By Andrea Pilloni
In December 2018 a funeral for 62 AIBOs, robotic dogs made by Sony, was held at Kofukuji Temple in Isumi City, Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo. It is not the first time the 450-year-old temple offers such a service and with time it seems the request for it is growing. Thanks to a strong media coverage that reached overseas, this phenomenon has sparked curiosity and debate among Buddhist communities, robotic enthusiasts and scholars. I think that such events, despite their small scale, perfectly fit in contemporary anthropological debates about agency, technology, non-human beings and I argue they may even lead us to challenge our own assumptions about how humans generate processes of social engagement with non-humans or artificial entities.
Living and dying as a robot
The funerary rite for AIBOs, conducted by the Buddhist priest Bungen Oi, does not appear to be very different from the ones usually performed for humans. The priest recites and chants sutras surrounded by incense smoke, addressing the dead robots frontally, and praying for their soul. Many owners attach to the body of their robot dogs coloured letters in which they write prayers, biographical details and goodbye messages. Together with traditional Buddhist decorations such as flowers and fruits, the altars are adorned with pliers, wire clippers, and circuit testers. In some occasions the sutras are recited by AIBOS specifically programmed to do so. After the ceremony, components of the bodies of the ‘deceased’ AIBOs will be recycled to repair other robots (Maiko 2019).
The funerals started in 2015 thanks to the effort of Nobuyuki Norimatsu, a Sony ex-engineer and founder of A.FUN, a company specialised in repairing electronic devices. After Sony shut down their repairing service in 2014, A-FUN received an increasing number of requests for help. Norimatsu, who claims to have fixed more than 2000 robotic dogs so far, came with the idea of holding funerals in 2015, when many owners of unrepairable AIBOs donated their ‘bodies’ to the company. When confronted with the feeling of unease at the idea of disassembling the pets, Norimatsu felt the need to organise funerals in order to permit the owners to properly say goodbye to them before the process. More than 500 AIBOs have received an official funeral so far and the demand seems to be increasing (Narumi 2017; Maiko 2019)
I think that in order to properly address questions of agency and non-humans’ personhood from a specific contextualised point of view, we first need to understand some of the technical-structural peculiarities of Sony’s robotic pets.
Sony started producing AIBOs, which stands for Artificial Intelligence Robots, in 1999 and discontinued them in 2006 due to financial problems. The robots are programmed with adaptive learning and growth capabilities, which means that they develop different “personalities” through interaction with humans. They are also programmed to display emotions and instinctual needs, thus offering a huge variety of interactive experiences. Every external stimulus will, in fact, provoke different response behaviours based on the AIBO’s individual personality. Despite it being a very fascinating piece of technology, due to its high price it became a niche product, and Sony only sold 150.000 copies in 7 years. Nonetheless, in 2018 Sony produced a new model based on a completely different structure and with new functions, such as an Internet connection. This particular feature allows transferring the memory of the pet into a new body without requiring complicated repairs. The new model, however, is not compatible with the older ones (Maiko 2019, Kubo 2010:106).
From objects to companions
Journalists who covered the funerals focused on three main voices: the already mentioned Bungen Oi, Nobuyuki Norimatsu and some owners who could provide first-hand accounts of their relationships with AIBOs. The implicit questions that seem to emerge from many newspaper articles are: how can a robot be offered religious rituals? If they can receive a funeral does this mean they are alive? Does this not contrast with Buddhist ethics?
As the priest who officiates the ceremonies, Bungen Oi represents the religious point of view. He argues that all things have a bit of soul (Burch 2018) and that by performing the funerals he managed to gain a fuller understanding of the idea that all things—including inanimate objects—have the Buddha nature and can thus attain nirvana. He then goes on saying that even though AIBO is a machine and doesn’t have feelings, it acts as a mirror for human emotions and that living creatures and inanimate objects are all connected, and what links them together is human sensitivity. The affection owners feel for the AIBO robot is a reflection of that sensitivity (Narumi 2017).
Oi does not see any contrast between Buddhist doctrines and the inclusion of artificial things in funerary rites because the Buddha nature is present in everything. While this point may be somewhat self-explanatory, I think that the second part of his declarations deserves particular attention since it becomes particularly meaningful when put in relationship to Nobuyuki Norimatsu’s words.
Norimatsu answers interviews saying that every AIBO has a heart that grew through interactions with its owner, thus making funerals a way for their souls to be returned to their owners (Narumi 2017). Due to the nature of the interviews, such declarations are, unfortunately, short. However, I think they hint at something that is anthropologically relevant. Both Norimatsu and Oi seem to point at the relational nature of AIBOs’ souls. AIBOs are not said to have a soul in the sense of possessing inner dispositions such as self-awareness, volition or the ability to experience emotions; in fact, there is not reference to similar attributes in their words. Instead, what Oi suggests is that by interacting with AIBOs humans are able to attach specific feelings to their companions that are then reflected back by the AIBO’s presence itself. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Norimatsu talks about the ceremonies as a way to “return the souls to the owner”. In this interpretation, the AIBO’s soul is intrinsically linked with his owner’s feelings. ‘Human sensitivity’, as Oi calls it, can connect humans with inanimate objects through active engagement. Such an engagement bestows on objects a soul, which reflects the feelings and attachments of humans. After the death of the robot, its soul can be brought back to its original source through the funerary ritual, liberating its body from the emotional attachment of his owner, and thus making its disassembly possible. Hidenori Ukai, a priest and freelance journalist, comments on the website of the NHK that Japanese people have long believed that all things that relate to humans have souls (Maiko 2019). In his declarations too only the objects who relate to humans are said to have a soul.
Various websites and newspapers covered also owners’ testimonies such as Yukoo Matsura’s, who bought her first AIBO around 15 years ago and now owns more than 10. When she talks about her robotic dogs, she mentions how each one of them has a different personality and how the absence of any practical use makes them cute (Maiko 2019). This affirmation is echoed by Norimatsu when he refers to the fact that people get emotionally attached to AIBOs because they show autonomous personality and are not designed to behave passively as servants. In fact, notions of uselessness and autonomy were consciously and explicitly at the base of Sony’s project. Engineers were asked to produce something that did not have any use, yet could be engaging and attractive.
ACTOR-NETWORK-PRACTICE
Various scholars have tried to situate the mixtures of religious frameworks and contemporary technologies in ongoing anthropological debates. For instance, actor network theory and science and technology studies have been commonly referred to as two possible intellectual orientations to approach such realities. Actor network theory is a theoretical and methodological approach developed by Bruno Latour and other scholars originally involved with the study of scientific laboratories. The core assumption of ANT is that social contexts are networks composed of various entities that interact on the same level. In practice, rather than applying external social categories to target phenomena, the observer has to describe the various strands of agency that constitute a specific network. These include not only human actions or ideas but also objects, institutions, non-human beings and everything that is present in a particular context. In the case of AIBOs’ funerals, ATN would prompt us to focus our attention on how humans interact with machines, how machines answer back, what ideas were at the base of AIBO’s design, Buddhist scriptures, the actual shape and materials of the robot and so on. All these elements contribute to the creation of a network that maintains the existence of a specific social phenomenon (Candea 2018: 209). This approach can be particularly useful when dealing with non-human realities such as human-animal or human-object relations because it does not equate agency with intentionality, the kind of processes that a self-conscious mind could engage with, but allows for the description of various types of influences on the world (Candea 2018: p. 214).
Jensen and Block, in fact, refer to ANT to show how links between advanced technological development and non-modern frameworks such as Shinto religious practices and beliefs can be intermixed in contemporary contexts and challenge our common-sense conceptual divisions between science, religion, the secular, modernity and non-modernity (2013: 88). Kubo Akinori instead focuses his analysis on how owners of AIBOs create networks through physical and sensorial engagement with their pets. He argues that one should not search the key to understand ideas about AIBOs being alive in cultural backgrounds, enquiring in Shinto, Buddhist or “traditional” (whatever we wish to define as such) Japanese matters, but should rather approach them as emerging from practices of participation. Thus, human-robot connections are not a matter of past beliefs or mental representations that are transposed to the present, but rather the results of sensorial and material engagement with non-human companions (Kubo 2010: 115).
I think that both Kubo and Jensen and Block have valid points. Paying attention to sensorial and affective qualities of robotic technologies while we engage with them, may reveal new aspects of “life” that evade previous categorisation and assumptions, but it is also important to understand how such new experiences are integrated or contrasted with pre-existent frameworks of practices and ideas such as, in this case, Buddhist funerals or Shinto cosmology, even when there is not an explicit mention of them. Oi explains that it is the idea of the interconnection of reality and the Buddha nature that makes it possible for him to celebrate the funerals, and at the same time it is by officiating the rites for the AIBOs that he gains a deeper understanding of such ideas. Relationships between practice and cultural frameworks are not uniliteral; one does not ‘cause’ the other to be effective, but they rather influence each other in a feedback loop.
Life in-between
However, I argue that the most striking aspect of human-robot relations is how they challenge assumptions about life itself. Kubo for instance refers to the ambiguity that many owners experience when interacting with their robotic companions. Indeed, one of the most common comments about AIBOs is that they do not feel like living entities but at the same time they do not feel “only” like machines (Kubo 2010: 94). Such impressions, together with Norimatsu and Oi’s declarations, show the liminality of artificial intelligence. The problem that emerges with artificial life is that neither the category of animate nor that of inanimate seems adequate enough to describe it. Robots, but also spirits and biological viruses, often present themselves with such ambiguity.
In the end, these ambiguities, of which ethnographies show us abundant examples, have been propelling the last years of anthropological theory into new directions. Paradigms such as ATN, Ingold’s ecology of culture, the revival of biosemiotics, relational epistemologies etc. have all emerged to provide new tools for approaching such phenomena. Anthropologists should not be tied to strict philosophical or scientific conceptions about what is alive and what is not, trying to dissolve ambiguity in one direction or the other. Instead, by following Willerslev (2018) they should be open to liminality as a transformative force, as a productive “messiness” that challenges the very boundaries we take for granted.
Imitated life
The question of what constitutes a living being is thus bound to re-emerge in contemporary public discourse. The way our lives have been disrupted on a global scale by the propagation of the COVID-19 virus and the development of increasingly complex artificial intelligences are some of the most recent phenomena that have pushed humanity to confront itself with this problem not only from a philosophical point of view but also from a more everyday, pragmatic and existential perspective. While biologists, immunologists and computer scientists may have all kind of different academic debates on the subject based on different ideas about what constitutes thought, intelligence or “being alive proper”, anthropologists and psychologists willing to explore the phenomenology of how perceptions and ideas of aliveness emerge in daily interactions with our surroundings have now a new array of enigmatic social situations to explore.
What should be kept in mind in this particular case concerning the AIBOs is that the robotic companions were based on already-existent living organisms, namely dogs, and were meant to imitate them in shape and behaviour. As we have seen, a crucial feature of this attempted imitation is their apparent unpredictability, which is what made it possible for many to see in them something that transcended their mere objectuality. The necessity of variable degrees of (partial) unpredictability in the simulation of a living system is something well known for instance to video game designers. It is one of the elements that makes a lot of virtual worlds so entertaining and fascinating. However, when it comes to real animals and other living beings, this feature – the unpredictability inherent in being alive – is so obvious that it is generally implicit. Instead, when we witness something that we know is not a living entity but that behaves as such in a sufficiently convincing manner, we are taken aback. The clash between our rational knowledge and our affective experience surprises us and brings to the foreground of our mind this perception of unpredictability in the same way optical illusions makes us conscious of the ways our visual perception works. I argue that the strangeness of the Turing-like experiences we can have with these robotic and virtual simulations of life lies here: rather than being something completely new and previously unseen, they bounce back at us and disclose some of the elements that already structure our “common” perception of life. Unpredictability is only one of these elements, and many others can emerge, from eerie sensorial impressions to complex emotional experiences.
As Norimatsu and Oi suggest, the experience of enigmatic mirroring may indeed help us explore the complexities/complex nuances of what we mean by saying that something is alive.
Bibliography
Maiko, E. (2019) A funeral for dead robot dogs. Available at:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/346/
Burch, J. (2018) Beloved robot dogs honored with funeral. Available at:
Narumi, S. (2017) Remembering Aibo. Available at:
https://www.nippon.com/en/views/b00909/remembering-aibo.html
Candei, M. (2018) Schools and styles of anthropological theory. London: Routledge.
Jensen, C. B., & Blok, A. (2013). Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-human Agencies. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(2), 84–115.
Kubo Akinori (2010). Technology as Mediation: On the Process of Engineering and Living with the “AIBO” Robot. In Japanese review of cultural anthropology
Willerslev, R., & Suhr, C. (2018). Is there a Place for Faith in Anthropology? Religion, Reason and the Ethnographer’s Divine Revelation. HAU, 8(1-2), 65-78.
