Robotization and the domestic sphere

Abstract

The aim of this article is to advance theoretically the debate on the interrelation between robotization and the domestic sphere. I adopt a critical approach to the political economy about the diffusion of machines in the domestic sphere (unexpected and not predicted by the classical theories of capital) and the automation of everyday life, including that of the human body. In the first part, I focus on why robotics has shifted from the industrial sectors in the domestic sphere and on which features characterize today this sector. Then, I describe the trends that robotics has put in motion in the domestic sphere and Europeans’ attitudes toward it. In the final part, I analyze the processes of automation that are taking place. I will conclude posing the problem of what kind of society we want to build and live in by introducing the social robots and which future perspectives emerge at social level.

Keywords

Domestic labor domestic sphere feminism robotization social robots

Introduction: robotics shift from production to reproduction

The aim of this article is to theoretically advance the debate on the interrelation between robotization and the domestic sphere. I draw on three sources of data: the Eurobarometer (2012) survey on Europeans’ attitudes toward robots, the International Federation of Robotics’ (IFR) most recent report (2016) on the diffusion of robotics all around the world, and a survey I carried out in Italy on a convenience sample of high school students (N = 528) regarding various aspects of robot appropriation and of which I anticipate here some results. In recent years, a series of special issues of international journals has addressed the topic of social robotics from a social science perspective, producing a remarkable corpus of empirical research (Böhlen and Karppi, 2017; Esposito et al., 2014; Fortunati et al., 2015; Pfadenhauer et al., 2015; Sugiyama and Vincent, 2013). Furthermore, in 2015, the pivotal book Social Robots from a Human Perspective, edited by Vincent et al., articulated even more the social science perspective on social robotics, which the imminent book edited by Guzman (2017) is also expected to do. While the bulk of the general debate on robotics has focused on the transformation that robotics is posing to the organization of industrial labor prefiguring the loss of many factory jobs (Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2017), the specific literature mentioned above on social robotics has posed another issue. This issue is the increasing shift of robotics from the sphere of production (industrial sectors, advanced information technology [IT] services) to the reproduction sphere. By the reproduction sphere, we mean the sphere where the energy of waged, unwaged, and precarious workers is reconstructed—mainly by women but also by themselves—where the new generations of workers are put into the world, where social services are provided, and where the public sphere is explicated.

Among these authors, Fortunati et al. (2015) and Taipale et al. (2015) were able to capture this shift and to argue that the field of development of robotics appeared to be no longer confined to the industrial setting and workers but to have expanded to the home and to social services, and as a consequence, to the elderly, children, women, and disabled people. In this vision, the targets of this new wave of robotics are the so-called “weak social subjects,” and the labor that robots are required to address is immaterial and material care. Care labor is a completely different labor from what robots are used to perform in the factories and it imposes difficult problems to identify and to resolve. In particular, drawing on the data provided by the Eurobarometer (2012) survey on the Europeans’ attitudes toward robots, these scholars have argued that the sectors that are likely to be penetrated by robots in the near future are the reproduction sectors: domestic settings, healthcare, entertainment, education, communication and information, and the public sphere.

However, so far this shift has remained outlined only at a descriptive level, without any attempt being made to explain why it has occurred. The time is right to reflect on the reasons that have produced this shift and the way in which it is manifesting. To operationalize my analysis, I decided to limit it to the domestic setting, which is the least explored area among the various sectors that compose the reproduction sphere. At first glance, the domestic setting might appear as the place of anti-robotics par excellence, since domestic and care labor present serious problems of formalization. Explaining why robotics shifted from the production sphere to the reproduction sphere, and in particular to the domestic setting, will be my first objective.

The second objective is to describe at least some of the features or trends that the field of robotics is developing in this setting. The structure of the article is organized as follows: the next section will be dedicated to illustrating why robotics has shifted into the domestic sphere and to analyzing the main features that characterize this sector today. The following section is devoted to grasping the main trends that robotics has put in motion in the domestic sphere and to Europeans’ attitudes toward it. The third section focuses on concretely analyzing the processes of automation that are taking place in the domestic sphere. I will conclude by posing the problem of what kind of society we want to build and live in by introducing the social robots, and which future perspectives emerge at a social level.

Why robotics shifted to the domestic sphere

It is only possible to grasp the reason why this shift has happened if we first understand deeply what the domestic sphere has become in recent decades. To do so, I will draw on the knowledge produced on the domestic sphere by Marxian feminists (e.g. Dalla Costa M. and James, 1972; Dalla Costa GF., 1978; Federici and Fortunati, 1984; Fortunati, 1995 [1981]). Their theoretical analysis goes behind orthodox Marxian categories and thus is useful in outlining the most relevant changes which occurred inside the domestic setting in the past few decades. I will also draw on the work done by Silverstone et al. (1992) and by Silverstone and Haddon (2006), who identified the domestic sphere as the crucial place where the consumption of media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) takes place.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the development of innovation and technology was seen as linked to the factory (Zuboff, 1988), the only place where value was believed to be produced. In the factory, the large increase in the use of machines and the parallel decline in the number of workers were considered inexorable (Marx, 1964). The novelty of recent decades is that the number of machines used in the domestic sphere has become higher than that used in the production sphere (factories, services, etc.). The domestic sphere has become a place where the mass population uses billions of machines: means of transportation, domestic appliances, mass media, fixed telephone, the Internet, smartphones, computers, tablets, three-dimensional (3D) printers, and so on. Thus, the domestic sphere that in the past had been considered backward and unproductive now appears openly as central for the innovation of the entire economic system and for society. This can be seen as a paradox, if we take into account that the domestic sphere has been organized, apparently, as a “natural” sphere of production. However, as feminist scholars have shown, this is not a paradox because the domestic sphere has, in reality, always been a place of value creation in capitalist terms (Fortunati, 1995 [1981]).

The domestic sphere as the new locus of innovations presents several features that are worth analyzing. First, the displacement of the pivotal role of the machines from factories and services into the domestic sphere has presented structured consequences, which are different from those experienced in the production sphere. The consistent increase in the fixed capital (machines) in the domestic sphere has not been accompanied by a decrease in the variable capital (number of workers). Rather, in the domestic sphere, there has been an increase in the number of workers. On one hand, in the global North, the increase in women’s employment rate did not translate into a decrease in the number of workers in the domestic sphere because women have also continued to do housework, although perhaps less than before because they pressed partners and sons to increase the time they spent doing housework and/or by rationalizing it (Esping-Andersen et al., 2013). On the other hand, there has been an increase in the number of caregivers within families, especially those taking care of the elderly, disabled, and children, with the purpose of compensating for the domestic tasks that employed women were not able to provide in the same measure and that men did not increase (Fondazione Leone Moressa, 2016).

Second, a bifurcation of technological development has occurred in the domestic sphere between technologies addressing immaterial labor and those addressing material labor. The technologies that are present in the domestic sphere do not present in their design the same level of innovation. Those addressing the material sphere of housework (domestic appliances and means of transportation) and those addressing the immaterial sphere of housework (e.g. computers, smartphones, tablets, television, radio, and telephone) are characterized by a quite different technological quality. Domestic appliances have clearly been the outcome of a secondary fallout of the evolution of the industrial sectors in the domestic sphere (Gras, 1997: 172). By contrast, the means of transportation and digital technologies clearly come from the “core” factory tradition, which infuses a high degree of innovation and science in its products. In particular, digital technologies come from strong sectors producing communication, information, and entertainment, commodities which are increasingly precious in the globalized world. The different value that is attributed to digital media and to domestic appliances is connected to the fact that new technologies, such as smartphones and the Internet, are much more universal (addressing men and women, youth, and the elderly) than domestic appliances, which tend to remain a “woman’s affair.” This difference is reflected also at the level of language, as Cockburn (1997: 363) reports for the United Kingdom. Here, the term brown goods is used to qualify equipment considered challenging to the engineer. By contrast, domestic appliances, such as cookers, washing machines, refrigerators, and freezers, are termed white goods and are considered uninteresting by engineers because these are equated with female users and this is what in part confers them low value.

In perspective, the different value attributed to domestic appliances and digital media is destined very probably to reduce itself over time, following the increasing penetration and development of digitalization inside them. However, for the present time, this bifurcation continues to exist.

Third, in the domestic sphere, these technologies—domestic appliances, means of transportation, traditional mass media, and digital technologies—did not spread in parallel in a first phase and did not present the same pace of diffusion and appropriation by the multitudes. It was essentially the material sphere to be invested by technological innovations, given the level of women’s disaffection with housework. These technologies diffused in some countries earlier and in others later, according to their different degrees of industrialization and wealth distribution. In Europe, for example, domestic appliances and means of transportation became mass commodities after the Second World War. In particular, the penetration of domestic appliances into households has been accompanied by the social construction of the housewife-worker, a less rigid gender division of labor, and the expenditure of more masculine energies in daily domestic and care tasks. At the same time, domestic appliances have reduced the amount of time and fatigue required to perform a single task that has been subject to automation, but, in the meantime, overall domestic labor was incorporating other tasks, especially organizational, planning, and care tasks (Bittman et al., 2004). The continuous increase in the complexity of social life, which the intricacies of factory work, service work, and public administration organization mutually reinforce, has had, however, an immediate impact on domestic labor, which has become more and more complex. Families, like any other organization, use machines to reshape their internal organization and division of labor in order to adapt to the changing rhythms of social life.

After this first phase, until the 1990s, the technological development in the domestic sphere was stuck: the new acquisitions that were adopted in the domestic environment were fundamentally microwaves and food processors. It was only in the 1990s that new technologies, destined this time to machinize the immaterial labor carried out in households, arrived: computer, mobile phone, smartphones, and tablets. ICTs arrived later, but they diffused at a much greater speed.

Fourth, the domestic sphere has become the place where new technologies are used more. Think, for example, of the billions of people in the world who regularly use mobile phones, and the billions who, using smartphones (with Internet access), are in perpetual contact with others. The number of technologies used at home is incomparably higher than that in the production sphere. In many cases, competence on the use of new technologies is built at home, and from here, it is exported into the factories. Learning and updating of knowledge continues to be largely produced at home.

Fifth, the domestic sphere is the place where new technologies not only are used more but also are more profoundly reshaped (Glotz et al., 2005). Traditionally, the factories represented the place where innovations, processes, and phenomena happened, and then from there, things spread all over the society and in particular into the domestic sphere. Take, for example, the mobile phone. This device arrived in the household as a device that could accompany family members on the move. However, from there, it has been transformed into a personal device. As such, in current workplaces, the smartphone represents for any worker and employee the bridge with people inside and outside their place of work.

Sixth, the domestic sphere is the place where technologies, being posited as mass commodities, depend on the willingness of men and women to appropriate them by exercising their purchase power. We talk of grass-roots appropriation of machines because, although the power of persuading and manipulating inscribed within the machines is strong, the purchasing power of the people has the last word. As a consequence, these machines are almost owned by the people. In the industry of the 19th century, workers were treated as “appendages” of the machines, which were owned by the industrialists. Nowadays, billions of people not only use machines but they also own many of them (means of transportation, domestic appliances, mass media, ICTs, and now also social robots, drones, 3D printers, etc.). This ownership gives to the people their complete disposal over them. Although some scholars have argued that in reality there are only the terminals of machine networks in people’s hands (Zwick et al., 2008), in any case, people’s disposal over them represents a great power. Of course, this is a power which is moderated by the fact that these machines represent the periphery of the architecture of the information society but it is nevertheless a great power. The mass ownership of these intellective technologies represents an important ground for political experimentation and for new practices of communication, as well as a strategic moment of self-valorization for men and women. The use of these machines in the domestic sphere has a certain degree of freedom, in the sense that people can use them as they like and adapt their use to the ritualization of their everyday life. Although a certain type of use is inscribed within the machine, the imagination, the creativity, and the geniality that are expressed during their use can literally rewrite the meaning and the functionality of these machines (Shirky, 2008).

The six features outlined above illustrate in detail the intrinsic reasons why the domestic sphere has actually become the leading sphere, within the capitalistic system, with respect to technologies and innovations. The new role played by the domestic sphere regarding the diffusion and appropriation of technologies represents a turning point for the economic system and the balance between its sectors. It should also be put in relation to the new role played by the domestic sphere at a social, political, and economic level that several sociologists (e.g. Hochschild, 1997) and economists (National Transfer Accounts (NTA), 2017) have observed.

The reversal of the power relationship between the sphere of production and that of reproduction enables us to understand better that the innovations and technologies at home, rather than factory technology and innovation, are consequently the most strategic terrain of confrontation between ruling classes and the multitudes.

However, the diffusion of machines in the domestic sphere is actually characterized by some important elements, which make the potential control over these technologies unstable for capital. On one hand, these machines are powerful means of command and control on both material and immaterial domestic labor, as happens with machines in the factory. This command is exercised on the times, modes, and intensity of housework and its continuous reorganization. In practice, these machines structure the domestic workday, enhance the overlapping of multiple tasks, shape “leisure time,” orient imagination and immaterial work consumption by imposing “their” narration of the world, and continuously readapt the division and cooperation among family members. They control, for example, the specific organization of everyday rituals by establishing the sequence of tasks and actions to be performed during the day (a million people eat during the TV news, e.g.). They also shape the discipline inside the family and push its members to cooperate with the purpose of reaching an adequate level of reproduction. Overall, for the ruling classes, ICTs are ideal tools to manipulate, educate, and manage immaterial labor in productive terms, that is, for producing more value.

On the other hand, in the domestic sphere, they are appropriated, owned, and have a certain degree of freedom of use and thus allow an open and strong confrontation between capital power and people’s empowerment. Only by looking at the dynamics of this relationship can we understand in which direction (toward capital or people) technologies turn. While the only behaviors toward machines expressed by workers in the factories have been their destruction (Luddism), their sabotage, or their refusal (today against robots), nowadays a different story of grass-roots appropriation is told through what happens in the domestic sphere. Here, the machines also have the potential to become influential means of empowerment for people (youth, women, and the elderly, in particular). Therefore, new technologies have represented to people in the domestic sphere the ideal tools to express subjectivity and agency, to rewrite the rules of the game, especially in the central tenet of the capital logic: the property. Today, there is a great flourishing of bottom-up initiatives, such as the abdication of private property (open source, open access), proliferation of unpaid and voluntary work, technological bricolage and handicraft, sharing practices, and refusal to pay for services online (Fortunati, 2015). All these forms of people’s empowerment, which pass through the practices of the use of digital technologies show that the science of the abstract and the science of the concrete might be converging in a new model of society (Lévi-Strauss, 1966 [1962]).

To conclude this section, the shift of robotics from industrial sectors to the domestic sphere happened because inside the capital system this last sphere has the features most adapted to attract robotics. This is so true that the new generation of robots for the industrial sectors is designed on the basis of social robots’ experience. These co-bots are robots characterized by a lower speed, a lighter weight, and more flexibility than the traditional industrial robots (Gasparetto, 2017; Sortino, 2017). However, the domestic sphere, although its leading capacity in terms of technologies and innovations, is rather unstable for capital because it presents many anti-capitalist potentials. In light of this discourse, it should be evident that the mother of all battles regarding robotics will not be in the factories and advanced services and professions but in the domestic sphere.

What are the dimensions of robot diffusion in the reproduction sphere? To what extent are people’s attitudes toward robotics in the domestic sphere positive?

According to the IFR, 3.7 million robots for personal and domestic use (so-called “service robots”) were sold in 2015 (vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, window cleaners)—an increase in 11% compared to 2014. The IFR has also released a forecast of approximately 42 million sold units for the period 2016–2019, whose market value will amount to about US$22 billion (IFR, 2016). Furthermore, from 2014 to 2015, unit sales of entertainment robots, especially toys and hobby systems, jumped by 29% to around 1.7 million units. The entire segment is projected to increase to 11 million units (2016–2019) with a market value up to around US$9 billion (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Service robots for personal or domestic use in 2014–2015 and forecast 2016–2019.

If we compare these numbers with those of the smartphones and computers/laptops present in the world today, the presence of social robots seems small. However, its current dimension should not make us think that it is negligible. While the markets of smartphones and computers/Internet are very mature, the service robot market is in expansion with products such as Pepper, Jibo, Nao, Paro, Giraff, Romeo, iCub, Asimo, Kaspar, and several others. These have attracted the attention not only of firms, public institutions, laboratories of research, and potential users but also of a large scientific community that studies various aspects of their diffusion and adoption by users (e.g. Dautenhahn, 2002; Turkle, 2011). However, social robot diffusion is still a niche area for the moment, even if there is a good potential for their true diffusion on a large scale. We are still in an experimental phase, in which robots have been introduced in museums, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, schools, airports, rehabilitation centers, sports, and so on. Royakkers and van Est (2015) have provided a review on the introduction of this new robotics.

From a sociological point of view, “social robots” is a pleonastic definition since each technology is social in itself. Drawing on Brondi et al. (in press), it would be more correct to define social robots as robots that are designed to be social and this is the broad definition of social robots I have adopted in this article. Social robots present two issues. The first issue is their shape, as today we are going toward a more articulated concept of robots. The forms of robots we have inherited from the past—anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, machine-like, or particular objects with their own specific shape—are in the process of being renovated. On one hand, there is a tendency to re-structure robotic agents with material bodies as drones, humanoids, swarms, and so on. On the other hand, there is a tendency to deconstruct the “classical” robot “into intelligent agents, automated personal assistants, future smart environments, ambient assistive living technologies, computational intelligent games/storytelling devices, embodied conversational avatars, and automatic health-care and education services” (Esposito et al., 2014: 626).

This open process of redefinition of robot shapes is obviously not only formal because physical appearance affects interaction and thus it contributes to constructing and deconstructing gender categories, and especially the category of “woman” (Fong et al., 2003). The gendered characteristics in the design of robots are only one part of the problem, which is complex. This problem in fact is constituted also by users’ habitually ascribing gender to robots, by the effects of gender characteristics of social robots on users, by gender differences in interaction with robots, and by some interaction effects between these (Chiou, 2017; Knox, 2017; Shaw-Garlock, 2017; Tatsuya, 2017). As in any other process of creativity and innovation, trends in the representation of women (especially in artificial intelligence (AI) and social robotics) may objectify them and conflate certain roles with womanhood (e.g. so many personal assistants are female bodied/voiced), but they are also subject to negotiation of different identities, symbols, expectations, skills, and tasks. All depends on how much political agency women decide to invest in this field.

The second issue concerning social robots is that their arrival at home takes place in an environment that is difficult to adapt to robot needs.

To understand future trends of robotics, the perception of potential users is critically important. Let me draw on the Special Eurobarometer survey on public attitudes toward robots that was administered in 2012 to 26,751 citizens, representing 27 European countries (European Commission, 2014). From this survey, it turned out that if we put together the various areas that compose the reproduction sphere, this situates itself in third place (with 11,400 preferences) after manufacturing and space exploration, as sectors where people think that robots should be used as a priority (Table 1). Distinguishing instead the various domains of social reproduction, it turns out that the ordered logistic model applied to the domestic sphere shows that women are more likely to welcome robots for domestic usage than men are. Countries where women have a large responsibility for care and domestic work chores, such as Italy, Portugal, and Malta in the South, plus countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Eastern countries such as Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, are more supportive of the use of robots in this particular sector (Taipale and Fortunati, in press).

Table 1.

The areas of life where Europeans “think that robots should be used as a priority” (unweighted).

Domain	N	%
Manufacturing	14,630	57.1
Space exploration	13,955	54.7
Search and rescue	11,267	44.2
Military and security	9877	38.9
Healthcare	5436	21.5
Domestic use	3742	14.9
Transportation	2858	10.7
Care of children, the elderly, and disabled people	991	3.9
Education	639	2.6
Leisure	592	2.4

Each respondent was allowed to choose up to three categories. The total number of answers is thus higher than the base (N = 26,751).

A similar question was posed in 2016 to a convenience sample of 528 high school students in the North East of Italy. Only 4 years had passed since the Eurobarometer survey, but the results are quite different, as Table 2 illustrates. The question included a 5-point Likert scale. We report here only the frequency of the positive answers for each sector: I agree very much and I totally agree.

Table 2.

To what extent do you agree with the use of robots in the following industrial or social sectors?

Sectors	N	%
Space exploration	231	43.8
Care of the elderly, children, and disabled people	220	41.7
Education	218	41.3
Healthcare system	202	38.3
Military and security	201	38.1
Agriculture	199	37.7
Domestic uses (i.e. cleaning, cooking)	198	37.5
Search and rescue	195	36.9
Entertainment	186	35.2
Logistics and transportation	178	33.7
Industrial sectors	174	33.0

These high school students in the North East of Italy are convinced that apart from space exploration, the sectors that most deserve the introduction of robots are the care of the elderly, children, and disabled people, and then education. The third place of education is very probably put into context by the fact that many students today are using robots at school. Among these students, in fact, 59.1% state that they have used a robot at home and 44.7% at school. However, the most relevant thing to notice here is not only the widespread familiarity with robots that young, digital generations already have but also especially that they completely reverse the rank of the sectors where they see the diffusion of robots as a priority in respect to the Eurobarometer survey. Moreover, if we consider the averages of their preferences, it turns out that education comes in first place of a desirable diffusion of robots (M = 3.15, standard deviation [SD]: 1.299), followed by other sectors of the reproduction sphere: elderly, children, and disabled people’s care (M = 3.04, SD: 1.428), and healthcare (M = 3.00, SD: 1.393). The entertainment sector ranks in sixth place (M = 2.94, SD: 1.259), while the domestic sphere occupies the penultimate place (M = 2.89, SD 1.462).

In the Eurobarometer research in 2012, only 9% of European youth aged from 15 to 17 years stated that they have used a robot somewhere (at home, at work, or elsewhere), and this figure was only 12.6% for those aged between 18 and 24 years. Exploring Italy in particular, it turned out that only 17.7% of young people (15–17 years) and 11.6% of 18- to 24-year olds stated that they have used a robot somewhere. In recent years, there has been a relevant development of experimentation and teaching of educational robotics in schools at all levels (Benitti, 2012). Hundreds of schools of all levels have begun to teach pupils and students how to build small robots with the aim of teaching them to think about innovation in a complex way. An attempt has also begun to move from educational robotics to teaching social robotics, by integrating the first with creating awareness and critical knowledge about the present penetration of robotics in society. Given that this is a convenience sample, the results that are illustrated above cannot be generalized to Italian high school students and not at all to other cultural contexts. Despite these limitations, these results are interesting because this survey replicates the same questions posed in the Eurobarometer survey 4 years ago.

How do robotics and automation address the domestic sphere? Forms of proto-robotization of the immaterial labor in this sphere

The robotization of the domestic sphere can take place because a series of processes, developing through smartphones and the Internet and addressing individuals, have silently reshaped the general attitude toward automation. In the new millennium, individuals are trained to feel themselves as appendages of a society transformed through widespread automatization and/or robotic systems. The discipline and control infused through the automation processes brought by the new technologies in the domestic sphere are much more capillary, deep, and direct than they were in the past when they were indirect and took place in the locations dedicated to social reproduction, such as schools, public administration, and the healthcare system. I present and discuss below some examples of forms of automation that can be considered as forms of proto-robotization of the immaterial sphere in society.

The first area is that of communication, whereby an increasing proportion of practices take place online, which is a largely robotized place (Gehl and Bakardjieva, 2017). The premise of the robotization of the Internet is that computer-mediated communication is a form of human communication mediated by a computer and thus lacking a series of cues on the identity of the interlocutor and on the characteristics of the context in which the interlocutor is located. Given this premise, bots can access the Internet through the same channels used by human users, such as web pages, chat systems, and video games. Moreover, bots act as spiders of search engines that monitor the Internet with the aim of discovering content and websites or as programs that scour the net looking for information to be used for spam campaigns. Zeifman (2017) reports that 60% of the Internet traffic occurring today is between machines: users believe they are addressing a human being, but unbeknown to them, a bot answers. Bakardjieva (2015) is one of the first scholars who focused her attention on social bots, the software robots that operate on social networking sites and present themselves as human users. The rise of automated profiles on social networking platforms, according to Bakardjieva (2015), can be seen “as a logical step in the progressive enclosure of online social interaction in standardized, simplified and trivialized forms, frames and gestures” (p. 244). Also, a part of the management of websites is carried out through bots. Concerns about the growth of robo-communication in the online public sphere regard critical issues of possible regimentation of communication, manipulation, and lack of transparency. The introduction and development of bots has serious consequences: their use serves to destroy and rebuild reputations, threatens the possibility of understanding how many visits by humans a website truly receives, creates at a political level the image of public consensus where there is none, and in general manipulates online political discussion (Bakardjieva, 2015; Howard, 2005). The robotization of the Internet affects, of course, the various forms of communication that people perform online and that are a fundamental part of immaterial domestic labor.

Another area involved in automation processes is information. Automation, algorithms, and robotics have been introduced in newsrooms with the purpose of improving efficiency. Right now, algorithms are used to report news content regarding weather, sports, and stock market updates (Barnhurst, 2016). Several companies market the automation service to news outlets (O’Sullivan et al., 2017). The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Forbes.com, and Associated Press are on the front line in using software to report on various facts. The Los Angeles Times reported on a homicide and used information from the US Geological Survey Earthquake Notification Service to generate a news story. As O’Sullivan et al. (2017: 90) report,

The Washington Post developed TruthTeller to automate fact checking of political speeches in real time (Carlson, 2015; Gani and Haddou, 2014). Forbes.com uses Narrative Science to create stories from databases and its own archived content. The Associated Press uses Automated Insights for company earnings reports. The AP announcement says the new system can write as many as 4,400 short articles per quarter, compared to 300 for its staff. Instead of cutting jobs the AP says its staff will focus ‘on reporting and writing stories about what the numbers mean and what gets said in earnings calls’ (Colford, 2014: para. 9).

More recently, journalists with the support of AI have succeeded in using data technologies for original reporting. The robotization of information concerns that part of its consumption which takes place in people’s everyday life and which contributes to disciplining their daily routines.

The third of these interconnected processes is the automation of social behaviors. An increasing number of social behaviors turn out to be regimented in automatic systems and already controlled starting from the domestic sphere. The multitudes’ thoughts, tastes, emotions, confidences to friends, declarations of love, sexual preferences, strategies of dating, purchases and sales, ideological adhesions, and so on are nowadays subject to the mediation of online platforms, services, and applications. These processes are the premises of the new phenomenon of “ubiquitous social roboting” (Fortunati, 2013). Barile and Sugiyama (2015) analyze one example of automation of taste: music applications for smartphones. They show how digital technologies, through automatic procedures, have implemented elements of simplification and standardization in the social formation and expression of tastes. The like/dislike button within social networks bears witness to this simplification. Online small-scale investors, whose portfolios total about US$19 billion in assets under management (Wesse, 2015), are increasingly advised by robots. Digital technologies have paved the way for an incredibly large number of people to communicate among themselves, to express their opinions and tastes, and to buy and consume goods. The management of all this has required the implementation of automatic solutions that can allow simple and easy behaviors (such as the like/dislike button). Of course, this has enabled billions of people to participate in several forms of self-expression and communication but at the cost of reducing their complexity and particularity. The organizational logic and the levels of automation and simulation of the Internet are dictating the modalities with which ICT users behave in many situations. The immediacy, the spontaneity, and the creativity of co-presence forms of interaction are sacrificed to the rigidity and discipline imposed by the machine.

The fourth of these processes is the robotization of the human body. Here, the first step to approaching the human body is made, as often happens, by medicine: surgery, diagnostics, therapy, and rehabilitation. A variety of robots have been produced for healthcare systems: from the robot Watson, with its diagnostic capability, to surgical robots, and from rehabilitation robots to therapeutic robotic devices, which are also expanding rapidly. Attempts to enhance the body include exoskeletons, suits to improve muscular strength, prostheses potentially made using 3D printers, and so on. Robots can be of great help in medicine, but at the same time, they inevitably establish a process of standardization and uniformity of the human body. The second step is made by aesthetics and fashion, which immediately came into play since fashion covers and manages the widest area of the human body and mediates the presentation of the self, the sense of beauty, and so on. This process began with ICT but it will continue with robots. We have reasons to believe also that robots will need to become fashionable to stay on the human body. From the Sant’Anna School, the Robot Companions for Citizens Manifesto was launched, containing many interesting proposals such as the robot suit, which is a wearable robot that provides support to people when they move and complete their everyday life activities. This is a genial idea and will be a substantial part of the future innovation. Many of these experiments in fashion technology attempt to shape intelligent systems around the human body and share various elements in common with the area of robotics related to the body, where the focus is often to enhance the wearability of these body-related devices. Here, we cannot but mention the great, visionary work done by Hussein Chalayan, the fashion designer of animatronic fashion. However, these forms of re-engineering society in the direction of a larger automation have a negative effect on the implementation of uniform, undifferentiated, and homogeneous social behavior, which can be more easily influenced, manipulated, and controlled. It has also the effect of training humankind to accept social robots.

Last but not least, the final process is the robotization of the machines currently existing in everyday life. For example, Roomba (Forlizzi and DiSalvo, 2006; Vaussard et al., 2014) and Bimby¹ (Ascione, 2014; Pisco Costa, 2013; Truninger, 2011), and the robot mower, are some examples of this process of the robotization of the machines that are already present in the domestic sphere. Other domestic appliances, such as refrigerators or washing machines, are increasingly equipped with AI. New cars are also more and more robotized as they are provided, for example, with sensors and video cameras in order to assist the driver in parking maneuvers. Another example of robotization comes from ICTs. Mobile phones are incubators of robotic interfaces (Siri, S Voice) (Sugiyama and Vincent, 2013). Sugiyama (2013) talked of mobile phones as quasi-robots and Vincent (2013) argued that mobile phones together with their users are personalized social robots. Currently, we use these cognitive machines (Maldonado, 1997) for many purposes: they interact with our mind and help us to develop many cognitive abilities (and underdevelop some of them). In the future, very probably, they will be able to interact with our emotions and will become more proactive and relational. But will they be made capable of movement? Right now, the mobile phone, the laptop, and the tablet are static, even if portable. Desktop computers and television are not only static but are also not portable. Is it better to apply robotic technology to the media or to integrate the media into robots? There is no answer to this question yet, but what is certain is that very probably in the future mobile phones and computers will take big advantages from robotics and vice versa.

Another effect of this appropriation of machines is that it challenges the “naturality” of the domestic sphere. In fact, it shows more clearly that individuals’ reproduction works in the same way as commodities production. It reveals that although different logic regulates this sphere, the outcome is the same: the production of value. As Fortunati (2007: 153) wrote,

centuries away from the Habeas corpus Act of 1679, globalization is moving from an exploitation of the labor force as work capacity towards the command and control of the whole machinized body, a control that, differently from before, can be exercised directly in a continuous cycle.

At this point, I am able to advance another reflection on why the domestic sphere has been robotized. There are several theories on the diffusion of technologies but not enough research, theories, or models that explain the historical and social dynamics behind it. I propose the interpretation that this has happened because the more that reproductive labor has been impoverished by women’s resistance to it, and by the double labor regime (at home and outside the home), the more machines were introduced in the domestic sphere. The specific purpose of this introduction was to make the value produced in this sphere increase again. But why more machines for the immaterial labor and fewer for the material level in the household? The answer should be found in the struggle between capital and women about simple labor and complex labor. Particularly nowadays, when most of the wealth produced is in the pockets of the wealthiest 5% of the population, the investments in the material part of the reproduction are less strategic. Since the capital system has the impellent and increasing need to control a population that has become poorer than in the past, old and new media may be useful now more than ever as a powerful means of separation, one from the other, and as a filter of reality, which might ultimately lead to mind and perception manipulation. On the contrary, people (and especially women) use new technologies to increase their complexity of individuals by multiplying their experience of being in the world, their knowledge, sociability, and their global thinking. The social consequences are the increase in their connection to the collective intelligence and their participation in the ongoing forms of communication, information, and in a variety of networks.

Discussion and final remarks

The discourse I developed so far has shown that robotics is inside the design of the ruling class, but at the same time, it is also inside the potential project and program of re-appropriation of time, wealth, science, innovations, and political control on the part of the multitudes. The automation of individuals and of the social has been an answer from the capital system to the big transformations of society, of the family sphere, and of the domestic reproduction that have taken place in the last half century. Over the past few decades, the capital system has taken steps to drastically deplete the middle and lower classes at the economic level, with a strong concentration of wealth and a parallel drain to the power of nation states, which have proved to be unable to effectively deal with the reshaping of class stratification inside them. However, these transformations have led to an important shift, in the sense that, today, individuals succeed in their empowerment much more than what was foreseen and hoped for. Robotics is a very important challenge because it can offer a convergent configuration of technologies addressed to immaterial and material domestic labor. It has the potential to become the innovation through which to make a change both in material domestic labor and in the overall organization of our everyday lives. The problem is how to take the initiative on robotics from the bottom and to govern the processes. Certainly, the spread of robotics in society implies its continued renegotiation and reshaping by users. Whether social robotics goes in the direction of empowering users or whether it goes in the direction of increasing the power of the ruling classes will depend on the outcome of the confrontation between capital and people. The participatory and inclusive design of new robotics will be decisive. Robotics for the domestic setting should be designed as tools able to suggest innovative glimpses to gender and generational issues, to the critical awareness of cultural assumption of specific choreographies for the various domestic labor and care tasks. It is also interesting to recall that today there is the possibility for people to build their own robots by themselves at home using a 3D printer. The program to build a real humanoid was put online in 2012 by the sculptor and designer Gael Langevin. Research carried out so far on practices of use for Bimby and Roomba shows that, while in families the practices of use of Roomba have brought a certain change in the gender division of domestic labor (e.g. Forlizzi and DiSalvo, 2006), the use of Bimby has brought only a skin-deep change (Pisco Costa, 2013). Cooking is a complex task that relies on specific knowledge and value-laden beliefs, socialization, and experience, which are inscribed inside the technology. Bimby is more difficult to interpret by men who feel unprepared and too inexperienced to use it properly.

However, our discourse is more ambitious, since it poses the problem of what kind of society we want to build and live in by introducing social robots. In other words, do we want to assign to robots the care of elderly, disabled, and ill people? Do we want to downsize the number of nurses, caregivers, sex workers, and so on by substituting them with robots? Do we want to support people (in primis women) in the domestic sphere by supplying robots to liberate us from housework or parts of it? These are political questions, which require political answers. In reality, two different perspectives have been outlined with respect to the use of care and assistive robots: to substitute existing family and/or professional caregivers by eliminating them in order to save money and to support existing workers and/or family members, spending more money. In the home, social robots can be introduced for both purposes: to substitute and to support family members (women), who are no longer at home but at work, by taking on part of the domestic workload. Especially for women, there is an opportunity and a challenge: the opportunity is to reduce housework at a material level and to liberate free time, while the challenge is to design social robots tailored for them and their needs. If women will face this challenge, social robots will become an opportunity for all. Robots are able to liberate time off work, but, if instead of having more free time, we become unemployed or occupied in other unpaid tasks, the use of robots will be against us.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

A version of this essay was presented as the honorary “Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture” for 2016, presented at the International Communication Association meetings in Fukuoka, Japan.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Leopoldina Fortunati is the director of the Laboratory of Research on New Media NuMe at the Department on Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine. Her works have been published in 12 languages. She is a member of the Academia Europaea.

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