The Dog It Was

imageThe recent short NYT series on robots has a dying fall. The articles were framed as an investigation of how robots are poised to change our world, but the last piece is about the obsolescence of the Aibo, Sony’s robot dog. Once apparently poised to change our world, the Aibo is no longer made and now Sony will no longer supply spare parts, meaning the remaining machines will gradually cease to function.
There is perhaps a message here about the over-selling and under-performance of many ambitious AI projects, but the piece focuses instead on the emotional impact that the ‘death’ of the robot dogs will have on some fond users. The suggestion is that the relationship these owners have with their Aibo is as strong as the one you might have with a real dog. Real dogs die, of course, so though it may be sad, that’s nothing new. Perhaps the fact that the Aibos are ‘dying’ as the result of a corporate decision, and could in principle have been immortal makes it worse? Actually I don’t know why Sony or some third party entrepreneur doesn’t offer a program to virtualise your Aibo, uploading it into software where you can join it after the Singularity (I don’t think there would really be anything to upload, but hey…).
On the face of it, the idea of having a real emotional relationship with an Aibo is a little disturbing. Aibos are neat pieces of kit, designed to display ’emotional’ behaviour, but they are not that complex (many orders of magnitude less complex than a dog, surely), and I don’t think there is any suggestion that they have any real awareness or feelings (even if you think thermostats have vestigial consciousness, I don’t think an Aibo would score much higher. If people can have fully developed feelings for these machines, it strongly suggests that their feelings for real dogs have nothing to do with the dog’s actual mind. The relationship is essentially one-sided; the real dog provides engaging behaviour, but real empathy is entirely absent.
More alarming, it might be thought to imply that human relationships are basically the same. Our friends, our loved ones, provide stimuli which tickle us the right way; we enjoy a happy congruence of behaviour patterns, but there is no meeting of minds, no true understanding. What’s love got to do with it, indeed?
Perhaps we can hope that Aibo love is actually quite distinct from dog love. The people featured in the NYT video are Japanese, and it is often said that Japanese culture is less rigid about the distinction between animate and inanimate than western ideas. In Christianity, material things lack souls and any object that behaves as if it had one may be possessed or enchanted in ways that are likely to be unnatural and evil. In Shinto, the concept of kami extends to anything important or salient, so there is nothing unnatural or threatening about robots. But while that might validate the idea of an Aibo funeral, it does not precisely equate Aibos and real dogs.
In fact, some of the people in the video seem mainly interested in posing their Aibos for amusing pictures or video, something they could do just as well with deactivated puppets. Perhaps in reality Japanese culture is merely more relaxed about adults amusing themselves with toys?
Be that as it may, it seems that for now the era of robot dogs is already over…