Narrative

Our project's main goal is to evoke thought on the potential effects artificial intelligence can have in the domain on pet-owner relationships in the future. We chose to accomplish this through telling the story of an Aura AI product targeted at dogs called Aura fIdO, which struggled during its several iterations. We think that automating aspects of the pet-owner relationship can go too far, in that it will further disconnect the two. The automation area that the fIdO product explores is dog training and basic analytics (e.g. hunger, thirst, health, last owner interaction). The product would be able to autonomously train a dog, with the tradeoff that dogs tend to become loyal only to the collar's commands, as well as sometimes become aggressive in cases where training intensity was set to a high level. We sought to explore the various use cases of such a product, both the good and the bad. We reasoned that including the good could be the difference between believable launched product with public controversy and a totally failed product that never had a chance to make it to market.