Robots are Increasingly: Imagination Crisis in Human-Computer Interaction Research

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Robots are coming for us! There is no escape anymore, AI is inevitable. Worst of all, our skies will be packed with noisy drones, our streets crowded with service sidewalk robots, our homes filled with mechanical companions attending to our children. This critique is a refusal to accept the inevitability of these machines as a premise for our work as researchers. Through a poem composed of opening sentences in robotics papers from the ACM library, I suggest that computing is stuck in a crisis of imagination. Through the example of social robotics, I argue how researchers seem to have surrendered to being either bystanders or servants of the narrow interests of capital; or are simply naively or insidiously perpetuating the motivation for their research agenda. This found poem is a site to create joint calls for unmaking thoughtless notions of acceleration; and beyond that, to challenge the inevitability of capitalist realism. I propose the union for computing alternatives as a movement towards collectively researching computational things otherwise.