I'm sorry, son, but XK-421 went to go live on a farm upstate. (Flickr/Ian Kennedy)
This may be my favorite story of the week. You might remember Aibo, a robot dog that Sony introduced in 1999. It was one of those things that seems most interesting as a preview of what technology will eventually become, but in any case it was basically a fun toy, albeit one that had some capacity to interact with its environment and change over time as it learned. So what's the news, and why am I so taken with it? Robot dog funerals, that's why:
Sony's robotic dog, named Aibo, was launched way back in 1999 and finally discontinued in 2006, but many of the 150,000 Aibo live on inside owner's homes. Except they're getting old, which means some are coming to the end of their lives. The pictures you see above are from an Aibo funeral, held in the Chiba prefecture in Japan.
The little robotic dogs are accompanied by engineers from A FUN, a company specializing in Aibo repairs, but these Aibo are obviously beyond even expert help. Each one has a tag with the owner's name and the place from where they came written on it. The head priest of the temple prays for the 19 Aibo dogs, and says it's to aid the robotic souls in passing from the bodies.
This is not because the Japanese have a unique relationship to technology, or inanimate objects, or both. OK, well maybe that's why it's happening there first. But we're all susceptible to the tendency to anthropomorphize, and the more sophisticated our robots get, the more they will appear to have personalities, and the more we'll be able to have an emotional attachment to them. Once that emotional attachment becomes sufficiently strong, we'll want to honor that attachment, and one way to do that is to include the robot in our very human rituals. After all, funerals aren't for those who have died, they're for those who are left behind. So if you really loved your robot and now it is gone, why not have a ceremony to acknowledge the passing and your feelings about it?
