Green Robots, Anthropocenic AI: Anthropological Provocations on the Role of Robotics in Climate Change Mitigation (Lora Koycheva)

 

Surprise, surprise!

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems scale across domains, their operation increasingly depends on vast, energy-intensive infrastructures whose environmental and epistemic conditions remain largely invisible to end users. This results in everyday use of AI which heavily leans towards the trivial – from preferring AI mode in simple searches to producing waltzing cat videos. At the same time, climate robotics can help scale environmental action, if only deployed at scale. Midst the paradoxes, absurdities, despair, and transformational promises yet to be fulfilled in the environmental AI and robotics space, this talk leads up to several provocations. Among them: Can AI and robotics commons be achieved? What is the role of culture and human-robot relations in this task? What answers can anthropology give that go beyond the reified prescriptions of ethical and responsibility frameworks?

This talk and the subsequent discussion will be held in English. Lora Koycheva will speak live at Babylon to us.

About the speaker:

Lora Koycheva

Dr. Lora Koycheva is an anthropologist and technologist working at the intersection of anthropology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and robotics.

She is Assistant Professor at the Chair of Technoscience Studies in Brandenburg Technical University, having previously taught and researched at University College London and the Technical University of Munich. She is also building Robots, actually! – a global initiative to rebuild the human condition with robots. From 2020 to 2023, she was a convenor of the EASA Applied Anthropology Network. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University (USA), and is co-editor of EmTech Anthropology:

Careers at the Frontier and Anthropology and AI (both with Routledge).

Selected articles:

• Koycheva, L. (2025). Anthropology: An Entrepreneurial Discipline. Journal of Business Anthropology, 14(1), 57-77.

• Koycheva, L. (2024). How to Do Robotics with Words: Language and Prospective Ethics in Design Anthropological Approaches to Emergent Hardware. In The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design (pp. 173-188). Routledge.

• Koycheva, L., & VandenBroek, A. (2024). Sandbox innovation: Potentials and impacts. Practicing Anthropology, 46(1), 36-45.

• Koycheva, L. (2024). Anthropology is good to build with: from ethnographic imagination to anthropological speculation in robotics. In EmTech Anthropology (pp. 107-129). Routledge.

• Koycheva, L. V. (2020, October). Empathy, More or Less: Scaling Intermediary Experiences of Emotion and Affect in Innovation. In Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings (Vol. 2020, No. 1, pp. 243-262).

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