From Embodiment to Social Incorporation: Robotization, Delegation, and New Forms of Action

Research on artificial intelligence and robotics has long been structured by questions of autonomy, cognition, and embodiment. Whether in engineering, cognitive science, or philosophy of mind, the dominant concern has been how machines can perceive, act, and interact within their environments. This article argues that such perspectives are no longer sufficient to account for the contemporary transformations associated with intelligent technologies. The central claim advanced here is that the key issue is not machine autonomy but social incorporation. Robots and AI systems become socially significant not because they increasingly resemble humans, but because they are progressively integrated into networks of practices, institutions, and forms of life that incorporate them into collective action. Contemporary robotization should therefore be understood less as a technological evolution than as a reconfiguration of social regimes of delegation. Drawing on socio-semiotics and Science and Technology Studies (STS), the article develops a theoretical framework that distinguishes three interconnected forms of delegation: operational delegation, cognitive delegation, and decision-making delegation. Through these processes, intelligent technologies increasingly participate in the production of action, interpretation, evaluation, and choice. As a result, agency and responsibility become distributed across complex assemblages involving humans, algorithms, sensors, infrastructures, and organizations. The article further examines contemporary warfare as the most visible and radical manifestation of these dynamics. Autonomous drones, AI-assisted targeting systems, and automated command platforms reveal how mechanisms of delegation extend beyond technical assistance and increasingly shape processes of identification, classification, and decision-making. Far from being confined to the military sphere, these transformations illuminate broader changes affecting healthcare, logistics, security, and everyday life. Building on these observations, the article proposes the foundations of a geosemiotics of robotization, understood as an analytical framework capable of articulating sociotechnical imaginaries, social practices, infrastructures, and geopolitical power relations. From this perspective, the fundamental challenge posed by intelligent technologies in the twenty-first century is not the replacement of humans by machines, but the ongoing reconfiguration of action, decision-making, and responsibility within hybrid collectives composed of human and nonhuman actors.