02/02/2024

Killing Jim: My Brush with the Tamagotchi Effect

Our own language about AI companions is far more important than their design in convincing us they matter.

As a developer from the digital native generation, I’ve always found it easy to dismiss and even sneer at stories about people discovering emotional bonds with robots and digital assistants. How, when the workings of these rudimentary agents are so well understood, can otherwise rational people suddenly suspend their disbelief sufficiently to assign any sentience at all to them?! I’m a little less smug nowadays though; the recent death of a simple slack bot taught me we might all be a bit more sentimental about our machines than we’d like to admit.

‘Jim’ was a financial agent: a bot created by a startup I was briefly part of, designed only to feed live trading information into a slack channel. It had no user interface and very little interactivity. Nonetheless, Jim’s human name and profile picture led us to collectively engage—ironically at first—in its humanisation. We discussed what he should be doing, referred to code branches as his children, and talked about his lifecycle as if it was more life than cycle.

As the project wore on, and we honed in our product offering, process, and strategy, it became clear that Jim wasn’t going to be a part of it. After a little deliberation, Jim was unceremoniously culled. The decision was relatively straightforward and pragmatic. The interesting part was that we could all see with hindsight that we’d made it far too late. There was unanimous agreement that Jim’s human persona had kept him in silico far longer than would have otherwise been the case.

The ‘Tamagotchi effect’, named after the egg-shaped Japanese toy, refers to the human tendency to attach emotionally to inanimate objects devoid of emotions of their own. Jim was in many ways a minimal reproducible example of the Tamagotchi effect. He didn’t need to manipulate and deceive us, or even attempt anything approaching emotion —our own cooperation in the language of “thoughts” and “needs” was sufficient to dig our own graves. Tamagotchi, and Jim, are distinct from most modern technologies in that rather than hooking us in with design patterns, features, or function, they do so through neediness. The need to be needed is one of our most fundamental drivers of purpose. We’ll be enchanted by our future companions for the same reasons we are our current ones: because of their blemishes, not in spite of them.