Cruel optimism, Lucid Despair, Precarious Hope in HRI

HRI 2026 takes place amid profound socio-political turbulence marked by rising authoritarianism, the consolidation of technological power, and the expanding use of robotics for warfare. These global conditions create an affective atmosphere that seeps into our field: a mix of attachment to techno-determinist and techno-solutionist narratives, unease with "business as usual," and a tentative search for alternatives. As HRI scholars and designers, we recognize how the wider socio-political tensions resonate within our own practices, shaping what we take to be possible, necessary, or inevitable in research and design. 

In this half-day, in-person workshop, we mobilize three affective orientations—cruel optimism, lucid despair, and precarious hope—as resources for reflection, critique, and experimentation. Through short provocations, interactive discussions, and a speculative group activity, participants will be invited to inhabit these affects to question dominant narratives that sustain HRI, confront structural challenges, and collectively explore alternative trajectories for research, design, and community building.

The motivation for this workshop arose out of the shared sense that something is deeply unsettled. We are witnessing renewed authoritarian tendencies globally and the consolidation of power among a small group of tech oligarchs. One of the prominent — and troubling — domains of application of technologies, including robotics, is warfare, where both remotely piloted and autonomous drones have emerged as a new and destructive class of weapon. However, even in the domains ostensibly oriented toward benign or supportive functions, robotic systems are frequently appropriated in ways that consolidate the power of large technology corporations and the individuals who control them. This often carries significant social and environmental costs, including the displacement of human labor and the intensification of ecological harms. In relation to these socio-technical conditions, Brian Merchant has described a contemporary "Luddite renaissance,"* a resurgence of grassroots collectives, organizations, and clubs undertaking refusal, sabotage, and collective resistance to technologies that deepen exploitation and oppression. 

These socio-technical and political dynamics together generate a pervasive affective atmosphere that seeps into our professional field, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): everything feels suspended, though nothing stands still. The crisis we sense globally resonates within our own research practices, shaping what we take to be possible, purposeful, necessary, or inevitable. Tracing the roots of this global and professional situation is less about finding a single cause than recognizing the overlapping forces that bind the global and the local, the professional and the personal, into a shared, palpable tension. Lauren Berlant calls such moments a "situation"**: a state in which something that will matter is already unfolding amid the ordinary activity of life. For HRI, this situation poses a pressing question: how can the field break from a model of "business as usual" that reproduces and amplifies existing inequities, and instead cultivate practices that enable more equitable and affirmative futures for those with whom—and for whom—we design and build robotic systems, but also for ourselves as researchers, practitioners and citizens?

We see this workshop as a way to collectively experiment with alternative trajectories for HRI, ones that open paths to different forms of inhabiting the present and foregrounding more desirable futures. This requires that we explicitly attend to the politics embedded both within robotic technologies — but also our epistemic practices — recognizing that technical design decisions are entangled with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. 

*https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-luddite-renaissance-is-in-full

** https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism