Benevolent Bots: Human-Robot Friendship and Empathy in German Children's Literature

Publication Date

11-2021

Faculty Department

Department of World Languages and Cultures

Document Type

Book Chapter

Abstract

Social robots, which interact with humans by displaying and responding to emotions, have been developed since the 1990s, concurrent with the affective turn in academic disciplines. As robotics technologies continue to advance and robots become more social, it is possible that children will have robot friends in the near future. The attribution of emotions to artificial life and the “sympathy of humans for nonhuman cyborgs” are already contemporary phenomena with precedents in science fiction literature, as Kathleen Woodward has argued in Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions (142). Yet some warn of the possible dangers of humans empathizing too much with robots.

This chapter examines the depiction of social robots and child-robot friendship in recent German children’s literature, including the books Schlupp vom grünen Stern (Schlupp from the Green Star, 1974), Orbis Abenteuer (Orbi's Adventures, 2011), Roboter Sam (Robot Sam, 2017), and Roki: Mein Freund mit Herz und Schraube (Roki: My Friend with Heart and Bolt, 2018). Inspired by Kathleen Woodward’s concept, “prosthetic emotions,” my analysis focuses on the feelings of emotional attachment that the child protagonists develop for their robot friends and considers the extent to which these social robots serve as positive identification figures for child readers. Although the robots depicted in these books are cute machines that bear little resemblance to the human characters, these stories blur the boundary between humans and machines by attributing emotions or a ‘soul’ to the robot characters. Taken together, these books imagine a world in which humans and robots can peacefully coexist and even form meaningful friendships that do not threaten human relationships. My analysis demonstrates that the greatest aim of these children’s books is to teach respect for all life forms, both human and nonhuman, organic and artificial.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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