Technical resistance and bio-hybridity

The humanoid robot is often envisioned as a widely distributed artifact, capable of performing daily tasks and raising questions about its resemblance to humans and its potential to replace them. This chapter, however, challenges such assumptions by examining the limitations of humanoid robots. To this end, the chapter analyzes the contemporary epistemological and ontological foundation of robotics as much as ethnographic observations of robotics laboratory practices. Drawing on material feminist writings, the author introduces a more-than-human framework for analyzing the challenging process of robot construction, called “co-scription”. The core argument posits that the vast limitations of humanoid robots should not be understood as a lack of technological competencies but rather as a necessary settlement between roboticists’ practices and the materiality of robots. By reconceptualizing technology as a (challenging) collaborative process, this perspective questions the traditional view of engineering as a linear activity. It calls for a critical reassessment of human/machine relationships in the technoscientific quest for producing human-likeness.