CS 340U

Robots as Media

This course examines robots as mediators of cultural values and practices. As machines, it is easy to construe robots as extensions of human purpose but this fails to consider how their participation contributes to shaping the ways in which we think, feel, and act with others. We will begin with a thematic survey of narratives of robots, both real and imagined, and the roboticized futures they describe. However, to look at robots as media means that they do more than signify already existing cultural values and beliefs. As such, in the remainder of the course, we will consider ways in which robots, both hard and soft, remediate our understandings of attention, cognition, labour, care, intimacy, racialization, disability, and, of course, humanness, making them all the more material and durable.