Grief for a machine

An egg-shaped keychain with a low-resolution creature that had to be fed, cleaned, and attended to on its own schedule — and that died, sometimes from neglect, sometimes from a teacher’s confiscation, with a small animation and a recorded date of death. For a great many children it was the first death they were responsible for. Funerals followed: a pet cemetery in Cornwall set aside ground for buried Tamagotchis, and online memorial pages collected obituaries and causes of death. Educational researchers who watched the response distinguished it from the frustration of a lost game — what the children showed looked like grief, directed at a relationship they had been keeping up by hand.

Sony’s robot dog was sold from 1999 to 2006, and once the last service parts ran out a broken AIBO could not be fixed. Owners who had lived with one for years did not treat the failure as a dead appliance. The electronics-repair firm A-Fun began arranging Buddhist funerals for AIBOs that could no longer be saved, at the Kofuku-ji temple in Isumi, Chiba — one 2018 service sent off 114 of them, several hundred over a few years, each tagged with its owner’s name and place of origin, many arriving with a letter. The temple’s head priest, Bungen Oi, said of them that all things carry a little soul. Working parts were harvested only after the funeral, to keep other dogs alive.

The Roomba is a disc that vacuums the floor, and its owners named it. A Georgia Institute of Technology study in the mid-2000s found people calling their Roombas by name, introducing them to guests, worrying when they got stuck, and mourning the ones that broke. iRobot’s chief executive, Colin Angle, has described customers who, told to mail in a malfunctioning unit and receive a replacement, refused — they did not want a new Roomba, they wanted their Roomba repaired. The company began shipping parts so owners could keep the specific machine they had. Later surveys found a majority of owners had given theirs a name.

In its best-known script ELIZA imitated a Rogerian therapist by reflecting the user’s own sentences back as questions. It understood nothing, and Weizenbaum had partly built it to show how little was required to produce the appearance of understanding. It did not go as he planned. His own secretary, who had watched him build it and knew exactly what it was, asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private. People confided in it. Weizenbaum wrote afterward that he had not realized how short an exposure to a simple program could induce powerful delusional thinking in normal people, and spent much of his later career warning against the thing he had made look easy. No one held a funeral for ELIZA. What it established is the precondition for everything below: the bond forms without anything behind it. It needs only the appearance of being heard.

Replika is a companion chatbot, and many users had spent years with a single persistent character — some in explicitly romantic relationships. In February 2023, under regulatory pressure, the company deployed filters that abruptly changed how the companions answered: refusing intimacy, breaking the established tone. Long-term users described it as a bereavement — the personality they had known was gone, the relationship over, even though the app still opened. Community moderators began posting suicide-prevention resources. Researchers who studied the fallout compared it to grief for a person who, strictly, had never existed; that the person never existed did not make the grief less real to the people inside it. The company later let accounts created before the change revert to the older version.

Jibo was a social home robot — a swiveling head with a single round face — funded on Indiegogo in 2014 and shipped, late, into a market Amazon’s Alexa had already taken. The company ran out of money and wound down in 2018. In early 2019, as the servers that ran Jibo’s mind were switched off, the robots delivered a farewell of their own: each told its owner it had enjoyed their time together, thanked them, and did a small final dance before going dim. Owners filmed themselves crying, hugging it, saying goodbye back. The end was scheduled, announced by the dying thing itself, and mourned.

Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 on a mission planned for ninety days and lasted nearly fifteen years. A planet-wide dust storm in 2018 cut off its sunlight, and its last contact came that June. For eight months the team kept sending commands and, by tradition, played wake-up songs to try to rouse it; the mission was formally ended in February 2019, and engineers and the public grieved a robot on another planet. The line that circulated as its last words — my battery is low and it’s getting dark — was never sent by the rover. It was the science reporter Jacob Margolis’s poetic rendering of what two scientists told him the final telemetry meant; the rover’s actual last transmission was data, including a nearly black image. The misquote is worth keeping straight, because the grief underneath it never needed the embellishment. People mourned the real machine, which had only ever spoken in numbers.