The Quasi-Other as a Sobject

This comment on Mark Coeckelbergh’s text “You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others” is about the concrete use of linguistic terms to describe the technical other, the robot, and its relationship to humans. There are many characteristics that a robot can have that are very similar to humans and interpersonal relations, but they are not human, they are quasi-human. This phenomenon is, amongst others, constructed and interpreted linguistically, but on the other hand, there is no linguistic term that could describe it unambiguously, so it can only be studied in direct human comparison, in a quasi-human way. In this comment, it is demonstrated why the use of the quasi is problematic and suggests that the phenomenon can instead be analyzed in a techno-philosophical-phenomenological context within the framework of the Sobject-approach. The term sobject describes a kind of technical objects to which humans can have deeper relations than to conventional objects. Therefore, it provides space to study the phenomenon on a phenomenological level, without the need for a permanent direct human comparison.  – This is one of six commentaries on a 2011-paper by Mark Coeckelbergh: “You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others.” Coeckelbergh‘s response also appears in this issue of Technology and Language.