> > Let's play thought experiment. If, instead of the toy-level robot pets we have today, we sometime down the road create a highly sophisticated robot pet that looks and acts just like a real dog, but with no messes, no health issues, no need to feed,and no possibility of running away or attacking somebody or what-have-you, would that still not be as good as a real dog? If not, why not?
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> No matter how realistic you make it, some people will still feel a difference because it is not alive. Being living things ourselves, we tend to empathize with other things that are also living, especially if they behave in a way we can attribute to personality and character. If a tractor is destroyed, someone might feel a sense of loss, especially if he or she has worked with that particular tractor for a very long time. However, the feeling generally is not crushing, and if provided with another, equally capable tractor, the owner would most likely not care one way or the other. However, if a pet dies, the owner can experience a deep sense of loss, and acquiring another pet usually cannot ever fully replace the old one. Such is the difference between what a dog means to a person, and what a robot means to a person. If your robotic dog breaks or malfunctions, you can always get another one just like it. If your dog dies, it's usually irreplaceable.
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> knivetsil

I heard somewhere, and it might have been on an X-Files episode, now that I think about it, and so maybe this is bunk, but... where was I? Oh yes. I heard somewhere that with robots, humans react more and more favorably towards them the closer to human they get in appearance and behavior, but only up to a certain point. After that point, the response is almost revulsion, even when the robot is very human-like. Perhaps the same would be true of dogs or other animals we've turned into almost-human "friends".

Of course, maybe there's a second threshold a robot could reach where he would be human-like (humanish? person-like?) enough to be loveable once again. Or maybe an artificial being could never reach that point, since humans, without realizing it, pick up on all sorts of mannerisms and personality tics that we don't consciously notice. Personally, I don't think it's possible to make a human- or dog-like enough robot; it would just be far too complex a project. But they said the same thing about all sorts of technologies that we have today, so I don't really know.

Vida