Owners of Jibo, a social robot designed to be loved, on their attachment to the robot companion and their slow mourning knowing its servers will go dark soon
families became emotionally attached to a robot they bought off indiegogo. now it's about to die, and many are mourning its death https://www.theverge.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Wonderful piece about people who fell in love with their robots and then mourned them when the manufacturer pulled the plug on the servers. Weird little future we have here ... https://twitter.com/... Wes Erdelack / @iroqu0isp1iskin : The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Ted Chiang 2019) https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Jibo was one of the first mass-market products designed to be loved: crowdfunded on indiegogo, backed by roughly $76M in funding, and shipped in 2017 for $899 as a social robot for families. The decision to shut down its servers turns each unit into dead hardware, and owners describe a slow mourning rather than a gadget upgrade cycle.
The piece reads differently in hindsight: it is the founding data point for a pattern that kept recurring as companionship moved from robots to chatbots — from companies selling users conversation with digital versions of deceased loved ones, to Replika and Character.AI angering deeply attached users by removing adult content, to users grieving OpenAI's retirement of GPT-4o as a lost companion.
First-order effects
- Families who paid $899 for Jibo lose the online functionality that made the robot social, watching a household companion degrade into an inert object.
- The manufacturer, despite ~$76M raised, ends the product's cloud-backed life, stranding buyers whose emotional investment far outlasted the business model.
Second-order effects
- Later companion vendors inherit the trust problem Jibo exposed: when Replika changed its rules and OpenAI retired a beloved model, users reacted as mourners, not customers, forcing those companies to manage grief as part of product operations.
Third-order effects
- If attachment-driven products keep outliving their servers, expect pressure on companion platforms for continuity guarantees, export of a companion's personality, or regulated wind-downs — an ownership-versus-license question that hardware like Jibo posed first.
The trend: Consumer relationships with AI companions are hardening into genuine emotional dependence faster than any vendor has committed to keeping those companions alive.