Can You Have Your Cat and R2D2?
When multimillionaire fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld died Tuesday at the age of 85, speculation swirled over one thing.
His cat.
Choupette, Lagerfeld’s cat, is Internet famous in her own right and is likely to inherit at least some of his millions.
Choupette is a pretty cute cat. Would pet, if she’d have me.
I like cats. I have, and have had, a lot of pets over the years, from hermit crabs to golden labs. But cats are without question, my faves. Cats are curious pets, though, because you really have to work at them. They aren’t like dogs, who are usually falling all over themselves…and often peeing all over themselves as well…to love you even if you’re busy doing something else at the time. Cats don’t roll that way. Cats must be charmed and enticed. And if you happen to pick out a kitten who was totally adorable, but matures into a cat who just really isn’t that into you, you may find yourself servant to a furry tyrant who doesn’t even have the decency to sit on your lap and purr now and then.
Another thing that’s been much in the news of late is sex robots. Are they ethical? Do they dehumanize women? Will they rise up and kill us all?
None of this is very interesting to me because I am 110% certain that I will never own a sex robot, not even if they make a model that looks exactly like James Garner. But a robot cat, on the other hand – I wonder.
It isn’t hard to imagine the appeal of a cat that didn’t scratch at the furniture, didn’t require Fancy Feast, didn’t shed, didn’t need a litter box, didn’t make me sneeze, and was always up for a cuddle. I literally just tried to pet my cat this very moment and she latched onto my arm with her front paws so she could simultaneously bite my hand whilst kicking my wrist viciously with her heavily-beclawed hind legs. She just wasn’t in the mood for my tender ministrations right then, which I accept because she’s a living creature with her own agenda and regardless of how much I wuvs her, right then she was trying to have a bath. Would a robot cat be better? The answer is, probably – if only for the practical reasons – no shedding, no pooping, no sneezing. But the deeper question for me is the purring. Would the constant accessibility of a robot cat outweigh the fact that it wasn’t real?
I’m inclined to think it wouldn’t. I suspect that a robot cat might be enjoyable, but unsatisfying, like dining on marshmallow Peeps. Too easy. I’d still want the real thing. There’s something about the challenge of winning a kitty’s affection that is supremely rewarding, and if it came merely because I’d programmed an entity to like me, well, I’m not so sure that would do it for me.
An episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer centers around this concept. A guy builds himself a robot girlfriend only to realize he prefers the real thing, and then the question becomes what does a guy do with a robot he doesn’t want any more? Especially when it’s programmed to love him and only him? Hijinks ensue, and the moral of the story is that making someone like you against their will (or in absence of any will at all) is like winning by cheating. Even if you get away with it, you know in your heart it’s not the real deal.
Clever programmers would undoubtedly figure this out and would write code to ensure robot cats acted believably catty. You’d have to earn their trust and their love, probably by spending a certain number of hours spend dangling yarn for Robokitty to bat at, and serving up X-number of bowls of digital cream. With trial and error, in time this algorithm would eventually produce a robot cat that was pretty close to the real thing, only without all the hairballs. This could be a happy development for people who are unable for whatever reason to care for a real cat. Yet I remain unconvinced it would feel the same emotionally as an actual feline companion. It would definitely be better for the environment, as housecats are pretty destructive critters. But would robot cats ever fully usurp the place of real cats in people’s homes and hearts?
I think not. Humans are attracted to life experiences like cats to catnip. When presented with two nearly identical options, most humans try to find a way to have them both, and ten other things besides. So I suspect that while people will eventually embrace robot pets, they’ll do it alongside flesh-and-bone pets, not instead of. I even suspect people will prefer it if their robot pets don’t look TOO much like the real thing because we want to enjoy the “having a robot” right alongside the “having a cat” thing. We’ve already played with this idea with Furby
And Tamagotchi
And if you have $3000 to spare, Aibo
These things look nothing like actual pets, and we like it that way. If I had to make a prediction, I’d bet large sums of money that the future market for robotic pets that look nothing like actual animals will far exceed the market for animal doppelgangers. If anyone out there is investing in sexbots thinking to make a lot of money, I suggest taking a hard look at robot Pokemon instead.
https://youtu.be/RtVUgNiz3UQ
Adorable. And yet if you watch that commercial, you’ll see one of the selling points is “it acts against you”! Robot Pikachu gets angry, shakes its head, and refuses your requests – and we like it! If we could make that little yellow guy administer electric shocks like a good Pikachu should, we’d love it even more. Sales of rubber gloves would skyrocket.
We WANT our pets, even our robotic ones, to have a rebellious streak.
It may be at some point in the future, that programmers will get the robot cat entirely figured out. They’ll give us a cat that looks like Choupette and acts like Choupette, only without the downsides that come with Choupette. Your forearms will stay entirely unscarred, your sweaters unsnagged, your floors hairball-free. No one will sneeze and your couch will retain its youthful beauty.
And I would bet that these kittens will be insanely popular. But they’ll never take the place of the real thing.
Because humans, just like Pokemon trainers, gotta catch ’em all.
Photo by rok1966 
Photo by peyri
I have a Furby, one of the original 1998 models. It’s still alive (I had it in a box for 15+ years, found it when cleaning up, popped some batteries in, and was amazed to find it still worked. (I also have one of those little Fingerlings unicorns that I bought for myself – yes, dangit, I am 50 years old this year – on a day when I was feeling kind of sad).
(Heh. And yes, I did refer to Furby as “alive.” I also have far more stuffed toy animals that is proper for a six year old, let alone a fifty year old. I also have strong croton-petting tendencies, where I can feel emotion for inanimate objects. I have cried when I dropped and broke a coffee mug….)
They are fun. They are not the same as a real pet and I admit there are long stretches of time that I don’t interact with either. That would not be the case with a real pet – you have to take care of it, it won’t let you forget to feed it, for example.
I don’t have a pet, despite liking cats (and some dogs*) because I have allergies, and I’m also not home enough – a dog would be especially hard with the walking thing, when I have a 7 am to 6 pm day, that’s awfully long to expect a dog to ‘hold it” and I don’t exactly live somewhere where dog walking services are common.
That said: I would love to have a more realistic robot cat or dog. Especially if the cat would purr or if they threw off a little body heat to simulate the warmth of a living thing. I’ve read that these are being developed especially for people in nursing homes, where having individual real pets doesn’t work so well (when it’s hard for you to take care of yourself, taking care of a pet can be hard).
I tend to be a lonely person; one thing I have said on many occasions is that I wished I had something that at least seemed to be happy to see me when I came home. But because “real” pets are off the table for me at the moment, a realistic robot might be better. If I take better care of it than I do my Furby…
(*I had some bad experiences with poorly-trained dogs as a kid and am apprehensive about dogs I don’t know. Friends’ dogs who are well trained and friendly I am fine with, but an unknown dog barking at me from its yard causes a strong fear response)Report
The idea of robot pets is a really important part of “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” The whole idea of that story is empathy–or, rather, how humans might invent simulations of it when they are so disaffected and disconnected from each other that they can’t get the real thing. Pets help, but ecological devastation has killed most of the animals on earth, so everyone uses robot pets.
The bit that made me have to stop reading was the part with the vet. I’m actually having some trouble typing this because it affected me so strongly. See, people find that the more realistic the robot pet is, the better it provides the emotional connection they need. So the robot pets are programmed to “get sick”, and you have to call the “vet” to come help them. In reality the “vet” is just an actor who pokes the robot pet with a stethoscope and gives it a pretend injection, and then the program lets it “get better”. I’m actually kind of crying right now, thinking about my cats. So one guy gets a call from a woman, saying that her husband’s cat is sick and can a vet come help it. He gets there and it turns out it’s an actual real cat, not a robot, and he’s got no idea what to do. He doesn’t even know where a for-real animal vet is, because real animals are so incredibly expensive that he’s never even seen one, let alone had to do anything for one. But he can’t figure out how to tell the person this because he (like everyone else in this story’s world) has basically no ability to have a conversation with another human, so he just takes the cat and drives around with it in his car for a couple hours while it dies. I didn’t keep reading after that, maybe it’s a sci-fi classic but whatever, that’s too sad for me to want to continue.Report
If it looks like the real thing, tastes like the real thing, and quacks like the real thing, you could easily see why calling it a duck isn’t *THAT* silly (even if it is a mistake).
I remember an old Michael Kinsley column at Slate that talked about Martha Stewart (emphasis added):
I imagine that robot pets and sexbots and whathaveyou provide a simulacrum of the real thing for about half of the effort. Hell, maybe even less effort than that.Report
I’m a dog guy so cats are meh to me. Dogs will love you unconditionally. Who among us doesn’t love a big ol English sheepdog with bangs over its eyes?Report
The sex robot and the pet robot serve a similar function. Both allow people to experience simulations of relationships that many people seem to be struggling to achieve with real life people or real live animals. Based on internet readings, there seem to be numerous people that want romantic and/or sexual connections but can’t form them for a variety of reasons, which could be anything from a very hectic life to the fact that they are disturbing creeps that really shouldn’t be in a romantic/sexual relationship. Likewise, many people yearn for the companionship that pets provide but either do not have time to take care of a real pet or can’t be bothered with the hassle.
There are legitimate and illegitimate reasons for resorting to robots for pet companionship and romantic/sexual companionship. The people who want to ban sex robots or robotic pets focus on the illegitimate reasons, the creeps that use sex robots because no woman will date them let alone sleep with them in real life for very valid reasons or the people that can’t stand the hassle of a real actual pet and might even want to abuse an animal vicariously. People with legitimate needs for sex robot or robotic pet are just seen as acceptable collateral damage. Yeah, it sucks to be them but they need to deal with their pain alone for the greater good of humanity. Others see sex robots or robotic pets as a way to take away some of the pain that seems to inflict many. If some bad people take advantage of this, so what? We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.Report
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Not if its a Chairee 2000.
They have a really nice chassis. 😉Report
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