Category: Uncategorized
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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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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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Beyond anthropomorphism symposium
I am helping to organise a symposium with the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems called ‘Beyond Anthropomorphism: Rethinking Human-Machine Relations in Robotics and AI’ on June 11 and 12, 2019.
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Mining robotics and media change
Here’s a link to an article I wrote last year on the transformations in mining practices associated with digital technologies. In it I argue that changes even in such a large scale material practice can be considered as media changes.
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Autonomous Robots compete to beat the field
The meaning of individual robots is put into relief when they face competition. This week I watched the National Instruments (NI) Autonomous Robotics Competition finals at Macquarie University as 27 teams placed their robots onto the playing field in the Lotus Theatre.
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Google’s robot challenge
Google recently acquired eight high profile start-up robotics companies, providing strong evidence of a strategy to create breakthrough applications for robotics over the next decade. This strategy is most likely to concentrate on manufacturing and logistics.
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Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day
The search for robots does not always end with finding discrete autonomous actors. The picture is more complex. In March, I travelled 7 hours West to visit the Open Day at Rio Tinto’s copper mine at Northparkes NSW (near Parkes) on March 2 2013. This visit was an opportunity to experience and understand some of…