AIBO

And the way I like to explain this is with these kind of two examples.

Anybody know what this is? The Sony AIBO.

It's a little dog, right? Pretty sophisticated data product.

Taking in all these sensors, does all this stuff so that it can walk and bark.

The second one that I encourage you to think about is use this analogy of make superpowers.

Always build superpowers.

Because a lot of times when we build data products, just that same example of the AIBO and calling it the airlines, those aren't necessarily superpowers.

So what's a superpower? Right now, if you take, I don't have my phone, but if you take out your phone, you think, hey, that phone's a superpower.

I love this detail from the brief about that.

At the Kofukuji Temple in Japan, they have held over 800 traditional Buddhist funerals for decommissioned Aibo robot dogs.

Such a striking image.

Isn't it? People are bringing these plastic and wire devices to a temple to have monks chant sutras over them.

And over 30 years later ...

I mean, we started to work on it in 1993 with Sony, and so over, over 30 years later, uh, we can see that, you know, Aibo, which was the name of the robot dog, but we also had a humanoid robot called QRIO.

Quest for Curiosity was actually the, uh, the real name of that robot.

Actually, it's, it's, has helped other companies to improve their humanoid robots.

Yeah

... you know.

That I, I can tell you about that because Sony, obviously we sold, uh, Aibo the, the robot dog, as you said, the talking dog, which was around €2,000 and went down.

We had even a, a version of the, of that robot that costed only n- only €900 over the course of six years when we sold the, the robots.

There were Furbies that you had to teach.

There were Aibos that you could teach and they would make gestures of love towards you.

There were Paros, which were little seals that you would give to the elderly people that would pretend to understand their affect.

These were all machines, and I became fascinated by them, I knew that they were terribly important, that didn't just want your cognition.

Tho- those areas are both ongoing, so what I'm looking forward to is when they come together.

Sony has just announced that its robotic dog, the Aibo, is going, the current model will be discontinued.

But it seems like they might have another model in the works, and it also seems, I'm speculating, but it seems like that model might have more AI capabilities.

So I think it's really heading in that direction.

M- my, my journey with this work began 20 years ago when I was studying, uh, I called them relational artifacts.

Um, Aibos, Furbys, Tamagotchis.

I mean, thing ... objects that said they cared about you, that they loved you, that they were smart objects, but they weren't coming to be smart with you, they were coming to love you.

And, um, I was very worried about them.

Well, that's a great question because I think we're all vulnerable, but it's always these products since the very beginning.

I started studying, you know, relational, I called them relational artifacts, you know, Furbys and Aibos and Tamagotchis and PaRO and, you know, ar- the first artifacts in the late 1990s, early 2000s, that basically said, "I love you."

Hmm.

Uh, but they turned out to break, and they were clunky, they were robots, and it wasn't until you got the generative AI revolution that they really came to the fore.

What's it called?

Is it called Aibo, A-I-B-O?

Yeah, that sounds right.

Uh, if you want one, it is $3,200.