Mediations of Care: Brokering Labor in the Age of Robotics

Developments in the field of social robotics have increasingly played with the boundaries between human and machine, using remote or tele-presence technological innovations as a way to mediate or revolutionize human-machine interactions. This paper explores one such development, namely the roboticization of care labour in the realm of education, and the ways in which it brokers relationships between human and non-human interaction. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and South Korea and using the telepresence robotic innovation of Engkey as a case study, this paper describes practices that represent the convergence of technology, politics, and intimacies that shape the complexities of contemporary forms of labour migration, articulations of gendered and racialized “skill,” and changing relationships between human and non-human. The paper argues that these relationships are intentionally produced mediations of care: gendered and racialized hierarchies that produce new forms of affective labour and sociality that are governed by modes of simultaneous disembodiment and embodiment, immobility and mobility, and marketized statecraft through vocabularies of innovation and exploitation. These technologically produced mediations of care have implications for how we understand the connections between human and machine and how labour and sociality are ultimately brokered in the context of a neoliberal and capitalist world order.

护理工作的调节：机器人时代的对劳动的调节

关键词： 护理工作；人－机器人互动（HRI）；　技术东方主义；机器人；远程遥控；情感劳动

使用遥控器或是远程监控技术创新作为调节或是革命化人-机互动的一种方式， 社交机器人领域的发展已经在日益冲击着人和机器之间的边界。本文探讨了这样一种新发展，即在教育领域的护理劳动的机器人化，以及它对人机互动的关系进行调节的方式。本文根据在菲律宾和韩国田野考察的发现，并利用Engkey的远程机器人创新作为一个案例，描述了代表着技术、政治和亲密关系三者交汇的种种实践，及其如何塑造了劳工流动的当代形式的复杂性、塑造了对性别化以及种族化的“技能”的表达，并塑造人与机器之间变动的关系。 本文提出，这些关系是有意制造出来的对护理的调节——也即性别化和种族化的等级制度，其制造的新形式的情感劳动和社交性通过创新和剥削的词汇受到同时具有去实体化和实体化、非流动性和流动性以及市场化的治国方略等模式的控制。这些通过技术性手段制造出来对护理的调节对于我们怎样理解人与机器之间的联系，以及劳动和社会性是怎样最终在新自由主义和全球资本主义秩序的语境下受到调节具有相当的意义。

Translated from English by Li Guo