Jang, D. and Jordan, S.B. (2025). Implants and Injections: Long-Lived Integrations with the Organic. Ed. Jamie Banks. Android, Assembled: The Implicit and Explicit Anatomy of Social Robots.

Social robots redefine humanity. Indeed, the category of human beings who can enjoy human rights has been defined differently by times, cultures, and hegemonies (Harvey, 1994). Now, social robots bring the next revision. The development of social robots forces us to revisit the essential meaning of being human, including criteria for that category and what an acceptable normal body is. This chapter devotes discussion to understanding the future that social robots bring as they help to inform our considerations of cyborgs. The ontological categories of social robots and cyborgs are not equitable and rather overlapping. Even if social robots are not allowed to have warmth, flesh, and pulsating organic bodies like cyborgs, cyborgs and social robots are partially or wholly borne from non-organic mechanical parts. We argue that we can understand cyborgs through understanding social robots and vice versa.