AIBO Robot Mortuary Rites in the Japanese Cultural Context

Abstract

In 1999 Sony released the AlBO Entertainment Robot, selling more than 150,000 units worldwide until 2006. By 2014, Sony had stopped offering upgrades and maintenance for the product, and owners were faced with the fact their pet-like robots would “die”. Some shrines and temples in Japan hold ningyo kuyō or mass funerals for dolls and other toys. At the suggestion of a small Japanese tech-repair company called A-Fun, one temple began offering a Buddhist funeral ceremony for AIBOs. Approximately 700 AIBOs have so far received a funeral service. This paper surveys A-Fun‘s maintenance services for old AIBOs, the AIBO funerals, and Sony's new 2018 AIBO release, in the cross-disciplinary context of human-machine relations in Japan and elsewhere. Drawing on the author's interviews with key actors, it articulates links between philosophy and neuroscience to explain tendencies toward zoomorphism in robot design. Perceiving presence (sonzai kan) and sensibility (kansei) in objects is a culturally contingent phenomenon. Whereas ways of conceiving the partly animate are largely absent from Western philosophy, in the case of AIBO ownership in Japan there is a reverential mindfulness of the technology's inherent contradictions.