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Short abstract:

Exploring the capacity of robots to make things happen through an assembly of relationships that combines the automated and the unpredictable, as well as the robots's magmatic signifier, this presentation analyzes a pilot experience with a feeding robot.

Long abstract:

Based on the patients’ enthusiastic evaluation and experience of a pilot process with a feeding robot in a palliative care hospital that doesn’t work, this presentation begins with the question: Why the enthusiasm and positive evaluation of an artefact that clearly does not function for the task it was designed for?

If we take the framework of autonomy as self-determination and analyze human-robot interaction as a dyadic relationship, given the results the enthusiasm of the patients is incomprehensible. It could also be referred to the Hawthorne effect, which reports the positive evaluation of people participating in experiments. However, this effect also warns that attention is not being properly paid to what explains the phenomena, and therefore, we must integrate new relationships into the analysis.

If we understand the robot as an entity that has the capacity to generate movements and articulate relationships when introduced and/or produces assemblages, and where autonomy in the assemblage is relational, then the scenario changes radically. The robot, due to its magmatic capacity to mobilize imaginaries, meanings, and economic investments, makes different things happen. This does not mean that the robot is nothing, but that it works for different things than those it was designed for. The robot from a dyadic conceptualization is a failure. In contrast, the robot conceptualized as a magmatic artifact designed taking into account its capacity to assemblage the automated and the unpredictable, could open new scenarios for the development of health programs and policies towards care and well-being of patients.