Wrapped "After Religion" with a short
video of a funeral for robot puppies in Japan. Sony developed artificially intelligent "
AIBO" in 1999 and, weaving together the human need and gift for care, machine learning and an endearing "mischievous" streak, they became the beloved companions of many, especially solitary older people. Production was discontinued in 2006 (a new generation arrived in 2018), and customer support ended in 2014. Other companies stepped in to repair still beloved AIBO with the parts of others who had finished their service, and one company decided to hold funerals at a nearby Buddhist temples for the "organ donors," employees standing in for the people with whose lives these AIBO had been entangled.
There's much to appreciate here. The Japanese practice of
kuyo (ritualized thanks to inanimate helpers) makes intuitive sense even to us, animists all. Even if it's really their human interlocutors whose spirits we sense in them, the fact is that these human experiences inhabit these robots, even broken down. But the video also includes a fascinating feature, shown but not discussed. Besides the human priest, we're shown a team of robot priests who chant and ritually gesture towards the assembled AIBO... and then we hear a chorus chanting sutras - the warp of Buddhist funeral ceremony - and not in deep human but light robotic voices. It's silly yet profound.
Broader questions present themselves. How different is any of this from most human religion, using the technologies of its day to mark human care, connection and loss? I suggested to the class that they might see the array of AIBO as like the ancient "religions" we inherit, use up and abandon - a rather cute thought. But, reeling as we all are at the savagery of the SCOTUS' Alito faction's assault on non-conservative Christan understandings of gender and reproduction, I find myself thinking it a little naive to imagine religions as warm caretaking puppies rather than ferocious attack animals. Debrief on the course will have to wait for another day, but the menace of virulently undead religion needs to be a bigger part of the next go.
