日本机器人在文化中发展

武夷山

日本机器人的水平享有盛誉。但我们可能没有意识到的是，日本机器人发展历程也是前所未有的机器人文化的培育、塑造的过程。《科学之社会研究》杂志2014年第3期发表了美国印第安纳大学布鲁明顿分校Selma Sabanovic的文章，Inventing Japan’s “robotics culture”: The repeated assembly of science, technology, and culture in social robotics。该文非常好，我没空全面介绍，只翻译文章尾声部分的一段话吧：

科技元勘学者都知道，科学家们总是置身于一定的历史、地理、文化和社会情境之中；然而，日本的机器人学者做到了利用自己的文化定位来确立其研究工作的社会意义与科学意义，这与处于支配地位的“科学之文化中立观”形成鲜明对比。这样，日本机器人学者就认为，没有必要为了进步而用“普适的”价值观代替本土的传统。Feenberg（2010）认为，日本人将技术发展构建为文化问题，其实就创造了一种“另类现代性”，这种现代性将价值纳入所有科学技术生产之中。从爱知世界博览会的理念――应该用保护、节约代替大规模生产和消费，就可以看到这种关于现代社会的另类想象的影子。……日本机器人学者是机器人研究领域公认的世界领袖，他们采用的发展科学技术的文化定位进路提高了人们的这样一种认识：将科学技术视作广义的机器人学社区中经过社会咨商的“本土知识系统”。将文化模型用作新的机器人技术的框架，表明机器人研究者们日益认识到，技术需要嵌入合适的文化与社会结构，并得到文化与社会结构的支撑。

该文摘要如下：

Abstract

Using interviews, participant observation, and published documents, this article analyzes the co-construction of robotics and culture in Japan through the technical discourse and practices of robotics researchers. Three cases from current robotics research – the seal-like robot PARO, the Humanoid Robotics Project HRP-2 humanoid, and ‘kansei robotics’ – show the different ways in which scientists invoke culture to provide epistemological grounding and possibilities for social acceptance of their work. These examples show how the production and consumption of social robotic technologies are associated with traditional crafts and values, how roboticists negotiate among social, technical, and cultural constraints while designing robots, and how humans and robots are constructed as cultural subjects in social robotics discourse. The conceptual focus is on the repeated assembly of cultural models of social behavior, organization, cognition, and technology through roboticists’ narratives about the development of advanced robotic technologies. This article provides a picture of robotics as the dynamic construction of technology and culture and concludes with a discussion of the limits and possibilities of this vision in promoting a culturally situated understanding of technology and a multicultural view of science.