The Genes of AI #03 — Teddy Ruxpin’s Lament
July 21st, 2023
Oh no, my AIBO.
Impressions:
You know, if I had to choose which was the more interesting story to focus on between a Teddy Ruxpin with dementia and a serial killer sleeping with her service robots before burying them in shallow graves outside of town, I'm pretty sure we're going with the latter. But I guess that's going to be an overarching story, or I don't know, maybe it's going to be dropped and barely brought up again like they did his mom in jail, because once the OP kicked in, it was all Teddy Ruxpin, all the way. And it doesn't help that the parents just go "We've tried screaming at him that it's just a doll. But nothing's working!"
Does this stupid thing have any actual sentience or not? That seems like the core question here, not whether or not it has some weird built in recordings relating to somebody else that's causing it to act seemingly weirdly. If it does, then it's pretty goddamned messed up to be selling and owning them. And have you people not encountered furbies before? An aibo? Loaded up an old save file from a game that touted its learning system and been baffled as to why your Black and White giant ape refuses to poop on anything but sheep? You could train a rudimentary chatbot to act like the teddy bear here in an afternoon. This feels like it was written twenty years ago, not in the time of ChatGPT. The premise here is too broken to even entertain… actually, what even was the philosophical question here? Do robot bears get alzheimers?
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“a serial killer sleeping with her service robots before burying them in shallow graves outside of town”
That was a dream scene representing her decision to break up with her robot, leading to a memory reset, implicitly effectively killing him.
“And have you people not encountered furbies before? An aibo?”
I think that’s the point. If we don’t distinguish between humans and humanoids by whether they’re organic or robotic but the complexity at which they can express themselves, how do we distinguish between machines? If a humanoid counts as a human being with its own rights, what if we reduce the complexity of the programing and end up with a highly complex service robot like the boyfriend? Is that still a human being? What if we go really primitive with a feel-good teddy bear. I believe it’s a question of “where do we draw the line and is it fair to draw one in the first place?” What’s interesting here is that the episode never specifically stated but implicitly revealed that the girlfriend wasn’t human but humanoid. So she’s closer to the service robot yet effectively decides to kill him while living with a human being instead.
Mind you, I don’t think this show is particularly smart or anything, it feels like it always falls short of thinking its interesting questions entirely through but at least it does offer some thoughts contrary to stuff like Vivy.
With that said, the Pluto anime can’t come soon enough.