I know I'm somewhat wrong, but I see no market for this whatsoever, besides as a learning toy for student AI laboratories, where the original AIBO is still popular. Can someone give me an example of a type of person of any wealth level or personality that would willingly go out of their way to purchase this? It doesn't clean the floor, so there's no practical function. It's not an MP3 player that follows you around or a Siri-like assistant, so it can't optimize your existing means of entertainment. The website advertises "love", but I see 0% actual connection with it, so anyone that claims this reason is doing it either ironically or perhaps due to certain object attraction mental conditions. If anyone wants to cure lonliness, this would seem to have zero effect. As a toy for children or hobbyist adults, it seems like a fun thing to play with and show your friends for a few days, but no better than a yoyo which is few orders of magnitude cheaper. For "tinkerers", it would be fun to program applications into it that use the sensors and motors, but if that was their primary market, it would advertised as an open development platform and they would leave out the pre-programmed AI. So what am I missing here?
If I was an investor, I would value this at no more than $0 because sales can't possibly surpass R&D. What reasons are there to believe otherwise?
EDIT: So it seems in this discussion I've learned that many believe that the love for dogs can actually be replaced by love for inanimate objects, which is a bizarre concept to me, but if the number of people who are able to do that is truly as significant as people are claiming, then I suppose I could see why this product could become successful.
Wait. I guess it mimics some actions of a puppy, and I imagine it can be entertaining for a few hours. Then you get used to it, and you start seeing the repeating patterns. For how long can you find entertaining a robot dog that pretends to scratch its ear, for no reason in the world and without actually even coming close to touch it with its paw?
>You're approaching this too much from an engineer's POV
I don't agree with this. If anything, I am approaching it from a spiritual POV when I say that a normal person cannot love an object like you can love a dog.
If that was the case, people probably wouldn't be holding funerals for their v1 Aibos, and there wouldn't be an active repair scene for them. They probably also wouldn't have made a v2. This thing is explicitly designed to trick your "is this a living being" circuitry.
Replace Aibo with a real dog in your text and you could claim the same - practically, having a dog (in the city) also makes little logical sense. Still, people have them
Just because he ruled it out doesn't mean that it's not a factor.
People become attached to lots of inanimate items, and can feel emphathy for robots [1] [2], though perhaps not as strongly as with living creatures. US Military soldiers can develop an emotional connection with bomb disposal robots. [3]
I definitely sympathize with this dog-like robot slipping on ice:
I wouldn't be able to claim the same, because normal humans can obviously love dogs, while normal humans cannot love Aibo. Therefore it makes perfect sense to own a dog, even if the other points (MP3 player) are irrelevant.
I should state it more generally. There are many meanings of the word "love", but normal humans cannot love inanimate objects with the same meaning as you can with dogs or other humans. You can of course "love" objects and concepts, much like I could "love my new car", but this is a different meaning, and mixing these two fundamentally different concepts is psychologically/mentally abnormal.
Have you considered that it is you who is abnormal? I don't mean that as an attack. Personally, I'm fairly certain that I'm incapable of feeling love as normal people do, I never take the initiative to meet up with someone and I certainly don't do small talk with strangers. But I'm aware, that in this regard, I'm different from most people.
Now, think about stuffed animals and dolls. Those are inanimate; most of the time highly stylized compared to their real-world inspirations; with exaggerated, unnatural features. And yet children will play with them, love them, and steadfastly claim that they are alive. That doesn't seem abnormal to me, but instead a very human thing to do. We just seem to be wired to interpret objects as if they have agency, even if it's just randomness or a simple mechanism that makes them move.
That is a good point. The love that children have for inanimate toys like dolls may be similar to the love for humans or animals. I too had these supports as a child. But by age 8 or so, the attraction fades away after realizing that the emotional support that objects give is insufficient. So I may be wrong about it being a completely intrinsic trait---maybe the ability to see a difference of these types of love is learned. But either way, Aibo doesn't seem marketed to children, as all of the videos feature adults using them. Maybe they are marketing to those who have or are willing to "unlearn" this distinction, so I think it will be a hard sell to people who have not considered this already, which seems rare.
> but normal humans cannot love inanimate objects with the same meaning as you can with dogs or other humans.
Iff the sense in question is a reciprocal exchange of similar emotion, then it's true that it can't apply to objects without human-like emotional capacity, but that would seem likely to include actual dogs as well as robot dogs, notwithstanding that it is perhaps somewhat easier to mistakenly anthropomorphization the former than the latter.
I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful, significant sense where there is a distinction that applies generally to “normal humans” drawn at the point you want to draw it; it seems very much to be wandering into No True Scotsman territory.
For what it's worth I think your response is more mainstream than the replies to you would imply: I've actually had conversations with people where I asked "imagine a robot dog that is actually perfectly indistinguishable from a real dog in every possible way: could you feel the same about that as a real bio dog?" Most people have a hard "no" even then, as though there is something actually magic about a bio-dog.
On the other hand I've also had people say they think it is bizarre that someone could love a dog any more than you can a tree, that they are a "thing" and don't have "real" thoughts and emotions like people do (just fake/emulated ones that we breed into them), so I don't think the philosophical ideas are broadly accepted for this.
Interesting video. The one thing that strikes me about each scene is how much of an uncanny valley being around one of those things would be. That would be the first step---to get used to that. Then you'd have to bring yourself so low to actually associate the human feeling of love with a physical unliving object. I don't think there's any way to do this to any degree unless you force yourself to develop a borderline mental disorder over time or believe in animism or something similar. It's not just how you're brought up---the ability to distinguish living things from objects is inherent from birth at a fundamental level, which is why I think the "dog replacement" and attraction claims in the marketing is nothing but silly.
Silly to you. I wouldn't want one of these either, but that doesn't mean I can't empathize with somebody enough to understand how they could find enjoyment or feel affection towards one. Did you ever have or know a friend with teddy bear? Even as a child you know it is not real, but that doesn't mean you can't be attached or even pretend that it loved you back.
That's why you are still not an investor? (partly kidding).
Not only the world is 7 billion different human beings but Japenese and people from SEA have very different cultures and purchases from the typical westerns.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd be interested in buying it if: it was cheaper. solid enough that my real dog doesn't break it.
I don't know, I think the first step to being a good investor is to avoid opportunities that make absolutely no sense to you personally. :)
I just think that Sony's claims that this is anything resembling a dog replacement is ridiculous, because I believe that regardless of culture or how you were raised, humans from birth see inherent difference between living things and objects and mixing the concepts is a mentally stressing activity.
> opportunities that make absolutely no sense to you personally
No. You are consuming a very tiny part of the world production. By going through that mindset, you are limiting yourself in a very big way. And you might be hurting yourself if you are not a very typical individual.
This plus Siri would be amazing.. I live in HK with very limited space and a lot of apartments that don't allow pets. Plus it's Asia so people will go wild for this..
Perhaps this is planned with Aibo, which would be very cool, but I didn't see it mentioned on the webpage or press release, and it will be very difficult to make a 190,000Y sale on an iPhone alternative with fewer features that doesn't fit into your pocket. If it sells, there needs to be more than a reason for a Siri-like feature, but I still don't see it.
I thought the main use case was a companion for elderly people, similar to paro. Pets in large cities in Japan are expensive and there isn't much room for them unless you're wealthy so it also makes sense as an interim gift for a child in Japan that wants a dog.
I didn't know, but it makes sense, that it is useful in an AI lab, but I think that is a secondary use the market found.
It seems to me that elderly people would not see a connection with this even more than young people would. A robot dog with zero ability to make people feel connected with wouldn't solve the problem at all.
People have pets all the way from ants and fish through mice and cats to dogs and pigs. This might be closer to a fish than a dog but those are all common pets for normal people. I think if it can learn and interact, it's going to be a meaningful pet, at least more than a fish is.
If I was an investor, I would value this at no more than $0 because sales can't possibly surpass R&D. What reasons are there to believe otherwise?
EDIT: So it seems in this discussion I've learned that many believe that the love for dogs can actually be replaced by love for inanimate objects, which is a bizarre concept to me, but if the number of people who are able to do that is truly as significant as people are claiming, then I suppose I could see why this product could become successful.