In Between Companion and Cyborg: The Double Diffracted Being Elsewhere of a Robodog

Abstract

Aibo, Sony’s robodog, questions the relations between nature, technology, and society and directs the attention to the difficult and changing triad between machines, humans and animals. Located at the boundaries between entertainment robot, dog, and companion Aibo evokes the question which relationship humans and Aibo can have and which ethical issues are being addressed. Promoted by Sony as a ‘best friend’, it is useful to analyze Aibo within the theoretical framework of feminist philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway, who develops alternative approaches of companionships between humans and dogs. Therefore, I am going to ask how Aibo challenges the understanding of other life forms by humans and how concepts of friendship are at stake. Ethical questions about human perceptions of dogs in the age of doglike robots must be approached. However, Aibo itself follows no predefined category. Aibo does neither live in a merely mechanistic ‘elsewhere’ nor in the ‘elsewhere’ of animals but in an intermediate space, in a doubled diffracted ‘elsewhere’.