
Japan's Robot Dogs Get Funerals as Sony Looks Away - uptown
http://www.newsweek.com/japans-robot-dogs-get-funerals-sony-looks-away-312192
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yellowapple
Between 3D printing and perhaps a "part donor" program similar to real-world
organ donor programs, I imagine there's a possibility to reduce the robodog
mortality rate by quite a bit.

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mklim
Reminds me a lot of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang
([http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...](http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang/)).
It makes sense that people would bond with AI specifically designed to act as
a pet strongly enough to want to give it a funeral, but it's amazing to me
that it's happening already.

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ffn
Not just with the deaths of our dog robots, we feel loss whenever we take
stock of how we and our world are changing. Take the case of nearly every
single Chinese person still alive today. China has went from a large rural
country with sprawling country-sides, rice paddies, dragonflies, etc., to a
massive concrete jungle in the clouds (it's smog, really). So to anyone who
grew up there, there is no "going home", seeing one's old room, or musing how
everything looks so much smaller (and dingier) now. In the shadow of change,
and especially rapid change, is always the shadow of death.

That melodrama aside, it's too bad aibos weren't open sourced considering Sony
is abandoning it, if it were, it might be possible for some crafty
Frankenstein engineer to repair them indefinitely with spare parts. Robo dogs
should be all means be able to outlast their real counterparts.

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unreal37
For those wanting someone to bring this back, there seems to be a lot of
projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo relating to robots and AI. For instance,
the famous one JIBO.[1] Actually, JIBO calls itself "the world's first family
robot" which would not be true since Aibo was a family robot.

So personal robots are still being made.

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first-
fa...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first-family-robot
--3)

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elwell
That's why I stay in the realm of software.

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rmidthun
In a similar vein, my 10yo daughter used to play a now-defunct MMO called
Pixie Hollow. In it, you played a Disney fairy and took care of pets which
needed to be fed and played with to remain happy and healthy.

Months after the game was shut down, she woke up in the middle of the night
crying. She had a dream where all the pets from the game were sitting in the
empty ruins, trying not to starve to death after they were abandoned by the
fairies. The pets might not be real, but the attachments definitely are.

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elwell
Neopets might be an alternative; it's been going strong for 15 years. Also,
when I played as a kid I think it taught me about capitalism / making money.

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VLM
On the topic of startups, the trajectory of the sales graph of aibos is
interesting and worth comparing to recent techno-gadget fads.

The first 3K took twenty minutes to sell. The next 150K took six years...
Sales never exceeded 1 in 1000 of the countries population.

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ctdonath
Having one, methinks two factors applied (other than the real-dog incident I
posted above) considering the $3000 price tag: self-recharging is a _must_ ,
and it was hard to get a mental handle on what/why it was actually doing.
Having to find it (after wandering for a couple hours), pick it up, and put it
on the charger gets old; later models would return to the charger on its own,
but by then interest had waned. Watching it frolic was amusing, but you'd get
this odd sense that it was more deliberate than you could grasp - leaving you
with a nagging "but what's it _doing_?" feeling.

Watching it look at a Christmas tree was hysterical though. Head would shake
all around as it tried to parse the visual cues of an unexpectedly large
number of small bright lights.

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chkuendig
The dog repair guy very much reminded me of "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick.

Funny how fiction sometimes becomes reality much quicker than expected :)

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learnstats2
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was originally set in 1992.

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drzaiusapelord
There's this rule of thumb that a lot of future sci-fi tends to fall into the
lifespan of the writer. So its usually 40-50 years out. I guess there's
something morbid about writing about a time where you're dead or maybe many
writers don't feel confident to extrapolate that far out.

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learnstats2
It makes sense to date dystopian science fiction in the near future for the
reader's benefit: the sense that 'this could yet happen to us' is a compelling
part of the work.

Space operas and utopian themes are abstracted by setting them further into
the future.

(Cite: The Algebraist, 4034AD; Star Trek TNG 2364AD; The Jetsons 2062AD;
Futurama 3000AD)

Partially relevant xkcd comic:
[http://xkcd.com/1491/large/](http://xkcd.com/1491/large/)

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ynak
I hope 3D printers make this situation better. If robot owners can print
broken components that manufacturers stopped producing, they are able to
repair their pets by their own. Of course, companies have to open their
products information though.

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pizza234
This is something that I find extremely interesting (in the domain).

I could imagine that having open "intelligence" specifications, would allow
transferring the "soul" (as perceived from the owner) of a pet to another,
while still mantaining a similar outlook, in order to mantain affective
identification.

That, and of course, many other things. I wonder how complex is to build a
robot (for a small company), which would still make it realistic enough to
create an affective bond. If not too complex, 3D printing would be realistic.

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slfnflctd
That's the good stuff, right there.

People seem to be hard wired to anthropomorphize anything remotely resembling
animal behavior in 3D space. If you can develop trained or environment-
reactive specific, repeatable actions (especially useful or amusing ones),
along with some narrow-parameter randomized responses (within or adjacent to
actions), and migrate those database contents to another robotics platform
seamlessly, _then_ you'd really have something.

Kinda surprised this type of thing is still in the 'fizzled' category.

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7952
That is strange. If people hadn't formed an emotional attachment maybe they
would have been more willing to buy a new one every couple of years and
maintain its viability. Perhaps we need heavily subsidised electronic pets
that have in app purchases to enable different behaviours. After all isn't it
just a mobile platform with a speciliast UI?

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vertex-four
People buy these with the intention of forming an emotional attachment with
them, so that wouldn't work at all.

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thret
There's money to be made in ordinary pet accessories, so I'm sure if Sony
tried they could create a range of toys and such for these pets too.

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drzaiusapelord
I'm curious as to why the Aibo was discontinued in 2006. What we're able to do
from a sensor and processing perspective today, I'm sure, blows away whatever
the original Aibo did. I can imagine a return to this at a much cheaper cost.
The robot pet market never really took off, which makes no sense to me.
Personally, I would love an intelligent robot dog that my real dog could play
with when I'm not at home. Especially if it had basic teleconferencing
features that let check up on my dog and my house. With VR, it might be
possible to control the robot dog and play with your dog, as a dog.

The $59 robots at the toy store really aren't the same thing. You need more
than a trivial amount of intelligence and movement.

We need a robot pet startup here. Hardware is tough but if this thing sold
under $500 and was at least as intelligent as the Aibo, I could see it selling
in large numbers.

I also find it pleasing that Japan's religious structures are so flexible that
a robot funeral isn't a big deal. In the largely dogmatic West, it would be a
scandal if, say, a Catholic priest attempted this.

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DanBC
People became attached to their Tamagotchis and people liked talking to ELIZA.
You need surprisingly little power to make people bond to stuff.

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tjr
Sherry Turkle's book _Alone Together_ talks a lot about this. A recurring
theme is people seeing social robots going from being "better than nothing",
partially filling some human void, to being "better than anything", because
the robot has some set of qualities superior to humans.

Medical care robots, for example, lack the disgruntled attitudes cited by
elderly patients. Robotic dogs are there to play when you want to play with
them, and can be easily stowed away when you don't.

I found it both fascinating and disconcerting how easily people seem to accept
robots instead of other people in a variety of relations.

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onion2k
It's a surprisingly emotional event when a piece of technology you've used and
enjoyed for years finally breaks down beyond repair. The notion that it'd be
worse for something that is specifically designed to act in a way that
apparently befriends you and grows with you over many years, to the point of
being a traumatic loss akin to losing a real friend, is entirely reasonable.
How we learn to deal with this sort of event as AI progresses and becomes more
and more lifelike will be interesting.

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higherpurpose
The day until robots have basic rights is probably not too many decades away.
Will Google have to pay its own robots in the future (not necessarily with
money) so as to not be considered a slave-owner? Will there still be "robot
sweat-shops"? We'll have to see.

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Majestic121
I don't think that there will be such a thing as a "robot sweatshop", because
a sweatshop implies that you use people, or at least conscious beings.

While I'm sure we'll be very advanced on the domain of AI in the next few
decades, consciousness seems to be a very difficult goal to achieve in such a
short time. And even if we manage to achieve it, and become able to give
consciousness to machines : why would we give it to robots in factory?

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yodsanklai
The question of consciousness is an interesting one. If the machine can
perfectly fake it has consciousness or emotions how can we tell it's not
conscious? conversely, how do we know other humans are conscious and not just
"pretending"?

