Social Studies of Science 2014, Vol. 44(3) 315–341 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312713511868 sss.sagepub.com Robot visions Claudia Castañeda Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA Lucy Suchman Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Abstract This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the ‘almost human’. We take as our model (in)organism ‘Lucy the Robot Orangutan’, roboticist Steve Grand’s project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. One aspect of Lucy’s figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway’s analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and more specifically (or aspirationally) human, cognition. We follow the trope of ‘model organism’ as it is under discussion within science and technology studies and as an ironic descriptor for our own interest in Lucy as an entity/project through which to illuminate figurations within robotics more widely. Primate and robot together are forms of natureculture that help to clarify how the categories of animal and machine are entangled, while making explicit investments in their differences from one another, and from the third category of the human. We conclude, again following Haraway, by imagining what other possibilities there might be for figuring humans, robots, and their relations if we escape the reiterative imaginary of the robot as proxy for becoming human. Keywords figuration, model organism, primatology, robotics Children, artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs, and nonhuman primates all here embody ‘almost minds’. Who or what has fully human status? … What is the end, or telos, of this discourse of approximation, reproduction, and communication, in which the boundaries among and within machines, animals, and humans are exceedingly permeable? Where will this evolutionary, developmental, and historical communicative commerce take us in the techno-bio-politics of difference? (Haraway, 1989: 376) Corresponding author: Lucy Suchman, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, UK. Email: l.suchman@lancaster.ac.uk 511868SSS 44 3 10.1177/0306312713511868Social Studies of ScienceCastañeda and Suchman research-article 2013 Article by guest on December 7, 2015 sss.sagepub.com Downloaded from