Plastic Comparison: The Case of Engineering and Living with Pet-Type Robots in Japan

Abstract

This article analyzes the development and reception processes for the pet-type robots known as AIBO in order to explore the multiple ways in which technoscientific practices make realities of the world. I investigate how practices of comparison work in the emergence of a new technological artifact. Specifically, this article focuses on a singular form of comparison, plastic comparison: comparison both shaping things and shaped by things. AIBO had been designed and understood by comparing the device with various existing entities: a technologically sophisticated machine, a pet animal, a computer game, and a family member. I analyze the way these comparisons gave this robot multiple shapes when it was developed in the laboratory, made it famous through media attention, and then created acceptance by its owners. I show that focusing on plastic comparisons is a useful way of exploring the multiplicity of technological practices that overcomes the limits of existing approaches in STS, such as the social construction of technology and actor-network theory.

Keywords:

• comparison
• robot
• Japan
• actor-network theory
• social construction of technology
• multiplicity

Notes

1 The introduction of the term plastic in this article is inspired by a work of Catherine Malabou (1996). She begins her discussion by pointing out the duality of the usual meaning of this term (plasticité in French, plaztizität in German), giving shape and receiving (different) shape, and extends it into a significant concept by focusing on the way that the term is used in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in order to pose a drastically new way of understanding Hegelian philosophy. The way the term plastic is utilized in this article depends only on the significant duality of its usual meaning vividly pointed out by Malabou and basically has no ties with her extended philosophical discussion.

2 Quoted from an interview with Fujita at the website Ginza-no-gakkou (http://www.dnp.co.jp/jis/g_gakko/talk/40/40_talk.html, accessed 21 April 2005).

3 The three original laws of robotics deployed in Isaac Asimov's novels are (1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law; and (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

4 Although the motif for the exterior appearance of AIBO had changed from that of “space dog,” as it was in the first-generation AIBO (models ERS110, 111), to that of a “lion cub” in the second (ERS210) and kuma-inu (“bear-dog”) in the third (ERS310, 311), its system of actions, which include functions such as giving its paw, had mainly been based on ways of communicating between pet dogs and their owners.

5 For example, an owner said in a self-published AIBO magazine, “At first, I had worried about even a little scuff. But, now each scuff is my abiding memory. When I see scuffs on my AIBO Safire's fanny or leg, I recall vividly when and where it was injured, even now” (Kuraki 2000). Engineers intended to express the growth of AIBO by means of software, in which the tendencies of the affect model would change over time. However, in addition to the variation of behavior controlled by software, scuffs or breakdowns also came to evoke abiding memories with AIBO for owners, who see them as the marks of trials and tribulations that bear witness to their AIBO's growth and the history of their interactions with them, for the scuffs and breakdowns had gradually implicated owners' bodily movements in caring for AIBO.