Paper short abstract:

Fictional futures are part of the culturally shaped identity of robtics researchers. Notions of "future" areused to legitimize research and to symbolize the ability to resolve societal problems. The promise of helping robots thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Paper long abstract:

Notions of the future play a crucial role in the epistemological genealogy of robotics. The construction of robots is aiming at applications and scenarios to be realized in the future. This is not only characteristic for the recent boom in robotics funding. It starts with the fictional origin of robots and mutually shaped ideas of socio-technical futures by writers and researchers.

These future concepts often work by the promise of all-around benefit. Visions of an everyday world inhabited by helping robots become a regulative ideal of research coordination. So-called "Grand Challenges" bunch different branches of robotics research under umbrella-like aims of national economic span. The idea that robotics is realizing imagined futures becomes its legitimation and motivation.

Despite their actual abilities robots are addressed as universal tools. Robotics thereby becomes increasingly a discipline to adapt the applications and use cases to the tools. Thereby users and situations of use become formalized parts of a solution process - instead of active stakeholders.

This empirical glimpse on future concepts in social robotics research shows different functions of the popularity of socio-technical futures in research: Fictional futures do not just become part of a culturally shaped identity, they are used to legitimize research and even more important to symbolize the resolving of societal problems. Thereby the promise of helping robots becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and implies a instrumental relation to the social worlds of application.