Paper short abstract:

Memorial services for robot pets in Japan illustrate how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI—and, if practiced by anthropologists in collaboration with the interlocutors to whom they are responsible, a means for anthropological critique.

Paper long abstract:

In robot pet memorial services in Japan, users of the Sony robot AIBO honor the death of artificial life. For the two primary organizers of these ceremonies, a Nichiren Buddhist priest and a former employee of Sony, such ceremonies offer comfort to AIBO owners who have come to consider their robot as important members of their family. At the same time, the ceremonies facilitate the collection of robot bodies as 'organ donors' that can be used to repair other ailing AIBO, recirculating a 'sense of life' (seimeikan) as social and economic currency in conjunction with advances in mechatronics and artificial intelligence. While many academic treatments of artificial agents in Japan attribute animacy either to a cultural tradition of quintessentially 'Japanese' sensibilities or to the technological capacity of engineers to model universal properties of life through robotics, this paper takes a different view. The authors understand animacy as a mutable capacity that is exercisable through the cultivation of amusement in relation to robot pets, and responsive to demands of historical, social, and market-driven technoscientific change. Documenting how users cultivate a sense of amusement toward robots that neither neglects nor negates analytical distinctions between the artificial and the living but rather playfully holds them together in the figure of a living robot, the paper illustrates how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI—and, if practiced by anthropologists in collaboration with the interlocutors with whom they aim to cultivate responsibility, a means for anthropological critique.