The Words of Robotics: From Movement Perception to Natural Language

The Words of Robotics addresses how the way we ＂tell＂ stories about robots cannot be reduced to a strictly logical discourse, but must involve the rhetorical aspects of ＂ethos＂ and ＂pathos.＂ The author focuses on the aspect of motion in order to analyze the relation between humans and robots, and show the opportunities and pitfalls of the popularization of academic discourses in using a rhetorical approach to talk about robots. This approach allows one to go beyond the reductionisms of either overstating the abilities and power of the robots or reducing the discourse to a specialized, mere technical language.

Céline M. Pieters is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.