Robots, in Jung’s telling, are no longer confined to laboratories or imagined futures. They are slipping quietly into hotels, kitchens, sports arenas, appliances, tools, and everyday routines. Yet society has not quite caught up with them. We are surrounded by increasingly robotic systems, but still lack the language and frameworks to understand what they change about work, authority, trust, and human behavior.

At the heart of the session was Jung’s idea of robots as fluid sociotechnical assemblages. Borrowing from the example of the Zimbabwe bush pump, he described robots not as tidy machines with fixed borders, but as living systems of a sort: shaped by people, institutions, maintenance, expectations, and the environments they inhabit. A robot is never only its hardware. It is also the hands that repair it, the rules that govern it, and the social world that decides what it means.

Jung brought this idea to life through Major League Baseball’s automated ball-strike system, often called robot umpires. On paper, the system exists to call balls and strikes. In practice, it does something subtler. It helps manage conflict, preserve the rhythm of the game, and redistribute authority between players, officials, and spectators. The machine does not merely make a call; it enters the delicate theater of sport.

The session then moved to Cornell’s Statler Hotel, where Jung’s team prototypes robotic laundry and bell carts in the bustle of a real hospitality setting. Here, the work becomes wonderfully untidy. Human-robot interaction is not a polite exchange of turns. It is continuous, awkward, spatial, interrupted, and full of unspoken expectations.

To study these interactions, Jung’s team begins with humble materials: cardboard prototypes, Wizard of Oz experiments, and rough arrangements that let them observe how people actually behave around robotic systems. The goal is not to perfect the robot in splendid isolation, but to understand how it learns its role in the world.

By the end, Jung’s argument felt less like a technical prescription than a design ethic. Robotics needs more than engineering. It needs art studio practice, field observation, and interaction design. If robots are to enter the wilds of daily life, they must be designed not as solitary machines, but as strange new participants in the crowded, complicated story of human society.