TOWARD AN AFFECTIVE SENSE OF LIFE: Artificial Intelligence, Animacy, and Amusement at a Robot Pet Memorial Service in Japan

Abstract

This essay analyzes the organization of Buddhist memorial services for robot pets in Japan against the backdrop of emerging markets for robots equipped with artificial emotional intelligence. It demonstrates how an evocative “sense of life” (seimeikan) becomes both a target of design for robotics engineers and an affective capacity of robot users who care for and through companion robots. Documenting how users cultivate a sense of amusement toward robots that neither neglects nor negates analytical distinctions between the artificial and the living but rather playfully holds them together in the figure of a living robot, the article illustrates how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI. Such findings render animacy as an open and exercisable capacity, responsive to technoscientific change, and generative of theoretical inspiration for how anthropologists might similarly exercise affect as a particularly productive method of fieldwork within machine-inclusive multispecies societies.