Lumen Spring Summer 2023 - Flipbook - Page 36
Are robot dogs fetching?
By Susan Hazel
I know my dogs love me even without using
artificial intelligence (AI).
But in the future AI will affect our pets and
our relationships with them. How much
remains to be seen, but we have evidence
already of some of these changes.
Although people love their dogs, raising
puppies can be extremely stressful. Ana
Costa is doing her PhD on the experience
of people raising a puppy. She has adapted
a measure of parental stress and recruited
people from Reddit groups.
Some people are so stressed they consider
returning or re-homing their puppy. One
participant wrote about “overwhelming
failures, constant setbacks, fearing I’ll ‘ruin’
or ‘damage’ the puppy..”. If raising real
puppies can be so stressful, is there an
easier way?
The robot dog AIBO was designed by Sony
in the late 1990s as an example of what
could be done with a robot. It was never
Sony’s original robot dog, AIBO
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
meant to replace real dogs. Yet people grew
real attachments to what in practice was a
simplified version of a dog.
When Sony decided it was not commercial
to keep producing robotic dogs, they
gradually wore down and could only be
maintained by cannibalising the parts of
other AIBOs, until none were left. People
genuinely mourned them when they ‘died’.
“What if we could
program robots to
help our pets live a
happier life?”
But robots are not sentient. Does that mean
we should have less empathy towards them
compared to a real dog or cat? And if we
had less empathy, would we then have less
empathy towards a real dog or cat in the
future?
We also need to consider other negative
outcomes. Judith Donath, a Fellow at
Harvard University, says in her recent work
The Robot Dog Fetches for Whom?, that the
problem with a robotic dog is that we would
need to know who controlled it. Robots
could be clever marketing tools to get us to
consume more, or track our emotions and
consumer patterns to better understand
how to advertise new products. Do we really
want that?
AI will certainly have other positive impacts
on pets. Machine learning can be used
to better diagnose diseases in our pets. A
recent editorial in the Veterinary Record in
the UK suggested AI would not replace
veterinarians, but if you decided not to use
AI your clients would likely find another vet
and you would be left behind.
Technology is used to track our dogs
already. Collar tags tell us how active they
are and when they sleep, and in future new
algorithms could interpret all this data.
