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.

Social robots were initially designed within frameworks of assistance, accompaniment, and relational support, particularly in contexts of ageing, care, and social isolation. Yet their diffusion has been accompanied by recurring concerns regarding loss of control, dehumanization of social relations, emotional dependency, human replacement, and the artificialization of care practices. Drawing on an analysis of media discourses devoted to social robots, this article proposes to shift the conventional question of technological acceptability toward an anthropology of contemporary relational imaginaries. The central hypothesis advanced here is that controversies surrounding social robots do not merely reveal resistance to technological innovation; rather, they make visible a deeper crisis affecting social bonds, care infrastructures, and forms of human presence. Media representations thus emerge as privileged sites of symbolic production where the boundaries between human and non-human, assistance and substitution, relationship and simulation are continuously negotiated. The article argues that the acceptability of social robots cannot be reduced to functional evaluation alone but must instead be understood as a cultural and anthropological construction of technical alterity and human–machine relations.

Once the failure of classical fashion Semiotics (1960-1980) was certified, as it conceived the fashion phenomenon as a system devoid of meaning (Barthes), incapable of communicating (Lotman) and unbearable (Volli), the great designers and marketing strategists began a new period, that of the Pragmatics of Fashion (1980-2000), committed to resemiotizing the system by resorting to prestigious referents for their collections (the history of art and culture) and to the brand, defined as a hypericonema loaded with powerful literal, imaginary and psycho-emotional meanings (Paz Gago). This stage of fashion semiotics is described by Floch and Calefato, scholars of fashion brands as written text, since it is the proper name of the great fashion designers that has become a brand. Both agree on the need to move beyond the more linguistic stage of the discipline to develop a visual semiotics or a plastic semiotics that serves to analyze fashion as an essentially visual phenomenon. With the new millennium, in line with the new digital technologies that colonize and are colonized by fashion, the Neosemiotics of fashion (2000-2020) emerges, mediated by the stories and reels uploaded to social networks such as Instagram or TikTok, as Bianca Terraciano or Victoria Nannini will analyze. Fashion semiotics faces a new challenge today due to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, which has already colonized all processes in the fashion system: design creation, pattern making, manufacturing, advertising and marketing campaigns, fashion shows, distribution, and marketing can all be implemented through generative Artificial Intelligence applications. These new technological phenomena respond to the semiotic mode I have called Machination, as opposed to the Representation and Simulation characteristic of classic analog and digital technologies.

Citations

• Semiotics of the Manila Shawl (mantón de Manila): From Historical Transformations to its Present Identity Function
  Ana Velasco Molpeceres, Carmen Baniandrés, María Prieto Muñiz
  EPISTÉMÈ.2025; 35: 2.     CrossRef