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Ageing has become a ubiquitous concern in European policy. Critics have bemoaned that such policies are not so much about older people but rather about finding justification for other policy aims, such as economic growth or technological innovation. However, such critiques do not capture the co-constitutive relationship between ageing and innovation shaping one another. Using the example of the Silver Economy discourse, we show that ageing has not only been reframed under the imperatives of economic and innovation policies, but that ageing itself can also affect those policies. In its formative stages, the Silver Economy was characterised by a number of tensions between, on the one hand, common ageist assumptions about old age and, on the other hand, alternative visions of what ageing could mean as a policy field. However, these potentials have later been domesticated within the broader field of Active and Healthy Ageing. In this Forum Article, we therefore hypothesise what it would mean to take ageing more seriously as a driver of progressive politics as indicated in those formative years of the Silver Economy. Such a speculative take on current old-age policy, we hold, opens up a number of fruitful avenues and new interfaces between critical researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in driving progressive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roboticists are faced with a striking discrepancy between vision and demonstration of care with robots. On the one hand, research funders, policy makers, and entrepreneurs expect robots to become a panacea to impending demographic change. On the other hand, efforts to demonstrate that vision in care practice have largely remained unfulfilled. In this article, I investigate how roboticists manage and deal with this discrepancy between high expectations toward robotics research and what robots are capable of doing in practice. I will offer an extensive analysis of the efforts by roboticists and others to install, repair, stage, and, surprisingly, suspend robot dramas. Robot dramas comprise an ambivalent mix of experimental practices that seek to stage visions of care robotics while at the same time testing precarious phenomena of human–robot interaction. This relates two prominent but still largely disconnected strands of research in Science and Technology Studies: works on techno-scientific demonstrations, and on high and low expectations. Here, robot dramas are a crucial site for studying the conflicting interrelation between the theatrical performativity of demonstrations and the interplay of high and low expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discourse on information and communication technology suggests that humans and machines are increasingly converging. However, in this article, we argue that for analysts of digital society it is necessary to understand the simultaneity with which humans and machines are both interconnected and separated from one another. Here, we propose to follow and trace human/machine interfacing, i.e. the manifold practices, by which humans and machines become interconnected, by being kept apart. Drawing on theoretical resources from feminist science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology, we extend common 'objective' notions of the interface and propose a performative and ecological framework for human-machine interfacing. We illustrate this framework with two contrasting cases, embodied social robotics and communicative software bots. Social robots denote a rather fragile technology, showing the precariousness of efforts to engender phenomena of human-machine communication. By contrast, communicative software bots can rely on vast digital infrastructures, which create the impression of symmetry between humans and machines by rendering ontological differences invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care robots promise to assist older people in an ageing society. This article investigates the socio-material conditions of care with robots by focusing on the usually invisible practices of human-machine interfacing. I define human-machine interfacing as the activities by roboticists and others to render interaction between robots and people possible in the first place. This includes, efforts to render prototypical arrangements of care 'robot-friendly'. In my video-assisted ethnography of human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments. I identify four types of interfacing practices, where care comes to matter: integrating the ephemeral entity that is 'a robot', helping it by way of mundane courtesies, making users 'fit' for interacting with it, and establishing corridors of interaction between the robot and people's bodies. I show that robots do not so much care for (older) people but rather, the other way around – people need to care for robots. Hence, care robots are not simply agents of care but also objects of care, rendering necessary a symmetrical analysis of human-machine interfacing. Furthermore, these practices do not merely reflect the prototypical state of the art in robotics. Rather, they indicate a more general mode of how robots and people interface. I argue that care with robots requires us to re-consider the exclusive focus on the human and at least complement it with care for the non-human and, incidentally, the robotic, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]