10 ms·

Japan's Robot Dogs Get Funerals as Sony Looks Away

109 points by uptown 12y ago

chkuendig 12y ago
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 :)
- Digit-Al 12y ago
  I had the exact same thought :-)
- learnstats2 12y ago
  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was originally set in 1992.
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    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.
    - learnstats2 12y ago
      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/
DevUps 12y ago
Fuck Newsweek.
onion2k 12y ago
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.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  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.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    I would say that truly self-conscious robots are really decades(if not centuries) away,so I don't think we have to worry about that just yet. Robots working in factories probably won't need to have advanced intelligence, basic routines will work just fine, so "robot sweat-shops" is unlikely to be a thing.
  - Majestic121 12y ago
    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?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - yodsanklai 12y ago
VLM 12y ago
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.
- Digit-Al 12y ago
  I guess that's why they discontinued them. Whilst they were very popular with those who owned them, I guess they never sold enough to be profitable compared to their more core products.
- ctdonath 12y ago
  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.
7952 12y ago
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?
- vertex-four 12y ago
  People buy these with the intention of forming an emotional attachment with them, so that wouldn't work at all.
  - thret 12y ago
    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.
- tajen 12y ago
  They should act limping so the owner knows they need to replace a leg, a tail, an ear... so after a few years the whole body is renewed and the viability of the species maintained.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > 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. That actually made me think of a different point of view on the topic. When you're building a "pet" that you know people will get attached emotionally to, you are playing god. And when you make it so that it just breaks after few years, then you basically suck at being god. You are responsible for the feelings of loss and suffering people will experience because the design wasn't good enough (and if you go the planned obsolescence way, you're an evil god). > Perhaps we need heavily subsidised electronic pets that have in app purchases to enable different behaviours. Now this sounds like something straight from Black Mirror. I hope I'll never live to see it happening, it's wrong on so many levels...
- 12y ago
ynak 12y ago
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.
- pizza234 12y ago
  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.
  - slfnflctd 12y ago
    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.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  Well, as they currently exist, they can only create things entirely made from plastic, so I don't think they'd be too helpful.
  - detaro 12y ago
    The printers people can afford for at home, yes. 3D printing companies like Shapeways will do your designs in many other materials as well, including steel.
mklim 12y ago
Reminds me a lot of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang/ http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...). 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.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
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.
- ccozan 12y ago
  We are working on this ;). Stay tuned.
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    Would love to hear more about your product!
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > Personally, I would love an intelligent robot dog that my real dog could play with when I'm not at home. Two dogs? No dogs?
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    Two dogs means 2x the daycare costs, 2x the vet costs, etc. >No dogs? Maybe. I like having a dog, but would like a better way to interact with her while I'm at work and other scenarios (people who wants pets but cant care for them like the elderly or the allergic or the relatively poor).
unreal37 12y ago
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-family-robot--3 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first-fa...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rmidthun 12y ago
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.
- elwell 12y ago
  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.
ffn 12y ago
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.
yellowapple 12y ago
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.
elwell 12y ago
That's why I stay in the realm of software.

109 points by uptown 12y ago

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 :)

Digit-Al 12y ago
I had the exact same thought :-)
learnstats2 12y ago
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was originally set in 1992.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  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.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    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/

DevUps 12y ago

Fuck Newsweek.

onion2k 12y ago

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.

higherpurpose 12y ago
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.
- gambiting 12y ago
  I would say that truly self-conscious robots are really decades(if not centuries) away,so I don't think we have to worry about that just yet. Robots working in factories probably won't need to have advanced intelligence, basic routines will work just fine, so "robot sweat-shops" is unlikely to be a thing.
- Majestic121 12y ago
  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?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - yodsanklai 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

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.

Digit-Al 12y ago
I guess that's why they discontinued them. Whilst they were very popular with those who owned them, I guess they never sold enough to be profitable compared to their more core products.
ctdonath 12y ago
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.

7952 12y ago

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?

vertex-four 12y ago
People buy these with the intention of forming an emotional attachment with them, so that wouldn't work at all.
- thret 12y ago
  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.
tajen 12y ago
They should act limping so the owner knows they need to replace a leg, a tail, an ear... so after a few years the whole body is renewed and the viability of the species maintained.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> 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. That actually made me think of a different point of view on the topic. When you're building a "pet" that you know people will get attached emotionally to, you are playing god. And when you make it so that it just breaks after few years, then you basically suck at being god. You are responsible for the feelings of loss and suffering people will experience because the design wasn't good enough (and if you go the planned obsolescence way, you're an evil god). > Perhaps we need heavily subsidised electronic pets that have in app purchases to enable different behaviours. Now this sounds like something straight from Black Mirror. I hope I'll never live to see it happening, it's wrong on so many levels...
12y ago

ynak 12y ago

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.

pizza234 12y ago
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.
- slfnflctd 12y ago
  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.
emodendroket 12y ago
Well, as they currently exist, they can only create things entirely made from plastic, so I don't think they'd be too helpful.
- detaro 12y ago
  The printers people can afford for at home, yes. 3D printing companies like Shapeways will do your designs in many other materials as well, including steel.

mklim 12y ago

Reminds me a lot of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang/ http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...). 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.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

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.

ccozan 12y ago
We are working on this ;). Stay tuned.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Would love to hear more about your product!
jacquesm 12y ago
> Personally, I would love an intelligent robot dog that my real dog could play with when I'm not at home. Two dogs? No dogs?
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Two dogs means 2x the daycare costs, 2x the vet costs, etc. >No dogs? Maybe. I like having a dog, but would like a better way to interact with her while I'm at work and other scenarios (people who wants pets but cant care for them like the elderly or the allergic or the relatively poor).

unreal37 12y ago

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-family-robot--3 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jibo-the-world-s-first-fa...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rmidthun 12y ago

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.

elwell 12y ago
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.

ffn 12y ago

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.

yellowapple 12y ago

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.

elwell 12y ago

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