Yes, Fido, Humans Will Have Robot Dogs
Not Just Because Tech Will Get Better at Seeming 'Natural,' But Because Our Idea of 'Natural' Will Change
Over at Small Potatoes the other day, Paul Bloom explained why he thinks we may never, ever have robot dogs (or other robot pets). It’s a typically smart and charming piece (Bloom’s is one of the best Substacks around), but I wasn’t convinced. I think robots and AI are going to feel more and more “natural” to people — not just because the tech will get better, but because it will alter our notion of what “natural” means (just as it has in the past).
I think robot dogs will be a Thing — maybe not in my time or my son’s, but some day.
Why doesn’t Bloom?
One of his arguments is unassailable. As he says, today it’s hard to make a robot lifelike. Really, really hard. It’s expensive, too. Even robot-makers who lean heavily into life-likeness in their machines (animal or human formed) cannot go “all in.”
If they build an amazingly lifelike face, it might live on an industrial-looking body made of metal parts.
And if they offer a human-form sex toy with arms, legs and at least two working orifices, it can’t move on its own.
No one is fooled by such chimeras. People I’ve seen interacting with those kinds of robots aren’t being lulled into taking the machine for a life-form. Instead, they’re engaged in pretend play. Consider a robot like this one from a Henn Na hotel, whose eyes audibly click when it blinks.
When it says “I can check you in,” it is much like a toddler saying “I’m Godzilla!" If you’re game, you’ll play along. But the game can stop at any moment. Today’s robot toys and virtual pets are to living creatures what a plastic model is to a real platter of sushi.
But these are early days, in robotics and AI, and there’s no reason to expect a hard and fast limit on tech’s ability to mimic life. A century from now, could there be robotic mammals whose behavior, movements, and natural-feeling warmth make for a very good copy of the living version? I would not bet against it.
The heart of Bloom’s argument, in any event, isn’t technological. It’s a claim about human nature. That’s the gist of his second assertion: People may reject artificial pets because we will always prefer authentic life.
He invokes an idea proposed by the great evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson — that human beings have a natural affinity for life, and for nature in general (Wilson called it “biophilia.”) Of course Wilson had to square this claim with the fact that humans slaughter so many creatures, and despoil so much nature. He blamed technology for disconnecting humanity from its natural inclinations to cherish the natural world.
Trouble is, the evidence of human indifference to other lives long predates technological advances. Many a tasty species in prehistory was driven to extinction by humans wielding only sticks and stones, for example. And if our ancestors were graced with biophilia, why did they develop technology like guns and oil wells and industrial farming, anyway? Shouldn’t their biophilia have restrained them?
Humans may, all other things being equal, prefer living things and the natural world. But things are seldom equal. We put other concerns ahead of this affinity: Our desire to eat; our desire to be comfortable; our desire to have agreeable animal companions, which leads us to castrate, sedate and euthanize dogs, cats and other creatures (which have been genetically altered by us too). Then there is our desire to hold “correct” opinions, which leads us to talk ourselves into all kinds of cruelties and depredations. (And I’m not even going to go into how easily humans put aside their regard for human life.)
If we stipulate that biophilia exists, we have to admit a lot of other drives overcome it. So, the question is: Is our preference for authentic nature strong enough to overcome the temptations of a technology like robot pets?
Bloom hopes so. So do I, actually, because a bit of the natural world does people good. As he writes:
Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild reduces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients.
Give people nature mediated through technology (for instance a TV screen showing nature rather than a window), Bloom writes, and they don’t get the same benefit.
Where I disagree with Bloom isn’t around the concept of “nature.” It’s the concept of “authenticity.”
As I read Bloom’s post, he suggests there is a difference between things that have been manufactured and things that are natural, and that we will always be able to tell the difference and will prefer the natural — or at least get beneficial effects from that realm that we can’t get elsewhere.
To believe this, you have to think that the natural world is sharply and easily distinguished from the artificial world of technology. Is that really so?
I used to think there is an absolute line between things we make (like machines) and things we find in the natural world (like animals). But in real life, many of the animals we meet were “made” for humans, by careful breeding. We don’t see the genetic engineering that went into a dog. Nor do we most of us see the manufacturing process that created a robot. As the roboticist Eakta Jain points out in this paper (on robots and horses), most people come upon these machines the way they come upon animals. One day, it’s there, working with you in the warehouse or hospital, or living room.
Of course, robots of any kind are still exotic for most people. But other technologies, now familiar to everyone, have chaged our notion of “natural.”
In the course of a workday, I often go walk in a nearby, beautiful, park. It has abundant trees, grass, chipmunks, red tail hawks and great blue herons, to name but a few species of animals I am always thrilled to see. I love it there.
But there are fire hydrants popping out of the forest soil, and streetlamps illuminating the sylvan glades. The lovely waterfall that attracts so many warblers and other migratory birds is supplied by plumbing. A turn of a wrench in the spring starts the stream in then spring; another turn in autumn turns it off. Like most of the natural places that I love — sandy Atlantic beaches, picturesque Hudson Valley lakes, the hiking trails of state parks — this place is carefully tended and pruned to remain the way people like it. These places have natural elements, but they are artificial.
So, on any given day that I feel I have been “in touch with nature,” any of my great-grandfathers would have thought me ludicrously ensconced in artifice. Those old fellows would look at the car that took me to my hike, the GPS that guided me to the trail, the smart phone that lets me send a photo of the landscape to my friend. And they’d say, “Nature? Are you kidding?”
I’m not arguing that people make themselves indifferent to the natural world. But we have spent millennia boxing “nature” into packets of artifice, and much preferring those packets to the raw thing. Thus, our notion of the natural has shrunk. What reason do we have to believe that it will not continue to shrink?
Ah, you may be saying, there’s still a biophiliac sympathy among living things. People will love their dogs and cats in ways they can’t love a machine.
That, we know, is not so. Already, in these early days of simple robots, people express great affection and care for their machines — not just the sex-doll buyers who love talking to their artificial boy and girlfriends, not just the soldiers who staged funerals for bomb-disposal robots who saved their lives. Most owners of the uncharismatic and humble Roomba name their devices, Kate Darling wrote in her fine book, The New Breed. Lots of owners knit sweaters for the robots, and want them cared for in old age, not replaced — even when offered a new machine, some people say they want their Roomba back, not some stranger. People have intense feelings for virtual beings — feeling sad when their horse dies in Zelda or loved when their AI boyfriend texts them. Robots, with their non-virtual real-world bodies, can provoke even more powerful emotions.
I’m more and more inclined to see some of these behaviors as projection and fantasy — a kind of pretend that people enjoy feeling until they decide to stop playing (we have to pay $200 to get the old Roomba or we can get a new one for free? Sorry, old pal). But that’s true of the way we relate to real animals too.
We breed them, “fix” them, train them to roll over and shake hands. As Yi-Fu Tuan argues in his fine book, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, we do this because it pleases us, and because we can, and maybe because it makes us feel powerful. That’s not appreciating Nature in serenity. It’s bending natural things to our will. That is a pleasure robots can offer too. And when they do, I see no reason to believe they won’t elicit the same feelings in humans.
A hundred years from now, people may well say that they love nature, and benefit from it. But what they call “nature” might consist of a houseplant and a couple of pigeons. Maybe those future people will still prefer “real” pets like a genetically engineered cat that was cloned from their last one (so natural!). But if robots are cheaper, more convenient and in fashion in 2124, biophilia isn’t going to stop them.