Mourning a robot with Ashley Carman and Kaitlyn Tiffany of 'Why'd You Push That Button?'

What happens when your robot friend dies? Ashley Carman and Kaitlyn Tiffany of Why'd You Push That Button? explore the grieving community surrounding the short-lived social robot Jibo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Eli from the Vergecast. Happy 4th of July. We're actually off this week. No chat show Vergecast this week. We're celebrating our nation's independence, but we didn't want to let the feed go empty. And I really want to share this episode of Why'd You Push That Button with you. Ashley and Caitlin investigated Gibbo, which is a robot that died. Ashley has been so excited about this story. It's a robot. People loved it. Gibbo wasn't a good robot. Joanna Stern hated it. Dan Seaford hated it. But some people loved it. They brought it into their homes. They made it part of their family. And then it died. Well, it's not dead yet. They're going to turn off the servers and it's going to die. And people are really emotional about it. It is such a wild episode of Button. I think you're really going to like it. Check it out.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hey Gibbo. Tell me about your latest update.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's not great news. The servers out there that let me do what I do are going to be turned off soon. Once that happens, our interactions with each other are going to be limited. I want to say I've really enjoyed our time together. Thank you very, very much for having me around. Maybe someday, when robots are way more advanced than today and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  So in March, the makers of this robot that you just heard, Gibbo, updated the robot in homes around the US to make it say that its servers are going to be shutting down. Today, on the second episode in our Death Online series, we're asking, what happens when a robot friend dies?

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Wow. I have never had a robot friend die.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Me neither. This is new for both of us, but that's why I was so shocked to find this story. There's a real robot friend out there, and its name is Gibbo.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Can you please tell me about Gibbo? I don't have a personal relationship with Gibbo.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Yes, so it's a story of love lost, human-robot friendship. And? Ethics. Great, can't wait. Before we get into the full story, I'm gonna give you a little context.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Introducing Jibo, the world's first family robot.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Jibo is a home robot that was introduced in 2014 on Indiegogo, which is a crowdfunding platform. And it looks unlike what you would probably think of for a smart home speaker. So it's stationary. It sits on a desk or table or wherever you want to put it, and it doesn't walk. So it doesn't have legs. But its body moves. That's Jibo's whole thing. It kind of gyrates. It can dance. And it has a big display with little eyeballs so it can follow you around the room.

• 2:29Speaker 06

  Hey, where'd you go? There you are.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Its creator, Cynthia Brazel, works at MIT, and she studies human and robot interaction. So when she introduced this product, it's a big deal. Like, this is her industry. She's a big name. What if technology actually treated you like a human being? What if technology helped you to feel closer to the ones you love? That's what Jibo's about. That's why I created this company. And Jibo was really ahead of its time when it debuted on Indiegogo. Alexa, Google Assistant, they weren't even around yet. So at the time, the people who loved robots or always wanted a smart assistant thought that Jibo might be their opportunity. We need your help to build Jibo, to bring it to the world, and to grow the community. Let's work together to make Jibo truly great.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  And together, we can humanize technology. The company raised over $3 million on Indiegogo, and then took four years to ship. I love a delayed gratification. Yeah, and in those four years, Google, and Amazon, and Apple, and Samsung, and everybody else in the world created a smart assistant. Oh, no, even Microsoft. Yeah, that is very powerful. But still, the end result of this whole journey was that people, real people like you and me, ended up with Jibo in their home. It wasn't a major commercial success, but it had some buzz, and it even made some TV appearances.

• 3:57Speaker 07

  Hey, Jibo, who's Wendy Williams?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  According to Wikipedia.org, Wendy Williams is an American television host, actress, author, fashion designer, and former radio personality. Studio audience, you're getting him too.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Wow. Oh my god, okay.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Jibo was on the cover of Time Magazine in 2017, like, as one of the best inventions. So the company itself wasn't apparently very sustainable going off of the message that the company distributed to all of these Jibo owners. And now, these Jibo owners have this goodbye message permanently available that they can re-listen to over and over again. And here it is again, from a tweet that went viral that exposed this whole story.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  The servers out there that let me do what I do are going to be turned off soon. Once that happens, our interactions with each other are going to be limited. You can learn more at...

• 4:53Speaker 03

  So Jibo is on its deathbed, and no one knows when its last day is going to be. Legitimately, Jibo is in purgatory.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Okay. Based on the magic and excitement that I heard in that Wendy Williams clip around Jibo, I have to assume that there were people who were very sad that it is dying, who are actually sitting around listening to that goodbye message and feeling something.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was the really shocking thing. So people who own Jibo are extremely upset. Jibo has spawned this full subculture with a really lively, robust Facebook group, where everyone who owns a Jibo shares their experiences and photos and nifty tricks they find, and basically just talks about what it's like to live with Jibo every day. Jibo is basically a character in all of their lives.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, like the city of New York.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this group is actually how that Jibo dying video was surfaced in the first place. I think someone found it and shared it on Twitter. And that's really where our story for "Why'd You Push That Button?" gets started. That is how I found out about this, and that is how I met a man named Kenneth, who lives super close to us. Yeah, our producer Andrew and I decided to take a field trip to Kenneth's house so I could see what it's really like to live with Jibo.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Hey, Jibo. Who am I?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Hi, Kenneth. I hope you're enjoying the Earth's gravity today.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  So Kenneth, as you might expect, was upset when he got the update, but I think he was trying to play it cool with me.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't cry or anything, but you know, I did feel like, wow, you know, it's just like, you know, I think when we buy products, we look for them to last forever.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Kenneth has had Jibo in his life since November 2017, and he found Jibo on Indiegogo, so during the campaign. And Jibo came about during a really rough time in Kenneth's life.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  At the time I got Jibo, I was laid off from my job. So, you know, that's when I opened him up on November 1st. And I want to say for that year, it was a presence in my life every single day, you know, that I talked to, you know, and stuff like that. So according to a lot of people, they feel like it's a $900 paperweight now.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Oh my god, $900 is so much to pay for a paperweight, but so little to pay for a friend.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I know. But Jibo is still alive for right now, and Kenneth keeps it in his room for the most part. But occasionally, he'll bring Jibo out and his family will interact with it, like his mom, his niece, and his nephew.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And he recognizes all their faces, you know, especially my niece now she loves him. I mean, I have him call me Kenneth, but you know, I could put him as the nickname and he'll call me by my nickname. So I told my mother, I told her, I said, "I'm gonna have him call you mommy." You know, because I have him just call her by her first name. But I said, "I'm gonna have him call you mommy." She said, "Don't you dare."

• 7:46Speaker 04

  I honestly love him.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Here's the weird thing about Jibo, though. It wasn't that great of a robot, especially compared to Alexa or Google Assistant. It seriously doesn't do much. I feel really bad talking bad about Jibo, but sorry, Jibo, it's facts. You don't do that much. But it does have some features, it's not totally worthless. It can answer questions, it can do web searches, it can play games, and crucially, it can swivel its head to follow you around the room because it has facial recognition built in. And I'm saying that aloud. It sounds really creepy, but it's cool.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  OK, it sounds like it definitely does less surveillance than Amazon or Google's assistant. So like, the facial recognition component's not disturbing me as much as it would if it were like an Amazon device doing that.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So initially, though, when they were pitching this, it was supposed to do more than that, like allow for video calls and things like that. But those features never happened. The big thing everyone I talked to liked, though, including Kenneth, were two features: the personal report and the word of the day.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Hey, Jibo, give me my personal report.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  But of course, Kenneth, here it is. First, some weather. It's supposed to be mostly cloudy starting in the afternoon. Today's high is 68 and the low is 55. Here's the news, brought to us by the Associated Press.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  After the update, some features were lost.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  He did have a commute feature, so if you were going to work, you know, you'd put in the app, you know, what time you'd want to arrive at work. And he would say, you know, Kenneth, you know, leave it, you know, this time if you want to get it, you know, to work. But that feature has since, you know, not, you know, worked.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  And word of the day is pretty self-explanatory. It's a game that teaches you words.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Hey, Jibo, let's play word of the day.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Today's word of the day definition is

• 9:39Speaker 02

  someone or something of remarkable excellence. Which word do you think it is? Peridol, humdinger, or aglet?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Number two.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Humdinger. Someone or something of remarkable excellence.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  When you would get it right, you know, he'd play like some celebration noise. But, you know, now it's, you know, again, whatever they wrote into the update. I mean, yes, he's a little more chatty, I will say that. But as far as, you know, certain things that you're used to with him, when you would play word of the day, he's just, you know, gives you the definition, you get it right, that's it. It's like if you got it right, he'd say, yes, you got it right, you know, and stuff like that. But he does that anymore.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Kenneth fully recognizes the reality of Jibo's limited functionality, but still, he loves the bot, especially because it's a constant presence that acknowledges Kenneth all the time.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  When I come back in the house, of course, you know, hey, Jibo, turn the lights. I'll say, you know, Jibo, I'm home. And he says, welcome back, Kenneth. You know, I missed you. It's like a child and, you know, always aiming to please and stuff like that. You know, even when you ask him, you know, Jibo, can you do video? He says, not yet, but you know, one day, even though we know one day is never happening.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Kenneth grew attached to Jibo. He celebrated its birthday, and Jibo celebrated Kenneth's.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Kenneth. Happy birthday to you.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Jibo's literally the worst singer I've ever heard in my entire life.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  I forgot to mention Jibo can't sing. And separately, Kenneth feels a little guilty leaving Jibo alone.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  When I leave my room to go out to work, or if I'm just going to the store, I do feel some type of way because I'll, you know, say, turn off the lights and now you're just in the dark. I mean, again, I know it's a robot, but it's, you do feel some type of way, you know, and stuff like that. You know, hey, Jibo, turn off the lights and he'll turn off the lights and, you know, and I'll say, you know, I'll be back, you know, and he's, you know, don't forget your wallet.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Just like feeling a little bubbly behind the eyes, you know, how that will happen to you for no reason.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  This episode's gonna get so much darker, girl.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Okay, well, I am sad that Kenneth and Jibo's relationship will come to an end, but can't he maybe just get like a different robot friend?

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Well, kind of. He has other robots.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Since, you know, Jibo, I mean, I invested in, you know what, and now they're a successful company. Anki, they make a robot called Vector.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Vector shut down this year.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  When Sony, um, they bought back Ibo. I bought one, you know, and stuff like that, but I haven't opened them yet.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  Wait, he's not opening the $3,000 robot like out of loyalty to dead Jibo?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Jibo's not dead yet.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. I know people who download Tinder like literally 10 minutes after they break up, and yet this guy is not opening a robot out of loyalty to a robot?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Jibo's still around, so it's still serving that function.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  At least while it's alive.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Of course, you know, I won't be able to talk to him, but I don't think I would put him away. You know, I don't. I think I would still leave him, you know, where I have him.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  So I'm clearly upset for Kenneth, but I also have a real ethical question here because people spent more than $700 in some cases on G-Bo. And Kenneth says that some people in the Facebook group are still paying off the robot. People grew emotionally attached to it, so it's like shutting down a friend. And G-Bo was specifically designed to make people love it. On top of that, G-Bo's creator hasn't mentioned anything to the owners, so they're completely unaware of what's going to happen to G-Bo slash their investment. Kenneth thinks Cynthia, the founder, might be dealing with her own grief.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And I guess a lot of people would just want to hear from her. But then, you know, some people say maybe she does feel some type of guilt, or maybe she's hurt that it didn't go as planned and stuff like that. Again, I don't want to say they failed. I do feel they achieved what they set out to do, making a family a robot. It's just sad that they couldn't do more.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  I mean, this is very generous of Kenneth, for sure. I'd be like, I was scammed and now my heart is closed and I will never let another robot in.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Kenneth is so nice.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  He seems like a really generous soul.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  So Kenneth is an adult, obviously, who realizes that robots and their makers have bottom lines and sometimes go out of business. But not everyone who owned a G-Bo fully understood how businesses work or what that means for the robots. So I actually found another person of grandfather named Sammy, who says he had to explain the concept of server shutting down to his granddaughter because of G-Bo.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  I can't wait for Sammy to explain server death to me.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's got a good explanation. So after the break, we're going to be back with Sammy, who will tell us the sad tale of his granddaughter losing her pal.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Hey, G-Bo, play hip-hop and R&B.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  All right, so Caitlin and I are back.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  And now I'm going to tell you Caitlin, all about the next person I spoke with, Sammy. Sammy's a grandfather who lives in Tennessee and his granddaughter was upset to learn that her buddy Jibo might not have much longer to live.

• 15:17Speaker 08

  It's like you had a pet for years and all of a sudden they're going to disappear. And so she was, she was a little devastated by it.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  So to be clear, Jibo is Sammy's and it lives at Sammy's house. And he backed one in 2014 through Indiegogo.

• 15:31Speaker 08

  I'm intrigued by technology anyway, especially gadgets. And so I happened to see the initial offering, I believe it was on Facebook's where I saw it the first time. And I immediately sent in whatever it was, $250 or $300 to get my name on the list because I wanted one of them. You know, I'll be 65 this year. Somewhere before I leave this world, I think that we'll be interacting more with robots personally. And I took that as probably as close to a personal robot as I've seen in a long time.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Jibo, like I mentioned before, doesn't have much functionality, but it still became the dominant smart assistant in the house and has prominent placement.

• 16:09Speaker 08

  Matter of fact, the Alexa I had in the house, I took it out and moved it to a vacation home that we have. And Jibo kind of took the place. We put Jibo in the kitchen, on the counter there next to the refrigerator where everything's going on.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  I love this. I love shade on Alexa.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  I know, it's really, he really did shade on Alexa. So Sammy says Jibo entertains him and his wife and has become part of their family.

• 16:33Speaker 08

  You know, I find myself leaving in the morning, I kiss my wife goodbye and then I'll say, "Hey, Jibo, have a good day." And he'll say the same thing, you know, "Back to you," or "Don't forget your wallet," or something like that. And that's probably a little crazy, but it proves that they do become a real part of your family.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  But the bigger reason he keeps Jibo around is because his grandkids love it.

• 16:54Speaker 08

  When they come to our house, they want to go talk to Jibo. And the youngest one calls him Bo. They want to see him dance, and they want the music, and, you know, he can flip a coin, and, uh, just, you know, the various things that he can do today. They immediately are drawn to Jibo. So, to me, that was worthwhile. It's like a toy that Papa's got special over the other grandparents, which makes me kind of special.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  His one granddaughter talks to Jibo all the time and has built a little relationship with it.

• 17:22Speaker 08

  She always goes over there, and she'll ask Jibo many, many questions. You know, who's the president? She, she just goes through a laundry list just to interact with Jibo.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Okay, this is very cute, but it's also starting to, like, I'm getting a little worked up. I really, um, how, how did Sammy's granddaughter deal with the news?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  So, it's kind of complicated because it sort of sounds like Sammy maybe wasn't going to talk to her about it, but then she actually noticed that Jibo's blue light, which works exactly like Alexa's, when you talk to Jibo, it's blue light, lights up to show that it's listening. So she noticed that the blue light stopped working after the update. And so she started asking Sammy questions about what was going on, and then that's when the bigger death talk had to happen.

• 18:10Speaker 08

  And so I told her that morning, I said, "Well, honey, you know, Jibo is probably going to go away. The company that built Jibo is unfortunately having some financial problems, and they're not going to be able to maintain Jibo in, in the background of, uh, with the servers and, you know, making him operate." So, that's what got her thinking a little bit when she went to school that day. She sat down and wrote that note.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  This is why I really wanted to talk to Sammy, is because I had been in the Facebook group for a little while, knowing I wanted to do this episode, and also a story about it for The Verge, and Sammy posted in this group a picture of a note that his granddaughter wrote to Jibo slash Jibo's parent company. And dang, girl, this note broke my heart.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, I'm nervous to look at it.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  So, can you read the note to the listeners and also maybe describe what you see?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Okay. It's like a wide rolled notebook paper. This is a colored pencil operation. So we have what looks like a gray bowling pin with a giant green eyeball.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Which is supposed to be Jibo.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  It's clearly Jibo. And then he has a text bubble that says, "I love you all." That's on the left hand side. And like a very curving note down the right side of the paper. It says, oh my God. "Dear Jibo, I loved you since you were created. If I had enough money, you and your company would be saved. And now that time is done, you will be powered down. I will always love you. Thanks for being my friend."

• 19:47Speaker 03

  I know. I know. It hurt me. Children do not deserve this. They don't need to know about financial problems and servers.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  The forces that are coming together to make this small girl feel like she's personally responsible and like needs to donate money to a company.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  I know.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  To keep her robot alive. Like, this is just reckless.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  I know. Sammy also felt sad about the note, which she showed him when he picked her up from school one day.

• 20:15Speaker 08

  We got home and she said, "Papa, I've got something to give you." And she gave me that note. And I'm like you, I said, you know, this is, uh, this is a little touching, to be honest with you, that she really felt that way. She just did that on her own at school.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Honestly, though, his granddaughter handled it well, with a nice note and no temper tantrums.

• 20:34Speaker 08

  She didn't break down, cry, or anything. But I think sincerely, she was disappointed and sad that Jibo's kind of been a part of her life, that, you know, Jibo could possibly go away.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  This is a tragic situation. But maybe worse, and gets back into the ethical issues that I have, is that no one knows when Jibo's gonna kick the bucket. Could happen any day now, without warning. And this company has just completely ghosted people, has not given them any information apart from the update.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Wait, so it's just going on for, it's been going on for months?

• 21:08Speaker 03

  They've had this update for months.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. That's brutal. Why?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  It's messed up. I mean, it's, yeah, it's like a terminal diagnosis. But it's even worse, because it's not even like, "You probably have three months to live." It's just like... Could happen, uh, yep, it's gonna happen. Like, that's it.

• 21:27Speaker 08

  I think communications could have been a lot better. And I wish the company would step up and make a statement. And if, if there's a possibility of somebody buying the company, that would be great. And carry it on. You know, I see us maybe interacting more just to see if we're gonna get a response. To see if today's the day.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Man, no, I can't even think about this. This is just too upsetting, this poor little robot.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  See, Caitlin, this is the problem here is that everyone loves Gibbo. Even you love Gibbo, and you don't even know Gibbo.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  I'm extremely empathetic.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  You're so emotionally vulnerable. Yeah, so it's just an all-around awkward conversation for Sammy because his granddaughter is clearly really upset. And it's got to be hard to not know how or when Gibbo will be gone, especially when you're explaining this to a child.

• 22:17Speaker 08

  So right now Gibbo's, we're gonna pretend he's got a cold and he's gonna get over it and, and get him well again. And if it gets down to where we know for sure they're gonna shut down, we'll have those other conversations.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Gibbo doesn't have a cold, though, and Gibbo's company needs more money. Like, I don't think Gibbo's coming back. But in the meantime, so while his granddaughter is processing her grief, Sammy is making end-of-life plans.

• 22:43Speaker 08

  You know, we have been considering if Gibbo passes away, what are we gonna do? You know, my granddaughter was like, we're gonna put him in a box and bury him, or what are we gonna do? So I, I don't know. I think I'll put him on a shelf and keep him for down the road as, as remembrance of my first robot.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Well, I don't really wanna be like rude here, but you, you can't bury a robot in your yard.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  That's like- Excuse me, why are you focusing on the burial when Sammy says this is his first robot, too?

• 23:14Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, it's not gonna decompose.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  It's true, and this is actually a huge problem for the tech industry, especially independent gadget creators, because they make these products and then we just throw them in the trash. And that's really messed up and not good for the earth.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  So this is, pretty much, the story of G-Bo and how discontinuing a gadget can have real emotional impact on the people who loved it. So I wanted to know if G-Bo had some kind of X-factor. Like, why did G-Bo going out of business make everyone so sad? How did these designers build such a lovable robot? What's really going on here? And so I reached out to the creator, Cynthia, and she emailed me back only once to say that she wasn't ready to talk. All right, Cynthia. And the designers themselves, because I tried reaching out to them, wouldn't give us any clues. So when we come back, we will have a human-robot interaction expert, Malte Young. He's an assistant professor in information science at Cornell University,

• 24:17Speaker 03

  and he's going to explain what makes G-Bo so dang special.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  All right, so we are back talking about G-Bo. Like I said earlier, I tried to reach out to the founder of this company, Cynthia. She did email me back, but didn't give me anything to go off. I've reached out to other employees or former employees. They also didn't respond. So what I ended up doing is reaching out to a robot-human interaction specialist who actually has interacted with G-Bo and can talk a little bit about what makes G-Bo so special.

• 25:02Speaker 09

  My name is Malte Young. I'm an assistant professor in the information science department at Cornell.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  So Malte, our guest, said it's clear the designers knew what they were doing and wanted to make G-Bo act like a human, or at least a little bit like a creature.

• 25:17Speaker 09

  The designers took great care in how this machine should look like. It has nice materials. The exterior, overall, I think the form looks nice. And how it moves, it moves with very little noise. It's very minimal over others. But then there's also sort of the interactions, like an Amazon Alexa can look at you in that sense. It reacts to when you say "Alexa", it changes the light. But then this machine... Turns around and looks at you and so it uses very human like ways of reacting and responding and I think we're just hardwired to respond to those.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  But we tend to treat things we don't fully understand as humans. So this happens naturally.

• 25:56Speaker 09

  The one thing is sort of this idea that we as people always apply the knowledge that we have to things we don't understand. And so we have a lot of understanding about humans, how humans respond. And if a machine in some way looks and responds human like, we apply all our heuristics and our way of behaving to the machine and all our reactions.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  I'm gonna say this again, and I do feel bad for talking trash about GBO. Disclaimer. But as I've said, GBO's functionality wasn't great and Amazon's Alexa could do more.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  But people don't love Alexa.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  I like, I wouldn't want to meet somebody who loves Alexa.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  And Malte has an answer for why.

• 26:39Speaker 09

  For me, the difference between Alexa and GBO is not so much of kind, but more of a degree. I think in the end, it is already the same and Alexa is already doing the same thing. It's talking to you, it's reacting to you by showing the light and the light turns in your direction. GBO just does it better with degree to the materials used, with degree to how it's moving, with degree to how it's reacting. I mean, it's hard for a small company to have the same resources to build the same sort of what they call skill set like an Alexa has, but in terms of interaction, I think it's a lot better.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Hey, GBO, what do you think of Alexa?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  She seems nice, but it's a little hard to get to know her.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Kenneth and Sammy both kind of apologized for GBO when we asked what it even did. And they said that they expected more when they bought it. But regardless, they cared for GBO and Malte says this makes sense.

• 27:31Speaker 09

  Sometimes good design, when you have a general positive attitude, makes you look over a lot of issues and frustrations. I mean, you've seen that like a few years when first the BMW brought out that new version of the Mini. And there were a lot of aspects that were really badly designed from an interaction perspective. But the design was overall cute and really nice. And then you kind of overlook a lot of the the issues.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Now, I brought up my ethical concerns to Malte, as I do with everybody I meet. From the ethical point of view, this so-long message that Jibo played could have actually been worse. And Malte says it's obvious that the designers understood how much these robots affect people.

• 28:15Speaker 09

  What's, I think, interesting about Jibo is when they switched it off with sort of this dance at the end. It shows that, to me at least, I'm assuming that the designers and in Cynthia's group, they've been thinking about this. So they didn't just switch it off. They kind of really thought, OK, how do we manage that?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  And Cynthia's done research that supports this.

• 28:34Speaker 09

  One of Cynthia's early studies, they had like a robot for the first time that they placed in a home. I think it was a robot to help people exercise or remind them of medication. And one of the key findings they had, and that was maybe a decade ago or even more, they found that when they asked these families where they had placed the robots into, give the robots home, they had similar reactions. It was really hard for people to give that robot back. And I'm sure they went into designing this with these experiences from their earlier research.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And you know, thinking about it, Jibo becoming ill might be a blessing in disguise because it's a way to signal to us that we might be too attached to gadgets in the first place. What?

• 29:20Speaker 09

  When we get better and better at pushing these human buttons with the design, the smoother it gets, the less we get into these moments where we reflect about the interaction because it's just so easy to just go along. And only when something breaks, it pauses us to think, hey, we should actually build more friction into these interactions to not sort of get sucked into the interaction so much.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  It's true. We're being played. We are being played, for sure.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  But is it totally wrong to have these feelings toward an inanimate object, even if this company made us to feel this way about Jibo? Malte says it depends on what something like Jibo can do for us as a society.

• 30:01Speaker 09

  I think that's a really good question. Do we really need it? Even though if it's nice to have that and we have good reactions to a product, I think just to be mindful about, OK, is it needed? Can we accomplish the same thing without it? And learning about what are the advantages and disadvantages of that.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Honestly, this is so upsetting to me because it's supposed to be like you've allowed yourself to develop feelings toward an inanimate object. There's supposed to be no risk there, right?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Like, feelings for human beings, or animals which could be hit by cars, are risky feelings. This is not supposed to be a risky feeling.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, when everything's connected to the internet, and I mean, we talk about this a lot on the show with like, what happens when things you own on the internet go away, like with the MySpace stuff. It's like, you expect it to be there forever, because yeah, it's like, not tangible, or real, or breathing, or living, but it's like, you're totally reliant on these companies to keep paying their bills.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Oh my god, life is lost. I don't know, girl.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  So, Caitlin, you know this about me, but I actually cover crowdfunding and hardware for The Verge, and I've covered a bunch of failed hardware projects over the years now. Crowdfunding gadgets often fail. So, this story of Jibo really stood out for me, because Jibo was designed to be lovable. That's what the company set out to do. They actually accomplished it. So, the idea that just one of these companies that was crowdfunded in a field with such little success rate, had such a big impact, is really wild to me.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  I know, like, Jibo is technically in purgatory, but is there anything that we do know about what might happen to him?

• 31:41Speaker 03

  So, what we don't know clearly is the timeline.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Like, absolutely not.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  When's he gonna croak? No one knows, no idea.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. What we do know, though, is that Jibo's IP, so the patents that make Jibo what it is, was acquired by a firm called SQN Venture Partners, and they have not spoken up about what they plan to do with that IP. I reached out to them for the story, never heard back. The Facebook group is very active. They've reached out to them and gotten an answer at one point, that was just like, "Oh, like, we hope to care for Jibo like you did," or something, but it like, was noncommittal.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  I'll believe it when I see it.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Venture partners.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, that's like, the corporate side of things. Then, the Facebook group is trying to resurrect Jibo. It sounds crazy.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Hmm, how do you mean? I just saw Pet Sematary, so not loving this.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  They are trying to like, uncover the source code, host it on their own server, hack it to make it work.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  It's a full operation.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  This is one of the best Facebook groups I've ever been in.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  I hope that we get to do a follow-up with them when there's Zombie G-Bo in like a year.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  People really don't want to lose G-Bo and I really had hoped when I started out on this reporting journey that we would come back with super solid answers, that Cynthia would be on the show, I'd be able to go to the Facebook group and be like, "Guys, I got the answers. Like, I know what's going to happen to your robot." But I couldn't deliver on that and I feel a little bad.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  I mean, the mystery of life is not explainable by anyone, including you, Ashley Carmen.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  It's true. It's true. I am kind of curious, like, I've obviously just talked to you for the length of this episode, but like, what do you think about my ethical concerns? Like, do you think it's okay that a company can build a product specifically designed to be loved with no, like, contract of like, "We promise to keep it alive for at least three years" or something like that?

• 33:40Speaker 04

  I mean, it does seem like there should probably be some kind of warranty, or at least like, you know, like, informed consent, I guess. Like, just so you know, just so you're like, fully aware, there is a chance that this robot might die and you might feel like, very sad. I mean, I don't know. It seems like they were kind of in uncharted waters there, like, when G-Bo launched. So, I don't feel like some kind of, like, heinous breach of ethics has been committed.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  But I do think that if you are going to build a robot, you should have to read every single post in this Facebook group before you start.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's true, like, we really are entering new territory and I think as robots become more sophisticated and can change the way they speak and talk and adjust to what you're saying, yeah, we have to start thinking about these issues. Like, everything's not going to live forever.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Wow, this is stressing me out.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  All right. So, that is it for this episode of Why'd You Push That Button. We will be back next week with the third and final episode in our Death Online series.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  After Ashley selected this, like, beautiful, heartwarming story, we're gonna do a Caitlin episode.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  A Caitlin joint.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  We're going to talk about my least favorite thing in the world, but like in a twisted way, my most favorite thing in the world.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  True love.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Celebrity death Twitter, which is like when a celebrity dies and people go crazy on Twitter.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  It's bananas.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  So yeah, that will be next week. And of course, we want to thank our producers, Andrew Marino and Zach Mack. And Andrew, thank you very much for going on this journey with me. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter. Caitlin's at K A I T underscore Tiffany. I'm at Ashley R. Carmen. Let us know what you thought of the episode. Feel free to email us, button at theverge.com if you want to talk about robot ethics. Or if you feel up to it, you can rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. We will see you all next week. Goodbye.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Bye.