When Robots Are Abandoned: Post-discontinuation Sustainability as an Epistemological Problem

Sustainability in social robotics is often addressed at the level of individual artifacts, design choices, or efficiency metrics. However, social robots are embedded over time in socio- technical systems composed of users, infrastructures, routines, and shared practices, within which their (re-)use, maintenance, and disposal are collectively shaped. Under these conditions, sustainability can be adequately explored not only at the level of robotic artifacts, but also at the level of the socio-technical systems in which robots are embedded.

Starting from this premise, the paper investigates technological discontinuation in social robotics as a critical site for analyzing sustainability. It explores the conditions under which post-discontinuation configurations can generate system-level regulation leading to sustainability-relevant outcomes after support withdrawal.

The analysis builds on prior work on AIBO, where post-discontinuation sustainability was interpreted through a self-organizational framework describing system-level regulation involving users, repair practices, and material infrastructures. While this case showed the heuristic power of a systemic approach, it left unanswered whether self-organization can function as a general descriptive framework for system sustainability in social robotics.

To address this issue, the paper subjects the self-organizational framework to a stress test through a controlled comparison of the post-discontinuation cases of AIBO and Moxie, characterized by sharply different organizational dependencies. The comparison suggests that self-organization operates not as a general framework, but as a diagnostic analytical device, identifying the organizational conditions under which system-level regulation can stabilize, or remain inhibited. On this basis, the paper examines when post-discontinuation sustainability can, and cannot, emerge in hybrid human–robot ecologies.

[This manuscript has been submitted (04.02.2026) and is currently under peer review.]