AIBO sits patiently on Frédéric Kaplan's office floor. It remains still when Kaplan leans over to switch it on, but it beeps to reassure us it's awake. Then it stirs. Raising its head, wagging its tail, and with all the poise of a Romanian gymnast finishing off a floor routine, it lifts, straightens, and stretches all four legs in unison.
Visually, AIBO is balletic. Aurally, it's arthritic. It creaks and grinds as it raises itself to its feet. But the sound is inconsequential; AIBO is charming. It pads confidently across the floor, and when Kaplan, a young researcher at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, rolls a red ball before it, AIBO tracks the movement with its head. Good, AIBO, good! It wags its tail and—attaboy, AIBO!—pushes the ball playfully with a paw.
At some level for the human observer, this robot is a dog. That's partly because AIBO—short for Artificially Intelligent roBOt—is a very clever piece of machinery, equipped with a 384 MHz computer processor that coordinates 1,000 different doggy moves, like extending its front paws and luxuriously stretching its back. But AIBO also looks like a dog because I'm human, and humans will believe pretty much anything.
We are wired to see life where it isn't, to impose intelligence where there is none, and to have a wide range of emotional responses to our misguided perceptions. From our ability to bypass disbelief comes anthropomorphism as well as art. Think of all the talking animals in Aesop's fables. Think Miss Piggy. Cognitive scientists are expert at pinpointing all the ways we can make symbolic interpretations or be completely fooled. But what about the perceptions of other animals? What do dogs think of a dogbot?
Recently scientists have been asking themselves just that. When çdám Miklósi, a Hungarian ethologist who works with dogs and tamed wolves, first came across AIBO, he was struck by the possibilities. He and graduate student Enik› Kubinyi, both at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, contacted Kaplan, and from this meeting arose a series of AIBO-dog experiments with the dual goals of using the real dogs to help them discover better ways to program the robot and using the robot to help them explore the dogs' species recognition: What makes a dog recognize another dog as a dog?
