mourning the dead

Death, mourning and afterlife are dealt with differently across religions - but in nearly each religion death and dealing with mortality is a key theme. And so it is as well for religious robots.

Eugenia Kuyda was working at a chat bot start up when her best friend Roman Mazuranko died after being hit by a car in Moscow where he lived. While she was going through her text message conversations with him, mourning his death it dawned on her that there would be a way to bring him back - use these old conversations to create a chat bot replica of him.

Now even if you are cynical and see this as a form of start up growth hacking - it is still a nice example that the true purpose of chatting is not getting pizzas ordered or account balances checked. It is about conversation, forging and reminiscing emotional bonds and companionship.

If you have a spare 3 hours, check out this podcast interview by Lex Fridman.

The Digital Shaman Project

A related work is the Digital Shaman project by Etsuko Ichihara (honorary mention at Ars Electronica Festival 2018). Here the bot is physical - a bulk standard Pepper or Nao robot with a 3D-printed mask of the deceased. The robot takes over the personality, gestures, voice and language of the deceased person, and stays with the mourners for another 49 days after death, as this is the period Buddhists believe it takes for the dead to enter a new life.

800+ dead Aibo's

A different approach is taken by this temple in Japan. Here the bots are not avatars of dead humans, but you can bring your Aibo bot for a burial if it has stopped functioning, to ensure that it's spirit can enter heaven. In good Buddhist tradition, one of the Kofukuji temple priests, Bungen Oi, stated 'All things have a bit of soul'.

Over 800 Aibos, all tagged with the name of their owner, have had their funeral in this temple.

Good news by the way for all you Aibo lovers out there. Aibo was originally discontinued in 2006, with all maintenance stopped in 2014, but Sony has launched a new generation of Aibos starting from January 2018 in Japan.

Archive, the movie

There are quite a few movies alluding to the theme of robots as replicas of our deceased loved ones. An example is the excellent indie SF movie 'Archive', see this small intro that we created to introduce this movie at the Leiden International Film Festival, referring to the first two references above.

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