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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to make sense of ethnographic observations of Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robot following its short-term experimental 'unleashing' in the centre of Melbourne, Australia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to make sense of ethnographic observations of Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robot following its short-term experimental 'unleashing' in the centre of Melbourne, Australia.

This experiment looked into what might happen as Spot entangled with an unfamiliar urban ecology. How would Spot's adaptive capacities relate with those of a nearby dog, car, street crossing, or passer-by? In posing this question, we were interested in exploring the idea of relational possibilities as immanent in technical objects and their milieus (Coupaye 2021). Moving away from a human-centred view of material agency as human intentionality inferable from the material, we then sought to approach the analysis of Spot's promenade as instantiating a particular modality for how this technical object may exist and operate in the world.

Our analytical attempts soon led us to question the scope of our own ethnographic task: what kind of ethnography was being crafted in and through Spot's data-gathering capacities along with those of other, human and nonhuman participants? And how to avoid the pitfall of mistaking Spot's technical spectacle for an unproblematic revelation of its technicity while still allowing for its non-anthropocentric elicitation?

In addressing these questions, this paper articulates an anthropology of techno-diversity understood as the inherent pluralism of technical objects–their 'inhuman remains' (Hui 2019 226) and 'margins of indeterminacy' (Simondon 2012 152)–and their wider milieus. The challenge of this diversity, we suggest, lies in approaching the study of technology without rehearsing the bio-centric, onto-epistemological grounds of its origins and agency in human sociality (Parisi 2022).