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

Sustainability in social robotics is often addressed at the level of individual artifact features. Yet social robots become embedded in socio-technical configurations that shape their maintenance, continued use and disposal. To investigate sustainability at this system level, the paper focuses on post-discontinuation socio-technical regulatory processes and related sustainability-relevant outcomes. The study builds on previous work in which AIBO’s post-discontinuation trajectory was analyzed through a self-organizational framework. Using AIBO’s case as a reference for further exploration, we take a first step toward extending this system-level research program to a broader empirical basis by assessing the self-organizational framework’s analytical reach, diagnostic scope and heuristic potential under contrasting organizational conditions. The article defines this operation as an epistemological stress test, specifies its possibilities and limits, and proceduralizes it. Accordingly, in implementing the test, a common grid of self-organizational descriptors is held constant, while Moxie, selected for its markedly different organization of critical operational dependencies, serves as AIBO’s contrast case. Within these analytical boundaries, the test shows that the framework discriminates between different forms of post-discontinuation regulation and extends its scope to regulatory organization in the making. Furthermore, the analysis identifies organizational dimensions shaping the development of regulatory capacities and opens a new, sustainability-related angle on robotic social presence. Specifically, the study characterizes this defining property of social robots as a key organizational dimension in their lifecycle extension, articulating the heuristic notion of lifecycle-extending social presence. This distinctive social-robotic outcome is translated into a heuristic tetralogue and related design hypotheses for future experimental investigation. [Originally submitted for publication on 04.02.2026; revised preprint following the first round of peer review, 05.09.2026.]