> 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.
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.