Found: Sony Aibo, Turing Terrier model

One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at the Wired Magazine was the monthly back page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e. the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers and illustrators and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print, which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.

This page in the November 2003 issue imagines a 30th anniversary edition of the Sony Aibo robot dog. Technology has advanced so much ny 2029 that it looks almost real. (A coworker brought their own pup in for the shoot, and we just gave it a bit of a Photoshop glow-up, complete with glowing eyes.)

Sony’s line of robot dog (cyber canines?) is actually still a thing several decades after its 1998 debut. The latest model debuted in 2018, and the programmable pooch received a system software updated as recently as March 2025. But it’s hard to capture just how much it captured the zeitgeist when it first debuted. This was no Furby or Teddy Ruxpin—with its sophisticated programmable features and a stiff price tag of several thousand dollars, it was very much positioned as a domestic robot, not a kid’s toy. Aibo seemed like the first faint glimmer of a future in which we’d all have virtual pets roaming our homes. Unless Roombas count, this has not yet come to pass.

I remember some pushback from the factchecker when we want to give this cyborg canid a scientific genus and species. We wanted to call this hybrid creature Canis familiaris minsky-us or something similar in an homage to the pioneering cognitive scientist who ran MIT’s AI lab. But the factchecker insisted on a more authentic Latin, which made that reference far more cryptic.

Closeup images and a reprint of the not-very-legible text on the box is below. Apologies to the designer and photographer, who are not credited on the page. Apologies as well to the model—I’ve forgotten his name, but I distinctly remember that he was a very good boy.

TEXT FROM THE PRODUCT BOX
“I’M THE PERFECT PET!”

SONY AIBO
30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Turing Terrier
©2029, Sony Corporation

TEXT FROM THE PRODUCT BOX
ORIG: SENEGAL
TYPE: CANIS FAMILIARIS MINSKIS

🦴Hypoallergenic, workplace-safe
🦴Won’t chew footware or attack mailbots
🦴3-petabyte storage capability (DRM compliant)
🦴Built-in antipathy to Hasbro FurReal felines