Robots and Insects: Gender, Sexuality, and Engagement in “Mixed Societies” of Cockroaches and Robots

摘要

Robots and Insects:Gender, Sexuality, and Engagement in "Mixed Societies" of Cockroaches and Robots Shoshana Magnet (bio) What does it mean to be an insect? What does it mean to be a robot? Is it possible that these two distinct "species" may, in fact, engage in a relationship that offers transformative modes of cultural communication? These are questions at the heart of scientific experiments involving "mixed societies" of insects and robots. "Mixed societies" is a term coined by interdisciplinary teams of entomologists, roboticists, zoologists, and engineers interested in developing and analyzing societies of robots and insects (or robots and animals) and how they engage with one another. To engage is relational—and opens up broad possibilities for communication. The ways that robots and insects engage one another in communication in these mixed communities results in their shaping each others' behavior. For example, a central characteristic of the common American cockroach, or Periplaneta americana, is that they are predisposed to move away from light. After living with cockroachlike robots for some time, however, these real-life red-brown cockroaches begin to follow decisions made by their robotic compatriots. In short, they follow the robots toward the light when seeking shelter—a choice made even though the cockroach usually prefers a darker environment (Halloy and Sempo et al. 2007).1 Through their mutual engagement, both the robots and the cockroaches change each other's "habitus," or "feel for the game" as Bourdieu (1984) calls it, in ways that shift the cockroach's most basic instincts. Mixed societies represent a scientific development that is part of the larger field of "biomimetics"—a discipline in which scientists look to biological life for inspiration in building new technologies. Mixed societies are unique in that they do not merely try to produce robots that are based [End Page 38] on animals or insects (Cole et al. 2009; Ma and Millar et al. 2011; Graetzel 2008; Schmickl and Crailsheim 2006) or to develop robots that use biological parts (Nagasawa et al. 1999); rather, they mix groups of insects with insectlike robots in order to investigate how the two groups will communicate with one another. Relying on Donna Haraway's study of species that are involved in "webs of relating," and Karen Barad's feminist science studies' theory that interrogates interagential realism, my essay puts to use published discourse analyses found in scientific articles that document InsBot experiments (a term coined by the LEURRE research group and short for "insectlike robot." I will discuss this experiment and group below; Caprari et al. 2005). I pose the following central questions: What are the scientific assumptions fueling research into mixed societies? What kinds of military imperatives drive their development? What new objects do these assumptions bring into view? What possibilities for more transformative understandings of insect communication might these experiments foreclose? Following Barad, I am interested in examining the conditions of possibility for the emergence of robot-insect mixed societies. What questions, in other words, help us consider the permeable boundaries between insects and machines? What questions come to light with regard to the ethical new groupings these mixed-species provide? For her part, Barad suggests the term "ethico-onto-epistem-ological" to describe how ethics, knowing, and being are not separate dimensions but remain "entangled" discourses (2006, 202). I extend her work here to think about the ways that ethics, knowing, and being, are "entangled" in robot-insect mixed societies. My project relies on both Barad and Haraway's theoretical groundwork for a number of reasons. First, in Haraway's study of primates (1989), as well as in her research on companion species (2003, 2008), she argues that it is important not to see species as separate but as in fact bound by "webs of relating," which I