Infrastructuring AI and Robotics for Health and Everyday Life: Visions and Practices in a Japanese National Moonshot Research and Development Project
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how emerging infrastructural AI and robotics for health and everyday life are proposed and negotiated, drawing on ethnographic research within the Japanese Awareness AI Project. The project envisages distributed assistance relying on continuous measurement of bodily states, aiming to make technological systems recede into the background. The analysis reveals how the project envisions bodies and machines as tightly coupled, yet encounters profound sociotechnical frictions around data integration, consent and bodily safety. It also traces perceived side effects, including the commercial circulation of bodily data and the risk of reproducing social inequalities. The article argues that such attempts at infrastructuring, although recently curtailed by shifting policy priorities, remain sociologically significant. They highlight the unstable nature of infrastructure in the making and provide a critical reference point for understanding emerging reorganisations of dependence and responsibility and forms of assisted selfhood, around continuous bodily datafication.
Source: Sociology of Health & Illness
Author: Hiroto Shimizu
Institution: Sophia University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,330
OpenAlex ID: W7212302865