[pizza234]

This is something that I find extremely interesting (in the domain).

I could imagine that having open "intelligence" specifications, would allow transferring the "soul" (as perceived from the owner) of a pet to another, while still mantaining a similar outlook, in order to mantain affective identification.

That, and of course, many other things. I wonder how complex is to build a robot (for a small company), which would still make it realistic enough to create an affective bond. If not too complex, 3D printing would be realistic.

[slfnflctd]

That's the good stuff, right there.

People seem to be hard wired to anthropomorphize anything remotely resembling animal behavior in 3D space. If you can develop trained or environment-reactive specific, repeatable actions (especially useful or amusing ones), along with some narrow-parameter randomized responses (within or adjacent to actions), and migrate those database contents to another robotics platform seamlessly, then you'd really have something.

Kinda surprised this type of thing is still in the 'fizzled' category.