Getting to Know You: How Artificial is Engineered Friendship?

Sparked by the use of robots to provide care for the elderly in Japan, several questions have (re)surfaced regarding relationships between the human and more-than-human and about the engineering of friendship and empathy. AI and robots are also increasingly deployed in mental health settings, for instance, to provide psychotherapy or to detect and treat autism. In many of these contexts, robots are expected to engage in relationships with humans, thus foregrounding the centrality of the more-than-human in the generation and circulation of affect. Several cultural and spiritual traditions across the world acknowledge and, indeed, center the agentive capacity of objects, animals, spirits, and landscapes as well as the affective relationships that form between the more-than-human and humans: they problematize assumptions that agency and affect are unique to human beings. 

My presentation draws on my previous research on the affective labor of call center workers in India and my new project on algorithms and emotions. Recent debates regarding robots and humanoids query their ability to engage in affective relationships, in particular, those based on empathy and friendship; they also construct narratives of futurity that interrogate the place of the human vis-à-vis the machine, robots, and AI. Some of these debates have shaped popular fiction, for instance, novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (which builds on his earlier book, Never Let Me Go, a poignant indictment of Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge) and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. Both these novels focus on friendships forged between humans, humanoids, and robots, and, in the process, they develop narratives of futurity predicated on dominant discourses regarding relationships between the human, the more-than-human, and machines. 

In my paper, I reflect on how these narratives of futurity compel us to rethink the centrality of empathy to what we consider “the human.” I stage a dialogue between anthropological scholarship on cross-cultural understandings of empathy on the one hand and, on the other, novels like Machines Like Me and Klara and the Sun to ask: how artificial is engineered friendship? How does the ability of robots and humanoids to engage in empathetic relationships with humans compel us to rethink the boundaries between us and the more-than-human?