Algorithmic Care in the Robotocene: a Case Study from Japan

Abstract

Long considered an innately human, labour intensive activity not easily amenable to automation, care is becoming robotic. Over the past two decades, the Japanese government has been spending billions of yen on the development and implementation of various national and regional robot care projects. Developing such robots involves a process of “artificial anthropology” (Dumouchel and Damiano 2017), with engineers first constructing a standardised, algorithmic understanding of elderly care, and then materialising this knowledge in the form of robotic analogues which are designed to carry out each of the discrete tasks that supposedly make up care. This paper aims to explore this process of roboticisation, following Japan’s largest national robot care project from the development of care robots through to their implementation at a nursing home. Data was gathered over 15 months’ of multisited ethnographic fieldwork at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and at a public elderly nursing home in Kanagawa, where three care robots (Paro, Pepper and Hug) were introduced. This data is used to analyse both the material practices and ideological inscriptions involved in producing and staging the robots, as well as how these devices were adapted, modified, accepted or rejected in actual use by carers. The aim is to contribute to wider debates in STS about roboticisation in practices of care and in other labour-intensive service industries, with a particular focus on temporalities of care and Judy Wajcman’s concept of “time shifting” (Wajcman 2015).