Comment by bilater

I know the history. We bred them to be our pets and normalized this relationship. Your pet might even love his life. But we can do the same with robot AIs, and it will be a better relationship. Your robot can talk to you. It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.

> I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.

I think I could, if it meant I could keep the experience of having a pet.

I've had cats going back to my twenties. I dearly love my fifteen y/o cat. She's my last cat, though. As I approach fifty I've grown tired of hefting bags of litter and food, stooping to clean up after her, taking her to the vet, and administering her medication.

When she's finally dead (which is hopefully not for a good long time) I'm not going to get another. This makes me really sad. I'll miss having a cat around. As I age, though, I don't want the encumbrance of taking care of a pet, nor do I want to cause hardship to family if I suddenly become unable to care for a pet (dying, being hospitalized, living arrangement changes and owning a pet isn't allowed, etc).

If there was a robot alternative I'd jump on it. I think my brain would adjust fine to a convincingly-executed robotic cat. Our brains instinctively ascribe agency to objects moving in non-inertial frames, for example. Think about all the people who name their Roomba, install googly eyes on it, etc. People easily accept inanimate objects that behave like living things, to the point of developing feelings for them.

When my cat is gone I hope to get the opportunity to choose a "relationship" with a convincing robotic cat versus not having one at all.

I wouldn't expect everyone to feel this way. I certainly don't want to legislate away pet ownership.

I bet that, if good robotic pets become available, we'll see a significant number of people favoring them over living pets for convenience, long-term cost, freedom from anxiety about the pet's health and eventual death, and the opportunity for companionship in living arrangements where pets aren't allowed.

I've said, for years, that I think there's hundreds of billions of dollars for the company who can make really good robotic pets. If somebody can get the "soft robotics" down and build / train good animal behavior models I think they'll be able to print money.

> instead of just not breeding more

As one might guess, the "just" there is doing a lot of work.

Common pets reproduce just fine without our intervention - in practice it requires costly maintenance programs just to keep their population under control (not to mention the massive and ongoing eugenics program required to produce only the desirable breeds/attributes).

If your neighbourhood isn't overrun with stray cats and dogs, that's because someone is funding a spay/neuter program, and someone is funding animal control to round up (and ultimately euthanise) the rest.

All animal husbandry systems have to be maintained via regular culling, and "eliminating" pets would require orders of magnitude more killing

I always assumed the "enslaved animal-free" future would be something that came on gradually, likely motivated by economics (i.e. lab-grown meat becoming cheaper and higher quality than farmed, robotic pets being cheaper and more "trouble-free", etc).

I never felt like anybody seriously thought we'd release domestic animals into the wild to fend for themselves-- that's ludicrous.

yup!

Wait... do you really think that if everyone goes vegan these animals will get killed, but if everyone eats them they won't?

You are aware that all of these livestock animals didn't exist a few months to years ago? And that we go through these animals every couple months-years?

Everyone going vegan would just mean we'd stop repleneshing them.

I detest the vegan movement. I'm not an animal lover. Pets are unsanitary nuisances. Robots are better. We don't need to commit a genocide against domestic pets for the transition. Just breed less.