Edited by Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry
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Invoking photo-video autolography: AI prompting as creative practice
In late 2024 and 2025, a new class of generative AI systems made it possible to upload still images and use natural language prompts to generate short videos. While models such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo could generate video from scratch, it was perhaps more interesting that they could be instructed to mobilise photographs…
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Intellectual production after AI: living alongside Deep Research
Chris Chesher Forthcoming as a ‘probe’ in Explorations in Media Ecology to be published as ‘Re-assembling agency: Invocational AI actants in media ecologies and Actor-Network Theory’. Introduction In working on this probe, I have been both thrilled and deeply unsettled by using ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature, an AI that does more than just chat. It…
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Meeting the Machines: Encounters with Jibo and Ameca
17 October 2025 In the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure — and slight awkwardness — of two memorable encounters with social robots. Both were designed to be companions of a sort: mechanical beings endowed with gestures, voices, and a glimmer of personality. One, Ameca, greeted me with eerily expressive eyes at the Computer…
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The Age of the Screen-Faced Robot
26 January 2025 Have you noticed how humanoid robots are starting to look like they’ve stepped off the pages of a slick sci-fi graphic novel? The new wave of mechanical beings – think Tesla’s Optimus, Figure 01, and others – sport glossy, obsidian face-plates that reflect studio lights with a futuristic sheen. We’ve arrived at a moment…
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Back to RobotWorld Seoul (2024): Then & Now
October 2024 I first attended RobotWorld in Seoul back in 2010, when the expo was a relatively modest affair, with only a handful of impressive demonstrations amid clunky prototypes and rows of servo-motor vendors. Returning in 2024, I expected to be overwhelmed by sleek humanoids and fully autonomous service droids—and while there were definite signs of progress,…
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Service through the eyes of a robot: Robophilosophy 2024 presentation
Service – from the robot‘s perspective In this paper, (video below), Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry ask: What does it mean to perform service work as a robot? This question might seem like a thought experiment straight out of a science fiction novel, but it was the starting point for our recent research at the…
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Reflections on Robophilosophy 2024
Robophilosophy in Aarhus was even better than I expected. Lots of good papers and many nice people working with humanities and social sciences approaches to robots. This theatre performance, called Replik.a, by a Stuttgart troupe, was a highlight. I really was not sure whether the second actor was a human or a robot until I…
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From novelty to normal: Dining with robot waiters across Kuala Lumpur
Introduction It’s July 2023, and I’m in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with my wife, Cathy, on a mission to explore a trend that has quietly taken root in the city’s dining scene: robot waiters. Once a futuristic novelty popping up in social media feeds, these mechanical servers have begun to settle into the everyday rhythms of…
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Pepper Parlor
Imagine eating morning tea surrounded by social robots. Pepper Parlor is a concept restaurant that offers just that experience.