Course

In recent years, the design, use and study of robots and AI technologies in a variety of social settings has
increased, ranging from therapy and care for older adults and children, to education and domestic life. The fast
development and diffusion of such technologies is grounded in contextual understandings, narratives and
ideas about what their function and role might be. As technologies are designed to address and offer solutions
to contemporary social challenges (such as in the context of care or education) it becomes crucial to question
how these challenges are conceptualised, understood and made visible.

In this multidisciplinary course students will be offered perspectives on AI and society from several social
science disciplines as well as from humanities. The aim of the course is to give a multifaceted understanding
of AI in society and to let the student delve more deeply into one of these perspectives. In this course, students
will be guided through engaged reflections on different ways in which robots and humans interact and co-habit
private and public spaces; and how these interactions are perceived, regulated and valued within a humancentred
perspective. The classes will also explore theories of power dynamics and social structures related to
smart technologies and artificial agents, and how these afford or even reproduce subject positions in
interaction with humans. The key aim of the course is therefore to support students learning how to identify
challenges and dilemmas that arise when using AI and social robots in communication with, and the immediate
surrounding of, humans.

The course will include a brief introduction to Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and an
overview of mainstream research theories and methods to investigate human-robot interactions. The rest of
the course will extensively cover main critical and ethics perspectives on AI and technoscience, spanning from
robo-ethics, gender/queer theories in AI to data feminism. Considerations, examples and critical discussion will
be central in this course to help students develop a critical view on how digital, embodied technologies (e.g.
social robots and AI-driven machines) do things for us, with us, and with what consequences and
entanglements for humans – from an ethical, political, relational standpoint.