Chris Chesher

Presentation: Anticipating distrust: the promotion and experience of service robots in restaurants

With Dr Justine Humphry

11:30am – 12:00pm

In the context of what some have referred to as a crisis of societal trust in relation to emerging digital technologies, this paper explores how distrust is anticipated and negotiated in the promotion and experience of service robots in restaurants. Robots are associated with ambivalent meanings in the popular imagination – as cute companions or as social threats. While robots are only gradually appearing in everyday life, they have recently begun to materialise in sites such as restaurants, cafes, shopping centres and airports. In this paper, we map the dimensions and dynamics of trust/distrust that service robots invoke materially and discursively in their promotion and implementation in restaurant settings. In the first part of this talk, we examine how cultural anxieties about robots are managed in the marketing, publicity and design of service robots by companies such as United Robotics, Pudu Robotics, LG and Keenon. In the second part of the talk, we draw on ethnographic observations of restaurants in Sydney, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur to analyse how robot waiters were often trusted to perform various kinds of service work in physical and social space.

 

Bio

Dr. Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Discipline of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and society, with current interests in the transformation of restaurant service with robots, the cultural and semiotic aspects of social robots and the place of AI image generators in the history of visual culture.

In earlier work Dr. Chesher has explored the implications of technology-mediated interactions in virtual reality, blogging, smartphone cameras, voice assistants and computer games. His work sheds light on how these interactions reshape social dynamics, behaviours, and human identities. His research is characterized by its application of theoretical concepts to real-world contexts.

Dr. Chesher’s forthcoming book, Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer, is both a critique of the dominant computational paradigm and a reimagining of digital technologies through the concept of invocation.

 

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