Robot Pets for Humanity
- We’re shoehorning AI into a decades-old precedent of digital lifestyle
- AI is far better suited to our millennia precedent of interacting with people and animals
- Family Pet is a better starting place for a “personal assistant” AI than any app
The current walls of AI innovation are dominated by capitalistic, tech-first acceleration and Black Mirror dooming. So here is a human-first, rose-colored future that is entirely achievable in the near-term, even if technology ceases to advance.
Spot is the family dog. He’s a robot, sure, but he’s got enough cute visual cues to bring out the best in his family and the neighbors. Alice and Bob adopted him a year ago, and they’ve been gradually sharing their family’s Personal Knowledge Base (PKB), and letting Spot add to it. He reminds them when to get exercise and when there’s an email that needs their attention, but he’s also around for pointless, inefficient tasks, like greeting Alice at the door and nudging Bob for scratches. He can field requests to look up nearby restaurants, but he’s also there to listen to his “parents” vent about work, or to goofily tell him what a good boy he is.
He has a thousand robotic ways to be helpful and efficient - investigate noises in the night, take candid photos, fetch a roll of paper towels - but his real superpower is countering the Era of Isolated Screen Efficiency. Alice might decide to ask Spot aloud for updates about the grandparents, or Bob might request NFL injury reports, and the conversation enters the social sphere, a la Alexa. In public, Spot sparks conversation, signals security, invites play. He might bring a tennis ball to a bored kid, or accompany Alice on her evening jogs. Some of the neighbors are starting to get their own pets, giving the neighborhood a physical security network and more “players” for the kids’ spontaneous soccer games.
Over time, Spot grows in knowledge and trust. He is an agentic knowledge base in a body, which opens up some very interesting opportunities. Alice and Bob adopt “Spike”, another robot dog, who immediately learns from Spot. They can put their knowledge base in a shopping drone, or their cars, or pet cats. In good weather, Alice rides to work on Spike’s back, before he returns home to do chores and participate in neighborhood Robot Timeshare Tasks like gardening and finding lost pets.
It’s so incredibly easy to turn every imagined opportunity into a horror story. Software can go bad, AI can go rogue, robots can be far worse than a misaligned pitbull. But we need a light and the end of this smartphone social-media tunnel, and I can see it. I’ll gladly trade my phone for a family robot wolf.