THE RISE OF ROBOT PETS AND DISCOURSES OF TECHNO-COMPANIONSHIP IN LATER LIFE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Robot pets of varying degrees of sophistication are advertised as ideal companions for older adults, with claims that they support their emotional and cognitive needs. A new generation of robot pets (e.g., Lovot) is emerging equipped with internet connections, recognition software, surveillance capacity, and AI platforms to mimic desired aspects of animal-human relationships. This paper draws upon promotional materials gathered at the Consumer Electronics Show 2019 and interviews with robot designers, to probe what the robotization of human-animal relationships tells us about shifting notions of companionship through the life course. The argument is that robot pets are inscribed within discourses that instrumentalize human-animal-technology entanglements and position digital technologies as idealized solutions to perceived age-related problems. Theoretical ideas from animals studies add a creative dimension to aging studies to explore what the societal enthusiasm for robot pets reveals about our understanding of the lived material and relational worlds of older adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".