In this paper, we analyse patients’ perspectives on the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic systems in healthcare. Based on citizens’ experiences when hospitalised for COVID-19, we explore how the opinions and concerns regarding healthcare automation could not be disassociated from a context of high pressure on the health system and lack of resources, and a political discourse on AI and robotics; a situation intensified by the pandemic. Thus, through the analysis of a set of interviews, a series of issues are identified that revolve around the following: the empirical effects of imagined robots, the vivid experience of citizens with the care crisis, the discomfort of the ineffective, the virtualised care assemblages, the human-based face-to-face relationships, and the automatisation of healthcare tasks. In light of these results, we show the variability in patients’ perspectives on AI and robotic systems and explain it by distinguishing two interpretive repertoires that account for different views and opinions: a well-being repertoire and a responsibility repertoire. Both interpretative repertoires are relevant in order to grasp the complexity of citizens’ approaches to automatisation of healthcare. Attending to both allows us to move beyond the dominant (political) discourse of technology markets as the only way to respond to healthcare challenges. Thus, we can analyse and integrate patients’ perspectives to develop AI and robotic systems in healthcare to serve citizens’ needs and collective well-being.

In this paper we analyze imaginaries about care robots using a set of interviews with roboticists. The study of imaginaries – from a notion close to that of Castoriadis’s radical imaginary – is used as a tool to unravel ethical, political and social concerns that care robots entail. From the analysis of the interviews, our results highlight that imaginaries regarding care robots are predominantly sustained by a social process of care fragmentation. The translation of the imaginary of industry robots into the wildness of the daily life in healthcare reconfigures the comprehension of robots and their mediations. This process is intensively linked to Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) imaginaries of care, based on the cult of domesticity and the opposition of human caring to rational caring. We see how these fragmentations are in tension with an approach that seeks to integrate the ethics of care with technoscience, which has relevant consequences for the ethical debate on care robotics and the political significance of care in our world.

In the scenario of growing polarization of promises and dangers that surround artificial intelligence (AI), how to introduce responsible AI and robotics in healthcare? In this paper, we develop an ethical–political approach to introduce democratic mechanisms to technological development, what we call “Caring in the In-Between”. Focusing on the multiple possibilities for action that emerge in the realm of uncertainty, we propose an ethical and responsible framework focused on care actions in between fears and hopes. Using the theoretical perspective of Science and Technology Studies and empirical research, “Caring in the In-Between” is based on three movements: the first is a change of focus from the world of promises and dangers to the world of uncertainties; the second is a conceptual shift from assuming a relationship with robotics based on a Human–Robot Interaction to another focused on the network in which the robot is embedded (the “Robot Embedded in a Network”); and the last is an ethical shift from a general normative framework to a discussion on the context of use. Based on these suggestions, “Caring in the In-Between” implies institutional challenges, as well as new practices in healthcare systems. It is articulated around three simultaneous processes, each of them related to practical actions in the “in-between” dimensions considered: monitoring relations and caring processes, through public engagement and institutional changes; including concerns and priorities of stakeholders, with the organization of participatory processes and alternative forms of representation; and making fears and hopes commensurable, through the choice of progressive and reversible actions.

This paper analyzes children’s imaginaries of Human-Robots Interaction (HRI) in the context of social robots in healthcare, and it explores ethical and social issues when designing a social robot for a children’s hospital. Based on approaches that emphasize the reciprocal relationship between society and technology, the analytical force of imaginaries lies in their capacity to be embedded in practices and interactions as well as to affect the construction and applications of surrounding technologies. The study is based on a participatory process carried out with six-year-old children for the design of a robot. Imaginaries of HRI are analyzed from a care-centered approach focusing on children’s values and practices as related to their representation of care. The conceptualization of HRI as an assemblage of interactions, the prospective bidirectional care relationships with robots, and the engagement with the robot as an entity of multiple potential robots are the major findings of this study. The study shows the potential of studying imaginaries of HRI, and it concludes that their integration in the final design of robots is a way of including ethical values in it.

En este artículo propongo la utilización de la ética de los cuidados como marco teórico y político para repensar la ‘robótica’ y la ‘inteligencia artificial’ (IA) en el ámbito de la salud. Utilizando la perspectiva teórica de los Estudios de Ciencia y Tecnología, desarrollo una aproximación a partir de la idea de continuum entre cuidados, política, ética y tecnologías. Propongo una reflexión sobre las controversias en torno a la robótica y la IA desde un posicionamiento no ingenuo, desde una lógica de conflicto y confrontación con los imaginarios que acompañan el mercado de la innovación tecnológica. Conceptualmente esta propuesta gira en torno a dos nociones: la heterogeneidad y la creatividad, nociones que expresan la potencia radical de la ética de los cuidados como utopía que desafía la utopía neoliberal. A partir de estas consideraciones articulo una manera de comprender las relaciones entre los humanos y los robots que busca superar la tradicional relación diádica humano-máquina. Tomando como unidad de análisis el entramado de relaciones de cuidados de las que participa el robot (Robot Embedded in a Network -REN-), emergen nuevas controversias que permiten visibilizar las prácticas cotidianas de cuidados con estos artefactos, y las relaciones de desigualdad que las acompañan. Del mismo modo, para poder garantizar un diseño e introducción de tecnologías responsables, al servicio del bien común y del bienestar individual y colectivo, apunto a la necesidad de integrar en el debate a los diversos actores que participan en los cuidados, así como también de establecer mecanismos de vigilancia y escrutinio público permanente en el diseño e introducción de robots en el ámbito de la salud.