Registering Robots: When People Talk About Robots

Speaker: Christian Greiffenhagen

Venue: Room 1017, No.8 Chengjun Building, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: We live in a world where people increasingly interact with machines, including various forms of robots in public places. While this means that people now have to ‘interact’ with robots (e.g., yielding), it also allows for the possibility for people to notice them and talk about them. This paper examines such moments of registering to understand how people make sense of robots in everyday public settings.

This paper draws on a video-based study of how people spontaneously ‘interact’ with autonomous delivery vehicles (ADVs) on university campuses in China. We recorded these encounters by following ADVs on bicycles and mounting 360-degree cameras on the robots. This unique video corpus captures the various ways in which pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers naturally encounter ADVs. In this paper, we identify and analyze 60 cases where people notice and talk about the robot. Following Goodwin and Goodwin’s (2012: 276) research on constructing noticings in car journeys, we examine how people topicalize the robot through talk, gaze, and bodily orientation, and what social actions they perform.

We focus on two main aspects of such noticings. First, we find that people’s registeringsconstitute the robot as something “noteworthy.” As Keisanen (2012) demonstrates, people bring things that become relevant in the environment into their ongoing activities, such asdriving. In this sense, robots remain novel objects in public space and become topics of conversation. For example, people point to, introduce or explain the robot to others: “It’s an autonomous delivery vehicle.” Second, people also occasionally express that they are not able to make sense of the robot’s behaviour, i.e., treat its behaviour as puzzling. While the robot generally operates without accidents or serious problems, their behavior is sometimes treated as problematic or incompetent, prompting complaints like “It’s not moving on such a narrow road” or “Artificial stupidity.”