I took home my first robot on Saturday, in order to conduct a small experiment: I wanted to introduce it to my two-year-old son and see what I could learn from their interaction. If you're a science-fiction fan, you'll appreciate this had a feeling of occasion about it. You never forget your son's first robot.
I remember when Sony's robot dog, the Aibo, was launched six years ago: it cost thousands of dollars and was clearly a prototype that would only be available as a plaything for the very rich. It was very exciting for geeks, and then we all forgot about it.
Aibo is now a chum with a pedigree. It has reached its sixth-generation, it's got more sophisticated and is much cheaper. You can buy the latest model, an Aibo ERS-7 with Aibo Mind 3 software for a mere £1,500. That's a lot of money, but in a world in which people pay £1,500 for a television, no longer the realm of millionaires. And the second-hand ones on eBay are significantly cheaper.
He looks like a dog designed by a car manufacturer: all sleek curves, shining metal and gleaming plastic. The only soft elements are his floppy rubber ears and tail, which have a rather eerie rubber fetish quality.
Aibo is still for PC geeks. He's become Wi-Fi enabled, with a built-in camera, and you can get him to read out RSS feeds with a new text-to-speech application. To get the most out of him you'll want to install some software on your PC, and as we struggled to get this to work, I suspect some of these features will be a challenge for civilians.
Aibo comes with a docking station where he can recharge his battery, some cards he can read with his camera and that give him instructions, a toy ball and a plastic bone. When he's in autonomous mode he'll play during the day, and then walk back to his docking station at night to sleep and recharge. You can set him to grow up, like a Tamagotchi puppy, and watch him develop, or just turn him on as a fully featured adult dog.
I explained to my son that I had a dog for him to play with, and pressed the on switch. Aibo stretched and woke up, and my son jumped and took a step back, but was clearly fascinated. I showed Aibo his dance card and he reared up on his back legs and played strange Japanese elevator music. Then he wiggled from side to side and did an impressive little boogie. My son likes dancing, so he joined in, and they danced together happily for a while, but then the dancing stopped and Aibo moved his head from side to side. My son picked up Aibo's bone, a strange little white and pink plastic barbell, and began beating the dog fiercely on the nose. He wanted more dancing.
Abuse of the dog's toys became a recurring theme of the weekend. Aibo can see and move towards both his ball and his bone, and then pick them up and do some pretty impressive tricks with them. Once he's spotted a toy, his face lights up with its picture, and he walks towards it to play with it. Then he can rear up on his hind legs with his bone in his mouth, or pick up the ball with his front paws and roll it across his back. However, just before he made contact my son would steal the toy and run away, leaving the poor dog to turn his head from side to side in search of it and then trundle off in pursuit once more.
Two things became clear very quickly. As far as my son was concerned, this was a dog. He chased it, kissed it, hugged it and smacked it on the nose just as he does with my mother's small and paranoid Yorkshire terrier, which is in many ways a much less realistic or convincing dog.
It was also a decent electronic babysitter. The only thing I can compare Aibo to in terms of its ability to capture my son's attention was television. He asked for the robot dog, which was kept on a table when recharging, with the same anxious, 'waiting-for-the-man' urgency with which he requests his Pingu DVD.
Play dates with other toddlers are enjoyable for your child, but they're exhausting, and when you're done you can't take other people's children, touch them gently on the back of the neck and store them in a wardrobe, unless you have a very good lawyer. Robots, on the other hand, are convenient and easy to tidy away.
We live in a world of over-worked parents who are having children later and later in life. One day our grandchildren are going to beg us to let them play with the robot just one more time before bed, and we're going to be tired, and we're going to want to watch Jon Snow the Third read the holonews report on Ultor's union trouble on Mars, and we're going to say, "Oh alright, then -- but only for ten minutes."
Several friends came over during the weekend, some with small children, and reactions were emphatic and immediate. One child went pale and ran to his mother, clearly scared of the dog. Others smiled and ran towards it and wanted to pet it. Adult reactions were just as visceral: some smiled and said, "How much is that?" Others wrinkled their nose and said, "That robot dog freaks me out. It moves like a spider."
We have been worrying about our future relationship to our robot masters for so long that a toy like Aibo comes with an enormous amount of cultural baggage. When you hear those servo-motors whine and watch its C3P0-like shuffle as it moves across the floor, you know at once that you are in the presence of what Sony calls "a fully autonomous companion to accompany and entertain man in day-to-day life". When the robots come, they'll come for our children first, and we'll be so busy that we'll be grateful for the help. We'll welcome them with open arms.
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