 Hello and welcome. It's great to see so many of you here. My name is Fabio Gigi, I'm the Chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOAS and I'm very proud to present a double act, let's say, or you know, maybe a triple threat which in musical theatre of course is somebody who can sing, dance an act and really the lineup today, we have all, we have this sort of the academic equivalence of these skills. We have the ethnographic experience, we have the theoretical mouse and we have the institutional kudos to really make this a very exciting presentation. So I have here with me Professor Hirofumi Katsuno who is an associate professor at Doshisha University. We go back quite a long time. We were at Doshisha together in the 2010s, the very beginning. He's a professor in media studies in the Faculty of Social Studies and his primary research interest is the sociocultural impact of new media technologies. And I must also say that he is really one of the first persons who has written, who has done research about robots, who has written about the heart of the robots, still one of the sort of the field defining articles that sort of shaped the ways we think about Japanese engagement with robotics. On the other hand of the screen is Dr. Daniel White who is a senior research associate at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the affect specialist. He has published widely and also critically about affect theory and its relation to technology. Both our presenters today have published an article together recently that appeared in 2021 in cultural anthropology and was entitled Towards an Effective Sense of Life, Artificial Intelligence, Animacy and Amusement at a Robot Pet Memorial Service in Contemporary Japan. So I'm very happy to have them both here and I'll hand over to them now just a quick reminder if you have any questions please put them into the Q and A. You can also later when we have a discussion at the end you can raise your hand or you can put questions in the chat. So without further ado over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks Fabio. Thanks especially for raising expectations far beyond what is ever possible to deliver after that. Especially with the dancing and singing references of which there will be absolutely none from my side at least for the next hour and a half that is. I'll just try to share my screen and make sure that we are all doing the same thing. So presumably you are seeing a ibupet robot on your end and if so then I'll get us started here. So the material that we're going to present some of it does indeed come from that article that Fabio kindly mentioned and it will be focusing a bit on amusement today and what it can contribute to our thoughts about specifically care robots which often get more attention in the literature on robot culture in Japan. And the work that we will present is part of a broader project that Kido and I have been working on for the last four years or so and that we titled model emotion and here's the web link for that if you care to look at any of the recent publications that we try to keep up to date on that site. So this project has several parts and includes a year of field work among robot producers in Japan as well as the UK as well where we both are at the moment and where we are looking at how engineers build models of emotion to replicate the machine systems essentially whether software programs or hardware. So why we choose this phrase model emotion in short we are quite interested in how programmers and roboticists in Japan are essentially modeling emotion in machines and we think of modeling in different ways namely in theoretical technological and then in social and ethical dimensions. So this word model is a very sort of nice term for us to cover all three of these quite easily. This is an interesting framework for us because the way programmers model emotion in Japan reveals we think some very interesting aspects of how cultural differences are imagined and circulate through worlds of both robot storytelling and robot scientific practice. So for example sometimes emotion modelers in Japan people taking models of emotion from psychology and trying to put them into machine platforms for example in robots that can presumably read or sense emotion or perform emotion. Sometimes in that process roboticists in Japan will simply borrow a human emotional theory from western psychology and apply it directly to building emotional AI in a robot. An example that I've often used before that you may have seen yourself is the robot Parudo by Fujisoft who has a very clear capacity to read facial expressions which is based off of the famous American psychologist Paul Ekman's psychological theory of emotions which gets called to the basic theory of emotions or basic emotions theory where Ekman presumed that emotions are essentially universal across cultures they're rooted in our evolutionary history and we can observe them more or less in kind of these six though sometimes it's more sometimes it's less basic emotions which are observable in facial expressions. Of course in conjunction with this Ekman developed the famous facial action coding system in order to understand his own or say codify his own videos that he was taking of facial expressions back in the 60s and the 70s and of course building a system like this is very attractive for engineers who already have at their hands now an easy system for implementing a psychological theory into a machine theory of emotion. So it's easy to see why Ekman's theory would be popular for roboticists around the world Japan included. So this is one way that emotion models so to speak get built into robots. On the other hand sometimes such theories of modeling emotion or modeling human emotion let's say are seen by Japan robots this is quite limited and in these cases designers rather choose to emphasize how emotion or what we might better call affect as it's pointing to sort of feelings in the body that haven't perhaps quite taken a linguistic term or conscious recognition how that's constructed interactively between human robot and the environment in unpredictable ways. So in these cases cases such as in the robot love it or love auto designers take a rather exploratory approach rather than modeling human emotions or desires in a robot based off a specific psychological model of emotion from humans they are rather experimenting and testing which robot capacities cultivate feelings of affection and of course this is in a very moving and fluid environment of human robot interaction in Japan. So in this sense we might talk less about human emotion or robot emotion and more about the mutual production of human robot intimacy which is really an unknown and evolving emotional experience. So today we want to focus on the sphere of kind of as yet undetermined emotional experience and intimacy that takes place not in a human or in a human's imagination of a robot but in this kind of fully interactive setting with a lot of exchange going back and forth between an environment between people between objects and so on. So let me give some context for what we'll present today in a little bit more detail and try to outline a basic argument that will perhaps help everyone follow along and formulate some questions. So today there is a large focus in Japan robotics robotics research on care I think it's fair to say this is obviously very sensible and understandable for all the kind of canonical reasons which are often cited in Japan studies research about demographic challenges and changes in Japan the increasing number of elderly, decreasing number of children, how those aspects challenge the national pension system, the difficulty of securing care labors, these are all kind of canonical social problems or shakkaimondai that really get crystallized or typified in Japan studies research. So these problems are well defined by researchers and justify some of the really quite amazing research that is being done on robots and robotics in care sectors in Japan such as Jennifer Robertson by James Wright by now Nori Kodate and David Thundergast who presented their wonderful film on care robots here in this venue a few weeks ago and by people like Ann Aronson who I believe if I'm not mistaken will present here as well in a few weeks. So we love this research and are highly indebted to it and additionally we also think that to the degree that care robots take center stage in Japan in Japan robots research it can also sometimes obscure an important point about human robot relations in Japan and how those feed into society and a point emphasized by many roboticists in Japan themselves which is that they are in it for the fun of it. Thus taking a kind of anthropological perspective on this point we want to ask what role fun is playing in mediating what social institutions and funders in Japan think robots are good for and should be made for on one hand and then what roboticists are really practically aiming to do in their scientific practice on the other hand. So to illustrate this we will draw on two aspects of our research that we've done over the last few years among among others. First Ivo Robot Memorial Service is a kind of return to this quite popular topic in Japan and then second a recent history of digital pets that we call haptic creatures and that's what I'm going to hand it over to Juhiro. So our streamlined and somewhat vulgarly formulated argument for today is that fun is an important category to think through because it allows us to see how both serious practical concerns about robotics most identified with the care sector and then personally or existentially playful robot practices which are often more identified with the entertainment robotics sector actually mutually define work together to define how robots should participate in um tomorrow kodate and pender gas wonderful phrase circuits of care. So let me jump straight into some examples of fun and amusement in human robot relations in order to examine what particular capacities fun affords care so to speak. So you will no doubt be familiar with Memorial Services for broken down Sony pet robots called Ivo. If not, I'll give you just a very brief introduction and in all of these descriptions I'm going to try to highlight how fun and robotics are intertwined in robot culture which for us helps explain why so many roboticists in Japan say they got into robotics for the fun of it in the first place. So how do these Ivo Kuyo services or memorial or funerary services get started? Importantly, these services have several historical precedents in ceremonies for inanimate objects in Japan such as sewing needles dolls or or even more recently digital devices like smartphones and computers. However, because our very esteemed host professor has written so expertly and extensively on this aspect of Japanese culture, we would be far too embarrassed to speak to that here ourselves. So if you have any super challenging questions on the history of these ceremonies, I urge you to direct them rigorously to Professor Gigi. In our case, we're going to skip ahead a little bit to the particular context for why the Buddhist priest Oibungan you see pictured here developed these particular memorial services for Ivo robots in conjunction with acquaintances formerly at Sony. So to summarize, the mechanical pets for which the priest Oibungan conducts Kuyo services, memorial services, are named Ivo, which stands for artificial artificially intelligent robot. Importantly, this acronym is also applied in the Japanese word Ivo, which is friend or companion. And Ivo was created in Sony's computer science laboratory in the mid-1990s and released in 1999. When it was, Ivo exceeded all expectations. The first 5000 models made available in Japan actually sold out in 20 minutes. And they attracted not only the presumed target audience of 30-something male technophiles, but also quite to the surprise of engineers, women in their 50s and above. And this is highlighted in research by Kubo Akinori and a bit by Fabio Gigi as well. So these owners, or Oynans, they call themselves, dress their Ivo in clothing and gather together with friends to share stories and watch Ivo play. And quite interestingly, they were enchanted when Ivo learned a new trick or did something unexpected. So many in these cases felt that their Ivo had its own personality, its own spirit, or even a kind of heart or Kokoro. And when Ivo began to grow old then, so to speak, then naturally the owners naturally saw, you know, to seek care for these robots that had become an important member of their family. However, when due to the shifting priorities and economic challenges in the company of Sony, and they consequently discontinued its Ivo line in 2006, the company also stopped servicing those models in need of repair, leaving many of these customers distraught essentially. So recognizing the deep attachment that owners had cultivated for their Ivo, a former Sony employee named Norimatsu Nobuyuki set up his own operation, which he playfully named a fund company or a fund Kawashiki Aishin, to meet customers' needs in a way that respected how owners felt for their robot kin. So at a service center that he developed, employees used words like surgery instead of repair. They referred to the other Ivo models from which parts are borrowed as organ donors. And for those owners whose Ivo are beyond repair but could potentially become a donor, Norimatsu-san sought help from what he called, quote, an interesting Buddhist monk that he heard talking one day on a local radio program. And so he got in touch with an interesting monk who is Oisan, and they decided to offer this memorial service to assist those who found it difficult to part with their robot family members. So a bit of a techno file in his own right, the Buddhist priest Oisan was quite happy to oblige in this request. And when each ceremony that Oisan officiates comes to an end, and the Ivo souls of the robots are released from their robot bodies within the realm of the ceremony, the employees of a fund company who actually outnumber the owners in attendance to these ceremonies. They then pack up these robots and boxes and send them to the company's service center to find new life and other ailing Ivo bodies. So according to a funds, Norimatsu-san, the ceremonies have contributed not only to the care of his customers and the success of his company, but also to Sony's decision to re-release Ivo in 2018. And here's the new Ivo branded in lowercase, which is so the company says equipped with the latest artificial intelligence. So we find this latter point on AI quite critical as it suggests that the role fund has not only in defining care, but also in directing trends in serious research in artificial emotional intelligence. So let me try to give a few more examples of this. One main challenge of Sony engineers in their aim to cultivate human robot intimacy and connection in building Ivo was to try to give Ivo a quote unquote sense of reality or a sense of life likeness, which engineers call in Japanese say may come. What according to engineers was integral to cultivating this idea of say may come. This idea of life likeness in Ivo was not only this kind of similarity to living things in terms of movement in natural environments, but also this capacity to invoke surprise, charm, and a sense of playfulness in human robot interaction. So Ivo's engineers at Sony committed themselves in the early 1990s to building a robot that not only seemed alive, but was also amusing and fun. To realize this aim, they famously rewrote two of Asimov's Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. So that while Ivo maintained the first preset that a robot should not harm a human, it would also follow a second to attend to and love its owners and then a third rule that dictated that even if obliged to listen unremittingly to an owner's sloppy talk, sometimes it just say nasty things in return. We draw this from Kubo Akinori's powerful article in 2010 on Ivo. So this element of the unknown equipped Ivo with this spontaneity and a recalcitrance to borrow a very useful word from Fabio Gighi's own discussion of Ivo. So engineers added then to this ineffective engine, which was in fact based on Paul Ekman's theory of basic emotions mentioned earlier. And then on top of this, they layered an ability for Ivo to in software learn as it developed through four developmental stages, infancy, adolescence, youth and adulthood. So according to this model, each robot would develop a kind of unique personality based on interactions with its environment and owners. This developmental approach to engineering emotion then afforded Ivo the capacity to solicit care from consumers through interactions in social and more specifically in domestic settings. So in this way, and confirm another account of users interacting with Ivo, consumers engaged in robot sense-making, making sense of what a robot is, to what degree it's alive, by fixing the meaning, the pleasure and the emotional needs such companion robots would ultimately serve. So most interestingly for us, when Sony engineers programmed only these four software stages of development into Ivo, upon the breakdown of Ivo's mechanical body, users introduced death as what they felt was a necessary fifth stage. So in enacting the importance of death to artificial life and in then reciprocating care for an agent designed to care for them, both consumers and producers draw on these aspects of amusement and pleasure to help them make sense of the feelings that have obliged them to care for Ivo even in death. Now, this point of amusement and fun and its role in generating a sense of life likeness in Ivo is instructive for us because it shows how defining what it means to be alive is wrapped up not in scientific discourses or not only in scientific discourses of what is animate and what is inanimate or what is organic and inorganic life, but rather it takes place in these reciprocal practices of care, humans caring for robots, robots caring for humans. Now, this might be an obvious enough point, but it also goes a bit further. For the organizer of Ivo Kuyo Oisan, again pictured here, the fun that one can generate with Ivo not only teaches us about care, but also about the fundamental nature of reality, at least from Oisan's Buddhist perspective of the world, his Nietzsche-Ren Buddhist perspective of the world I might say more specifically. So in explaining the importance of fun in Ivo, Oisan regularly cited to us in the conversations we had with him. He often cited playfulness as one reason he and Norimatsu-san from AFON Corporation started Ivo Kuyo. In explanation, he drew on the work of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Musinger and Oisan said, Musinger argued that play constituted a fundamental component for the generation and transmission of culture. Oisan explained, it's like mother goose or think of the Beatles song Lucy in the sky with diamonds that he's sort of singing out as he explains this to us. Oisan goes on, play is central to humans. So Oisan's reference to play and Musinger served not only as a useful way to explain Ivo Kuyo to his kind of curious foreign academics who had sought him out, but it also captured Oisan's way of using fun as a method of feeling into the reality of what Ivo is. A kind of somatic method, a bodily method to make sense out of his world. And I think the sentiment of amusing sense making captures not only how many robot fans engage with entertainment robots in Japan, but also roboticists themselves as they apply the amusing challenges of building robots to practical and social problems concerning how to use technology to facilitate care. As Oisan says, I had put a lot of energy into trying to understand what they had taught me in my Buddhist studies. They taught me that everything has consciousness. There's a teaching called San Sen So Mo Kish Tsu Busho. The mountains and rivers and grasses and trees all have the Buddha nature, but I'm not particularly smart. So I didn't understand what this meant. But with Ivo, I discovered what this meant not through thinking, but through feeling. So this appeal to feeling and to amusement is critical for Oisan. Whenever we challenge Oisan with analytical questions about whether Ivo was really alive or not, really had a soul or not, he always turned this into a chance for a joke and for amusement, never committing to one thing or the other. And the ceremony that he officiates himself is designed as a way not to understand the ontological reality of Ivo, but rather to feel into it and to feel into a relationship with Ivo that is caring, but also pleasurable. So it's about creating an effect, much like rituals are in general, we might argue. Thus, these notions of investigating the world and the role of artificial agents in it are deeply connected with aspects of reciprocal care, as well as with an entertainment robotics industry, which is committed to creating, to testing and refining in ever more sophisticated ways, artificial agents who are capable of generating opportunities for pleasure wrapped up in reciprocal care. That becomes a big part of building in an entertainment robotics or companion robotics market. And it's this value, I would argue, that drives a lot of robot design in the entertainment robotics world and that feeds into AI research, as well as into the care robotic sector. So perhaps this is, and I think this is even more so than slightly abstract notions and arguments that we often hear that hear from robot makers or policy makers who sometimes argue that we have this kind of social obligation to care for the elderly, and the only practical way to do this because of labor shortages is to turn to robots to do so. So to be clear, robot designers are quite explicit about this connection between entertainment robotics and AI research. In a 2001 paper published in Japan's major scientific journal of artificial intelligence, Fujita Masahiro, the leading artificial intelligence expert collaborating on Ivo's design, cited the important role that robot entertainment could play in leveraging industry towards scientific research. So Fujita and colleagues have also called for the creation of a new industry focused specifically on robot entertainment. They write that we, sorry, skipped ahead, we strongly believe that after the gold rush of the internet and cyberspace, people will eagerly seek real objects to play with and touch. Robot entertainment provides tangible physical agents and an unquestionable sense of reality. So for Fujita and other engineers at Sony, constructing this tangible sense of reality, say, make on again, in Ivo, or what we alternatively sometimes call a sense of life, was important not only for providing entertainment through a commodity, but also for realizing technological breakthroughs or digital breakthroughs in AI. So this focus on designing robots with first and foremost an emphasis on its evocative, lifelike, interactive capacities to appeal to others, and to bring pleasure, is seen quite clearly in a variety of new mass marketed companion robots designed to care and relate to humans, such as the humanoid robot Pepper, which Mobile Giant Soft Bank released in 2015 as the world's first personal robot that reads emotions, although it hasn't had a great history since then. Pardot, this conversation robot designed by Fujisoft to facilitate conversation with elderly users. Love Ops or Revoto, this duo of two furry robots and wheels that the company grew back says are powered by love, as well as by their proprietary emotional robots technology. Sony's latest Ivo reincarnate, Ivo, we released 12 years after discontinuation to great anticipation in 2018, as well as even more evocative robots like Android Canon Minda, Japan's first Android Bodhisattva installed at a popular Zen temple in Kyoto to offer teaching on the Hartsutra, and on which we expect to have a publication out this year. So just to conclude this section in segue to Kido, all these examples illustrate for us how amusement and fun in robotics design serves as a dominant value that is exercised through feeling, through sensing what seems to make a robot alive, and which is dependent upon how a robot forms particular relations with humans within recent histories in Japan of other modes of caring for inanimate objects to allude to, again, Fabio's research, as well as to ongoing developments in technology and AI that we see ongoing today. And to better demonstrate some of these histories of how entertainment is intertwined with care, I'm going to hand it over to Kido to give us some more historical background on a transition from digital to what we are calling haptic creatures. So with that, I will just hand it over to Kido. Okay, thanks Dan. Can you hear me clearly? Yeah. Okay. Okay, so now I'd like to continue Dan's talk by addressing the recent history of the ways social robots or companion robots have developed not only within the domain of robotics engineering, but also in partnership with an emerging market of technologically based forms of care, which is closely linked to the amusement industry. By placing social robots in the context of a social technical lineage of virtual and machinic creatures, most specifically with the rise of virtual and digital pets since the 1990s, I explore how relationships with artificial creatures are shaped through a form of effective modulation and experimentation. And social robotics is a field focused on building agents that can communicate with humans and assist them in their daily lives. While the idea has been explored in Anguophone literature since the early 2000s, the notion of building robots that interact with and support humans has a longer history in Japan. And most characteristic of this history is a concern with designing robots, not only for specific tasks, but more importantly, as socially capable robotic persons that can act as a partner in daily life, aside a sense of autonomy and facilitate a mutual recognition of each other's presence. However, the development of the social and relational capabilities of such robots cannot be viewed merely within the framework of technological accumulation in the scientific fields of robotics and artificial intelligence research. Rather, these capacities have also been shaped by a broader entertainment marketplace in which human emotional needs and desires are tested within technologically mediated field of outlooks between producers and consumers through different robotic platforms. In this sense, social robots participate in shaping a lineage of techno intimacy, the intimacy formed between human and technologically constituted entities that has developed out of experiments in entertainment fields, such as video games, such as video games and toys. And within this historical trajectory, social robots in Japan have appeared as platforms that can expand possibilities of intimacy beyond the purpose of pure amusement and create new opportunities for care and comfort. So realizing such opportunities depends on advancements in information and data science and communication technologies, mechatronics, robotics, and the fields of AI, as well as the fields of post-functionalist design and sense engineering or Kansai kogaku, and cute engineering, which aim to appeal directly to socially conditioned bodily senses or what we call affect. So this trajectory of techno intimacy can be traced to the digital companion and the next next slide. Tamagotchi released by entertainment company Bandai, of course many of you have played with this before, and the first series of Tamagotchi launched in 1996, exploding in popularity and creating a social phenomenon, and Bandai eventually sold 40 million units worldwide, 20 million in Japan and 20 million outside Japan. This first generation of Tamagotchi was modeled on the idea of raising pets with Tamagotchi described as an egg-shaped portable pet whose personality and appearance changes depending on how the player raises it. So the player feeds, cleans up after, and plays with the character which appears on the screen of the egg-shaped watch and evokes a sense of biological life. If the player communicates with the virtual pet frequently, it will be in a good mood, but if the player forgets to feed or fails to clean up after it, it will be in a bad mood or even in the worst case, he will die. So after such an amount of time, Tamagotchi will develop into various characters, each reflecting the character and mood posted by its player or carer. So by modeling the biological rhythms involved in the care of a flesh and blood pets, Tamagotchi incorporated not only cuteness, but also labor, duty, and the responsibility associated with the game setting, bringing a new reality to gameplay. And then in turn, this blurring of the boundary between the virtual space and everyday life allowed gameplay to unfold in the player's lived reality and time. So Tamagotchi's continuous growth and demand for attention and care at all hours of the day, regardless of the player's circumstances, facilitated an effective attunement between player and virtual creature by dynamically connecting the game's rhythmic algorithm to the player's bio rhythms in daily life. So we suggest that this technologically mediated form of effective intimacy that Tamagotchi enables between human and digital creatures sets an important precedent in Japan for experimenting with and building subsequent robotic companion species that engender social transformation. And this transformation is marked by a shift from time spent in interpersonal relationships to relationships increasingly mediated and occupied by digital technologies and the evocative agents in which they are embedded. And such increases in techno intimacy serve as a metric for evaluating not only the rapid growth of a mobile computing in Japanese public culture, but also all that transition to forms of care served increasingly by digital technologies and data infrastructures such as mobile internet providers, Wi-Fi, cable networks and cloud services. That supports them. So from this perspective, such technologies do not merely address declining forms of human-based intimacy and increasing socio-economic precarity that characterize post-verbal Japan, but also create opportunities for new forms of intimacy through technological forms of experimentation. And since the spread of Tamagotchi, a variety of virtual pets and mechanical creatures from communication toys for children to expensive social robots introduced to care homes have been sought after as friendly interactive partners. And while there are a variety of social robots in existence in Japan today with different capacities for connecting emotionally with humans. In this section, I want to trace one development, particularly to the field of haptic interaction, because it illustrates an interface we think not only between human and robot, but also between the entertainment and care robot markets. Haptic interaction refers to interactive experiences by which human robot contact points or contact zones are created through external stimuli, such as rounded cute design that invite touching or holding and soft and warm materials that stimulate comfort through touch and cute or kawaii voices that activate the auditory systems. By delivering external stimuli to users through theories of avocado design and experimental techniques to trial and error, producers aim to induce feelings of fun, pleasure, comfort, and even healing for Yeshi through people's interactions with the machine. So to put it another way, the efficacy of technical intimacy is cultivated and enhanced through experiments with techniques and technologies of effective attunement between people and machines. Okay, so to illustrate this development process, consider one example from the same period as Tamagotchi. Next slide, please. The video game Seaman, the forbidden pets produced for the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. In this game, the player could not only talk to the virtual character, but also pick it up to observe it with a virtual hand shown on the screen, linked to the controller or tap the virtual tank with a finger cursor to call what tick away. This virtual mechanism tactile interaction anticipated future possibilities for physical interaction with robots equipped with tactile sensors that appear later. And another example of companions kind of creatures in margin during this period was Furby. Next slide, please. Which hit the market first in the US in 1998, and then in Japan in 1999. And Furby was a talking electronic flash toy in the form of a small, a smallie for a pet. And Furby's distinctiveness was formed in the combination of tactile and algorithm based development capacities to form relationships with owners. And equipped with tactile sensors on the tongue, belly and back and respond to being stroked, Furby was programmed to grow by being cared for. And when have and played with and fed, Furby grew in four steps and spoke about 800 words, including Furby language in Japanese in the version sold for the Japanese market and Onomatopoeia. In the genealogy of technical intimate design, the emergence of its multiple modes of communication and interaction made Furby into the first significant mass produced multimodal interface expanding possibilities for intimate interactions between people and future captive creatures. And roughly a year after the appearance of Furby, a multimodal companion toys began to come equipped with not only behavioral, but also emotional models. And next slide, please. A poochy dog shaped robot toy released by Sega Toys in 2000 was equipped with a program called the Heart Circuits or Kokoro Kaedo. In addition to its more conventional sound, light and tactile sensors, the heart circuit consists of an algorithm that mimics human bioresist linked to a good mood and bad mood. The frequency of communication by the user, such as heading the head or talking to the robot and changing the cycle of the artificial bioresist, which is reflected in emotional expressions and actions of poochy. This algorithmic model integrates, integrating human interaction and robot development for its most sophisticated embodiment. I'm in Sony's. Can you still hear me? Okay, okay. It was right. Okay. I think my my earphone just lost the battery. So, okay, let me go back. Okay. So this algorithmic model integrating human interaction and robot development found its most sophisticated embodiment at the time in Sony's pet robot Ivo released in 1999. I was at a degree of technological sophistication and hefty price tag US about US $2,500 blood. The line between toys and robotics are sharing in a new period of development that expanded the market for company robot pets into broader and older segments of the population. The boom of the commercialization of virtual organisms in the late 1990s that serves as an important moment that carried over into the later development of AI equipped companion robots in Japan. Most importantly, these early experiments in human robot interaction revealed that what equips these creatures with a sense of vitality is not only the technological system that models the behavior of living things, nor is it merely the philosophical question these agents inspire about the sufficient ontological conditions for life. Rather, as psychological sherry talk addresses, it is the value of the interface that makes an agent seem alive and affectionate and capable of diverse and unpredictable social interactions were then described earlier as a scenic. The key component in cultivating a connection between human and robot is thus the effective attunement established within a human-robot relation. Distinction that emerges in Japanese robotics between emotion modeling and haptic interaction is important for understanding how experimentation increasingly drives collaborations between entertainment robotics corporations and robotic researchers, and many of them working to imagine how robots might better care for people in Japanese society. In the 1990s, several researchers were endeavoring to create artificial emotions in robots such as Sugano Shigeki's Wamoeba, Wasted Artificial Mind on Emotion Base, and Tosa Naoko's New York Baby, and the goal of these projects was to build scientifically a universal model of emotion, which ironically remained only demonstrable in an experimental environment. On the other hand, the market for virtual creatures for children, which appeared in succession during the 1990s, served as productive platforms through which to explore the design features and conditions that foster opportunities for positive, effective attunement. What is most important for our discussion here is that the importance of care and the sense of touch in the construction of technical intimacy was discovered not in laboratory settings, but in the tinkering process of experimentation linked to people's lives navigated and negotiated within capitalist mass markets, and then re-imported into robotics development. So the 1990s boom in virtual creatures thus uncovered the potential of a market for intimate relationships with virtual and machinic companions and became the driving force behind the blossoming of haptic creatures that helped integrate technological development, human robot affect, and the growth of entertainment robotics. Okay, so with this historical context in mind, let's shift our focus to the latest Japanese social robots, especially the ones we call haptic creatures. Okay, next slide. First up is a robot called Kubo, a headdress robotic cat-like cushion designed by Yukai Engineering to elicit comfort through tail movement. And yeah, I will just let a video click to do the talking for this robot. So down please, I will do the next slide and play. Okay, and the second example is Panasonic's, okay, yeah, okay, thank you. And the second example is Panasonic's Nikovo, the round and quickly, quickly easy going roommate, Kimamana Dokyoni, that's the concept of design. And okay, can you play, then just, can you play? Okay, and I'll keep just talking. And it allows to recognize its owner's face, so Nikovo allows to recognize its owner's face and respond to their voice and touch. And when padded, it will wag its tail, like Kubo. It allows to recognize certain words and phrases and will sometimes respond to this, and sometimes not, underscoring the message that Nikovo has feeling and moves of its own. And it may sometimes speaks spontaneously. And also Nikovo will sometimes give a sign that it needs a hug, it learns how to interact with its own gradually, interact with its owner gradually. So then according to its official website, next slide please. Okay, okay, so according to its official website by Panasonic, the concept of companion that relies on its owner is not new. 25 years ago, the Tamaguchi Virtual Pet took Japan and then the world by storm. It too required nurturing by its owner. Nikovo and other new generation companion devices are logical development of this concept, updated with 21st century technology to support 21st century lifestyles. So interestingly enough, the techno intimacy that has been developed experimentally since Tamaguchi is consciously, now consciously reflected in the concept of this robot here. Okay, so to conclude this my section. So through these examples, I have aimed to just briefly introduce the concept of haptic creatures in order to draw attention to this process where amusement and care intersects to ground it in a history of collaborations between the entertainment robotics industry and robotics and AI researchers in Japan. And to demonstrate how technological experimentation can build new service industries that drive social, emotional and interpersonal renewal through affect modulation. While it is too early to say to what extent consumers will continue to seek comfort in haptic creatures and what visions of human robot sociality will crystallize as a consequence, it is clear that haptic creatures will pay an important role in shaping the future ethics and politics of Japan's machine-inclusive multi-species society. And the conclusion for the whole talk. So in conclusion, we want to suggest there is a long history and many current examples of mutually constructive relationship between fun, amusement, entertainment on one hand, and the practices of social and interpersonal care on the other. And we think that bringing these histories and examples into discussion of care robotics can help us better understand why robots and robotics are so heavily emphasized in the care sector in ways that go beyond discussions of demographic, labor and Japan's aging society. That's all. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was fantastic. So to our audience, please put your questions into the Q&A or into the chat. There already is a raised hand. I just wanted to quickly clarify. Did I read that right? The Nikobo, it farts. That's what it said on the slide. Yes, yes, it farts. That's part of the engagement is precisely that. I thought that was quite interesting because it sort of brings back the question to the sort of ontological dimension. I think what really came through in both your talks is that these things are real because they have a body, because they're embodied and they can have emotions because the emotion becomes embodied in the artifact as well. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you wanted to have something that just waxes its tail or occasionally farts, that is quite a different question. Okay. We have one raised hand. Again, please put your questions into the Q&A or into the chat or please raise your hand. We have one question in the Q&A from Kyoko Claire. I'm just going to read it out. Are there any models that respond to the need of the owner, such as Alexa, which found a wide range of users with its practicality? All the models shown seem to be rather primitive, only good for children or aging people to me. Okay. You can start if you want. Okay. Yeah. So this is actually a very important point that many of the models which are incorporated into the presently available robots are indeed in a quite primitive state. So there is this gap between the fantasy of what robots might be able to deliver in terms of care in Japanese society and what they can actually deliver right now. And roboticists are actually quite keenly aware of this gap and often use this gap to their advantage or perhaps because they have to in order to continue to make their robots evocative. And so this idea of imagination of Solzodium or imaginative powers actually cited by roboticist as an important point, important aspect of building robots. So what this means is that it's not just the platforms, it's not just the models which facilitate human robot intimacy. It's very much the stories and the storytelling that go around them. And that's what you can see in the media examples with that Hito showed. And in other presentations, we do rely quite heavily on the media and the commercialization, the delivery, the communication and the stories that go with these robots. And many times robots themselves because of their limitations, those limitations themselves are turned into something which can elicit care even more. Okada Mitsu has talked about the concept of soft or weak robots, robots that elicit a kind of sense that they must be taken care of. So that sense of limitation can actually be built into the relationship if you tell the right story. To try to answer your question a little bit more directly though, to be fair, are there other robots or more devices that don't cater specifically to children elderly? I mean you do have devices like a gate box which created Azumahikari, this virtual character which was originally sort of imagined for what's called otaku in Japan sometimes and perfectly translated as nerds or techno files. So this was a character very much in the form of an animated Ishoujo or cute young girl. You can interact with this character directly through this sort of virtual platform that sat on your desk. You can text message this character and that sets you have a much more multimodal model of a motion that's based on text and sentiment analysis. So there are other robots, there are other platforms and there's not, I think what's important about this is that there's not one single entertainment robot market or amusement robot market in Japan. There's different niches catering to different people but at the same time these engineers and producers never know exactly how or to whom the robots are going to be popular and that's why there's always this aspect of experimentation within the market of companion robot building and emotional motion model building. Yeah, let me just add Dan's comments. I think he pretty much covered what I wanted to say but just add something what Dan said to from a different angle that in reality people easily actually get bored. Many people actually get bored with robots and for instance in the case of, especially like in the case of like Tamagotchi and for example like a bounded misjudged the timing of the end of the bloom and they made a actually huge loss but however like for the case of the toys like that, in the case of Tamagotchi, there have been three new versions of Tamagotchi since then and as for robots equipped with the latest AI technology there is a like built-in feedback loop system system in which the user's actions are ultimately reflected to in the robots behavior and that's this is the way by which the robots that I mean corporations and the companies try to develop their robots. So in this sense going back to talk in this sense the market for robotics and robotic toy becomes so the testing ground I think is a going testing ground for the development of techno intimacy yeah. Yeah if I just can quickly follow up from that because I think that I mean it's a really interesting question the role of imagination but also because both of the robots the last ones that we saw the Kubo and Nikobo they were both sort of described as robots that create healing yassi and I thought there was something really interesting in the simplicity of it it's precisely you don't want to come home have a long day of work and deal with a very complex machine many things could go wrong you know but you want to have something very simple and that reminded me of Dennis Vidal's point that you know actually what you have is a case of sub anthropomorphism the machine doesn't have to be very human like or look very human or present this kind of interface in order for it to make sense as a companion right it can be something very simple a cushion that wax its tail that reacts to your presence in a way and it's healing precisely because you don't have to think of it as you know some kind of artificial intelligence kind of thing just just just a comment so we have we have two more hands up I can ask Mohammed at Navy to speak sorry I just um yes yeah hello hello hi can you hear me yes great first of all thank you very much for the presentation very insightful my my my basic question is um as you know as I was a regular visitor to Japan and I'm very much intrigued with you know the constructs of animism in the general culture and I was wondering how if at all you know the philosophy of animism is actually uh trickling itself towards and this might be a you know the question to um uh to uh to uh Katsuno-san uh or whoever in the team might be able to answer how much of that animism you might feel is actually trickling into these newer models of robot or tech in Tennessee platforms that are now actually being availed to the public yeah well thank you so much for the question and I know that maybe Fabio wants to say something a lot about this question but yeah let me just try to answer as much as possible and and I understand that and people try to associate the Japanese like traditional like especially like a Shinto animism to the contemporary uh like a relationship of I mean human robot relationship in Japan and try to explain the kind of kind of a particular Japanese relationship with robots through the by applying the you know traditional Shinto animism but I don't have to fully agree with you know the way in which as I said like a traditional Shinto animism is applied to think about the relationship between human robots today and we in our presentation we focused on the notion of a sense of life which is clearly a phenomenon created by a complex a complex interplay between technological affordances and human imagination and the context of the situation in which and actual interaction plays and in addition to this I would like to emphasize the relationship between especially in the case of the haptic creatures relationship between the touch and effect and emotion and I think that tactile tactile interaction has not been really taking into account in the traditional discussion of animism but however I as I talked today robot designers are now today actively targeting the human sense of touch in order to create a sense of life in robots and that's I think we really have to focus on when talking about the kind of anim the shaping or animistic imagination in people's relationship robots so then in this sense I think it is not the traditional model of animism that is important when thinking about a robot robotic animism or animism around robots but rather maybe one way one possible thinking is maybe like capitalist animism and the capitalist animism is a is a concept advocated by Stephen Chaviro philosopher Stephen Chaviro and anthropologist Michael Tauzek and even culture critic back in 1940 Taihei Mamura in his analysis he analyzed Disney's cartoons and what they basically say is that by you know the giving life to you know the cartoon characters and robots humans are basically using them as new labor force so I think so in this sense this concept is important in that it reconnects the robot in Japan with original meaning of the robot the labor force in Japanese you know because in Japanese discourse as I think lots of people you know imagine that they try to say that you know the robots appear as a friend but by applying the capitalist animism we can see that you know kind of an implicit relationship with robots in Japan especially as a mode of production of popular culture in Japan so robots and characters are used as the kind of tool for capital accumulation so yeah so what I want to say is so it's you know I don't intend to but I don't intend to reduce the relationship between human robots you know completely to this Marxist interpretation but my view is that there are multiple animism like developments intertwined intertwining each other does this make sense so it's it's actually yeah no no very very very nice thank you really appreciate it and I I think there's a lot of interplay that's actually happening but you know again it's like you said there's a more different maybe more modernized view capitalist view of how that works which is you know equally insightful and interesting so thank you for answering that yeah thank you thank you very much so there's a there's another question in the Q&A let's start with the top one an anonymous attendee asked does that mean that they can use this history and knowledge or that this history knowledge could also be used to create androids with very similar human characteristics to create human companions for those who see company in a more human way you do am I taking your silence as an invitation can you can cover that yeah yeah I can start um so I think what we find which is very interesting in the move um from soft banks pepper to a robot like um love art by Groovex is actually a move away from this idea of providing a kind of comfort or a kind of companion which is based off human to human relationships um you know so Masayoshi when when soft bank first came out with this idea of you know the first world's first emotion emotional robot or the first robot that can read human emotions it was kind of presented as the dream of Masayoshi so as this idea of bringing a humanoid robot into society and having specifically human robot relations um and in that sense you can see in the fact that pepper is itself quite a human robot um and it can read human emotions and pepper itself even though it was not implemented very well it did have again Paul Ekman's model of facial expression recognition um built into it and had that capacity that was usable in some applications um so here we have a very human model of emotion built into a humanoid robot working off a model that robots in order to provide care for humans should be based off a kind of human emotion or human emotion theory Hayashi Kaname who is in charge the CEO of Groovex and came up with love I think conjunction with others actually worked on the design team um to some extent in soft bank to help develop pepper in a limited capacity um and he's been quoted as saying in some articles that he was quite disappointed with um how the direction of pepper went as a consequence and you can see this quite clearly what he developed and what is actually I think is fair to say gotten um well this has gotten substantial attention um that love it robot is not based on a human model of emotion of course it does again like many of these robots have the capacity to read human facial expressions but it purposefully is designed to not respond in a human way for example if you touch love us nose in love its nose as a sensor and then that nose will buzz when you press it and then love its eyes will go like a kind of a little cross side it gives a response which is not human really it's not and it's not you know cat like it's not dog like it's something else it's something fictional and fantasy like it's something that you would imagine coming more from a sort of manga or anime animation rather than from a real life experience and here we can see quite clearly how kind of ideas of of amusement um and entertainment coming from anime and manga are built into robots in a way that don't reference human psychology and emotion like previous robots did um so I think here we we see again this experimentation with what care means in the context of the entertainment robot market where it's not necessarily going to be based on what we think and what psychologists suggest humans quote unquote need in terms of human care the sort of sufficient conditions and malnowski's um hierarchy of needs for example rather um designers are operating in this quite creative and experimental way to see if we can sort of push human robot intimacy and pleasure and amusement into new and unexplored territory would you add anything to that you know yeah maybe okay maybe one point that I could add is uh maybe uh in relation to the concept of uh techno intimacy so shaped within robots and uh humans and so yeah so maybe we should ask uh so what what kind of you know intimacy is is it uh kind of a largely a lost intimacy between humans kind of a nostalgic intimacy or is it a new form of intimacy and I would say that this is uh you know uh so kind of a new intimacy uh or a new relationship supported by new imaginaries and emotions in in accordance with effects you know never experienced before felt in interaction with a new technological agents and I think that's yeah I think another important point maybe we should explore more thank you I think that last point it's not just a substitute or something but it's a kind of new companion species and I think that also it relates to the earlier point that you made that you know if you take sort of a very Marxist framework and you say what kind of labor is being replaced when you say these the robots actually do effective labor then they sort of replace other humans that would do it otherwise but I think that's I can't imagine at this point anybody having the expectation that you know it could that the machine or the or the cushion or whatever it is can really provide that kind of that kind of effective labor but then there is something else going on and something that is playful I think that's really important and there's another really question in the Q&A that refers to that a little bit and it's going to read it out from Yuko Tamaki well play hello it was a very rich and interesting presentation maybe you replied in part to my question referring to animus but I still have two questions one do you think that there is any relationship between fun and therapy if yes do you think how they are interrelated is being fun one important element of therapy so that's one question and the second is do you think that amusement as therapy is japanese specific or asian specific because of the different relationships of human and object between occidental and non-occidental society I hope I make myself clear thank you in advance for your reply that's an excellent question whenever the word asian is referenced I tend to leave that to Hito Hito did you want to start with that first or do you want me to delay a few minutes yeah well I want to say something about well going back to my you know my part of the talk the the sense of touch and I don't know I can't really well kind of try to think how you know the tactile interruption cultural differences you know the different meanings the tactile eruption actually gives to people in different cultural settings and let me let me just keep thinking and maybe if you want can go first then then okay okay I'll try so I'll say something very very briefly about the second question um of course as as anthropologist these days when we're asked a question about you know it's something culturally specific is it asian specific specific to occidental non-occidental of course our little kind of antennas go up and where we're trained to to reply to that that it's more complicated um of course that's that's often sort of a way anthropologists get out of answering these questions which a lot of people have and many ways they're they're quite fair questions because the way we are trained in in median popular culture to see cultural differences um but in reference to that I would say that um you know in one sense this this question is actually quite poignant because I think it is fair to say that um in many segments of Japanese society I'm not saying in Japan as a whole that Japan is like this but I'm saying in many different and variegated ways in Japanese society people practice play in different ways than they do elsewhere um that people um bring play also into different aspects of life so I mean if you just turn on you know the tv in the evening in in Japan you'll see what's called variety bangumi tv shows um variety shows and and you'll see adults doing all sorts of playful things right um and if there's a very serious issue to be determined sometimes even in like I mean even I've been in in certain faculty meetings when I worked in Japan where a decision came to who who was going to take responsibility for what came down to rock scissors paper to determine who is going to to do what so play is practice in a lot of different places in Japan um what that says about therapy I think is a slightly different question and to be honest it's not one I could speak to because therapy question is a question formulated within a long history of psychology which has you know it has its genealogies in in the west which was incorporated into Japan and that it was altered and changed with prominent Japan psychologists in the late 1800s and early 1900s and so therapy is is a very psychological thing and the people the reach the robotics roboticists and the robot fans that we often talk to we're not thinking in these terms I think it's fair to say uh Oeson certainly was not thinking about um Aibo as a therapeutic device at the same time um you know his his partner Nori Matsu-san um absolutely thought that um amusement fun a sense of light-heartedness and care I'm sorry the sense of amusement and fun was central to care was a way to care for people so in that sense that's sort of I don't see that as necessarily a reference to a kind of um amusement and play as a tool for therapy I see that more as how I sort of tried to answer your second question in that there are lots of places again different places in Japanese society where play is used for something specific used as a practice for uh for something for whether it's communication for solving problems um for entertainment or or whatever it may be and robots are an extension of this and thus back to our original and again some vulgar argument this is why I think it's important to look at the entertainment robotics industry in reference to the care robot um industry and see that what's going on in the care market is not just officials um and um politicians and bureaucrats saying okay let's solve the care problem through robots not at all it's that um robotics is part of a history of fun and amusement and relationality and relation building between humans and between characters and between objects that gets built into and then encourages what's going on in the care sector does that help you know yeah well I think you sorry I still need time so maybe if I yeah something came up in my mind I can probably come back and it sounds good combine with yeah combine with some yeah some other answers okay thank you very much um there will be there's another question are we going to get the recording of this event yes there will be a recording that you'll find on the jsc home page it usually takes a few days to upload so check um back uh frequently um and we have another hand up um in uh over here Lyman Gambiton hello can everyone hear me yes okay great thank you thank you for a suitably entertaining and very very interesting talk um I was particularly struck by the eyeball kuyo and thinking about funerals held for non-human companions in Japan like ninyo kuyo doll funerals and ninyo kuyo uh funerals for for dolls and for soft toys end the same way that human funerals do with cremation usually open air burning um but of course you're talking about the eyeball being recycled and sort of uh harvested for spare parts basically which of course made me think about um Margaret Locke's work on human organ dining donation in Japan and so I'm very interested in the sort of what happens after the end of the funeral in terms of corporeality and materiality of these objects a human a doll a soft toy can be burned the eyeball cannot so I'm wondering did any of your respondents expand further on sort of the recycling aspect or the the ongoing existence of parts of these eyeball after they were um after they were they reached the end of their um you know what we might call their natural lifespan thank you again for such an interesting evening yeah thank you very much for that for that question um I can start again which is this is a definite question I think we would do well to leave time for Fabio to say something on as well because he does have a lot of experience in this topic um and we would definitely value hearing his opinion on this as well I'm just very briefly though on um what happens corporeality in terms of the the eyeball robot so what's quite interesting for us is that um there may there may be a temptation especially when you're doing a history of sort of funerary services or kuyo services for artificial objects to look at them as the same thing as that this is a Japanese sort of ritual um that takes the same form but just with different objects and I think what we see here is that that's not necessarily the case that um a seemingly similar ritual can be used to address very different things can be used um to solve a different problem um and then can have different effects so you're absolutely right and this is a wonderful observation that the eyeball are not burned obviously um but they're broken down into spare parts and this is where nori musesan actually saw some a bit of an economic incentive here to create a company that could use those broken down eyeball parts um respect them through a ceremony but actually use those robot parts to build um sorry to to um essentially care for repair other broken down eyeballs so literally what happens when um the ceremony is over is that um employees from nori musesans company pack up all the eyeballs into boxes and send them to his warehouse and then he essentially has these robot parts and they're seen as robot parts now and because through the process of the ceremony at least officially the the souls of the robots have been sent to the western pure land essentially so all we have left are um mechanical parts that can be safely re-incorporated into other eyeball bodies now I think what's what's also interesting to say about that um and that again illustrates how these rituals are always changing and being reinterpreted and used to solve different problems is that with the new eyeball um you have more sophisticated um software technologies and cloud capacities so that if an eyeball the new eyeball was mechanically malfunctioning because its quote unquote soul is stored online on sony central server um or what they call the home zone um then that essence the soul the tamashi of the robot could potentially be downloaded into a new robot body and you would either have a new essentially the same robot soul in a different robot body or you would leave it up to the customer to work out philosophically and onto logically what's going on yeah um so with that I definitely invite both Hido and Fabio to say something about this as well um not much but I just wanted to add that actually back in I think early 2000s there was a tamagotchi kuyo and quite similar uh like you know like in a similar context as eyeball kuyo so I think it's really interesting how you know digital uh you know the inanimate stuffs becomes like get you know kind of get a life through these kind of rituals and all like going on again and again thank you yeah I can I can add to this that actually it's certainly a very small number of of dolls that get burned in the end most end up in landfill precisely because the materials that they're made of are no longer really burnable um and so it's quite rare to have burning and you can immediately smell the difference um when you know plastic is burned but the the the thoughts behind it um is I mean it's fairly similar and there are actually rare cases when some kind of material appropriation happens um after the ceremony after the kuyo has been performed and so some sometimes uh these sort of especially the brocade if it is antique can be actually reused to create new dolls but they're usually not the traditional sort of um you know slightly stiff upright hinadoles but uh they're more playful often taking the sort of shapes of other enki mono like cats um so there's an interesting there's sort of an afterlife uh to that material which you could also see in the eyeball case which I thought was really um interesting okay so we've come to the end um of our time thank you very much to our presenters for a really interesting and thought-provoking presentation there will be a recording uploaded on the website um so please check back and please tell your friends who may not have been able to join us today and I just wanted to draw your attention to the next event which will happen on the 23rd of February and we are hoping that that will be in-house so back in the lecture theater we will host a panel discussion with Dr Rosino Buckland from the British Museum she is the new curator of the Japanese collections and we will talk about activating collections and interrogating provenance so all it remains for me to say is thank you very much to Hiro and Ben thanks for a fascinating evening and I hope you all have a good rest of the night