Sociologies (May 2020)
« Mon nom est personne »
Abstract
The anthropomorphic projections aroused by humanoid robots tend to mobilize the grammar of distance or proximity, inclusion and exclusion, which is an eminently moral grammar. To this moral grammar is added the phenomenology of the familiar or the strange, the reassuring or the disturbing, the presence or absence, the real or the imaginary, which haunts the « uncanny valley » relating and separating humans and non-humans. After having deployed the moral stakes raised by the anthropomorphization of robots and in particular the relationships of emotional empathy that this one arouses or requests, we will propose to adopt on the robots another perspective, that which consists in apprehending them not as (non)persons, but as devices that have the power to make us act and feel. From this perspective, the way robots exist and how they co-exist with humans does no longer come under a moral grammar but under a politique one.
