Behind Every Social Robot Finds itself a Community of Developers: A socio-legal exploration on developers of humanoid social robots with a focus on the context of depression diagnosis and its embedded gender norms.

Sammanfattning: The rise in new digital technology is bringing with it new ethical questions around how we, as a society, can trust them. However, what if the question was before the technology itself? What if the role of the developers was influencing the way those new technologies were being programmed? This thesis situates itself at the point of exploration, where developers of humanoid social robots look for ways to advance the human-robot interaction as a field as well as getting social robots commercial-ised. By placing it in the context of depression diagnosis, where seemingly there are gender norms embedded within the diagnosis, this thesis demonstrates how devel-opers might navigate such a sensitive topic. To achieve this goal, interviews with developers and an ethnography of the HRI Conference were undertaken. Through a socio-legal and digital feminist theoretical framework, this thesis pinpoints the huge potential normative consequences due to embedded norms which derive from de-velopers themselves, as well as the data. This thesis concludes with seven policy recommendations to support developers in their exploration.