Justine Humphry

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

With Dr Chris Chesher

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 Justine Humphry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She researches the cultures and politics of smart, mobile and robotic data-driven platforms in everyday life. She has researched mobile media and homelessness, mobile apps and antiracism, smart homes and voice assistants, and mobile robots in public space, using ethnographic, participatory and co-design methods to collaborate with communities in research and policy change. Her latest research explores the public impacts and performativity of service robots in restaurants and food delivery in cross-cultural settings. Her book, Homelessness and Mobile Communication – Precariously Connected, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022.

 

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