Nearly half of U.S. teens (46%) say they're on the internet almost constantly. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat remain widely used by teens.

The post Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 appeared first on Pew Research Center.

When Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, was first launched in 1999, it was hailed as revolutionary and the first of its kind, promising to usher in a new industry of intelligent mobile machines for the home. But its success was far from certain. Legged robots were still in their infancy, and the idea of making an interactive walking robot for the consumer market was extraordinarily ambitious. Beyond the technical challenges, Sony also had to solve a problem that entertainment robots still struggle with: how to make Aibo compelling and engaging rather than simply novel.

Sony’s team made that happen. And since Aibo’s debut, the company has sold more than 170,000 of the cute little quadrupeds—a huge number considering their price of several thousand dollars each. From the start, Aibo could express a range of simulated emotions and learn through its interactions with users. Aibo was an impressive robot 25 years ago, and it’s still impressive today.

Far from Sony headquarters in Tokyo, the town of Kōta, in Aichi Prefecture, is home to the Sony factory that has manufactured and repaired Aibos since 2018. Kōta has also become the center of fandom for Aibo, since the Hummingbird Café opened in the Kōta Town Hall in 2021. The first official Aibo café in Japan, it hosts Aibo-themed events, and Aibo owners from across the country gather there to let their Aibos loose in a play area and to exchange Aibo name cards.

One patron of the Hummingbird Café is veteran Sony engineer Hideki Noma. In 1999, before Aibo was Aibo, Noma went to see his boss, Tadashi Otsuki. Otsuki had recently returned to Sony after a stint at the Japanese entertainment company Namco, and had been put in charge of a secretive new project to create an entertainment robot. But progress had stalled. There was a prototype robotic pet running around the lab, but Otsuki took a dim view of its hyperactive behavior and decided it wasn’t a product that anyone would want to buy. He envisioned something more lifelike. During their meeting, he gave Noma a surprising piece of advice: Go to Ryōan-ji, a famed Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Otsuki was telling Noma that to develop the right kind of robot for Sony, it needed Zen.

Aibo’s Mission: Make History

When the Aibo project started in 1994, personal entertainment robots seemed like a natural fit for Sony. Sony was a global leader in consumer electronics. And in the 1990s, Japan had more than half of the world’s industrial robots, dominating an industry led by manufacturers like Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric. Robots for the home were also being explored. In 1996, Honda showed off its P2 humanoid robot, a prototype of the groundbreaking ASIMO, which would be unveiled in 2000. Electrolux, based in the United Kingdom, introduced a prototype of its Trilobite robotic vacuum cleaner in 1997, and at iRobot in Boston, Joe Jones was working on what would become the Roomba. It seemed as though the consumer robot was getting closer to reality. Being the first to market was the perfect opportunity for an ambitious global company like Sony.

Aibo was the idea of Sony engineer Toshitada Doi (on left), pictured in 1999 with an Aibo ERS-111. Hideki Noma (on right) holds an Aibo ERS-1000.Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; Right; Timothy Hornyak

Sony’s new robot project was the brainchild of engineer Toshitada Doi, co-inventor of the CD. Doi was inspired by the speed and agility of MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks’s Genghis, a six-legged insectile robot that was created to demonstrate basic autonomous walking functions. Doi, however, had a vision for an ”entertainment robot with no clear role or job.” It was 1994 when his team of about 10 people began full-scale research and development on such a robot.

Hideki Noma joined Sony in 1995. Even then, he had a lifelong love of robots, including participating in robotics contests and researching humanoids in college. “I was assigned to the Sony robot research team’s entertainment robot department,” says Noma. “It had just been established and had few people. Nobody knew Sony was working on robots, and it was a secret even within the company. I wasn’t even told what I would be doing.”

Noma’s new colleagues in Sony’s robot skunk works had recently gone to Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district and brought back boxes of circuit boards and servos. Their first creation was a six-legged walker with antenna-like sensors but more compact than Brooks’s Genghis, at roughly 22 centimeters long. It was clunky and nowhere near cute; if anything, it resembled a cockroach. “When they added the camera and other sensors, it was so heavy it couldn’t stand,” says Noma. “They realized it was going to be necessary to make everything at Sony—motors, gears, and all—or it would not work. That’s when I joined the team as the person in charge of mechatronic design.”

Noma, who is now a senior manager in Sony’s new business development division, remembers that Doi’s catchphrase was “make history.” “Just as he had done with the compact disc, he wanted us to create a robot that was not only the first of its kind, but also one that would have a big impact on the world,” Noma recalls. “He always gently encouraged us with positive feedback.”

“We also grappled with the question of what an ‘entertainment robot’ could be. It had to be something that would surprise and delight people. We didn’t have a fixed idea, and we didn’t set out to create a robot dog.”

The team did look to living creatures for inspiration, studying dog and cat locomotion. Their next prototype lost two of the six legs and gained a head, tail, and more sophisticated AI abilities that created the illusion of canine characteristics.

A mid-1998 version of the robot, nicknamed Mutant, ran on Sony’s Aperios OS, the operating system the company developed to control consumer devices. The robot had 16 degrees of freedom, a million-instructions-per-second (MIPS) 64-bit reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) processor, and 8 megabytes of DRAM, expandable with a PC card. It could walk on uneven surfaces and use its camera to recognize motion and color—unusual abilities for robots of the time. It could dance, shake its head, wag its tail, sit, lie down, bark, and it could even follow a colored ball around. In fact, it was a little bundle of energy.

Looks-wise, the bot had a sleek new “coat” designed by Doi’s friend Hajime Sorayama, an industrial designer and illustrator known for his silvery gynoids, including the cover art for an Aerosmith album. Sorayama gave the robot a shiny, bulbous exterior that made it undeniably cute. Noma, now the team’s product planner and software engineer, felt they were getting closer to the goal. But when he presented the prototype to Otsuki in 1999, Otsuki was unimpressed. That’s when Noma was dispatched to Ryōan-ji to figure out how to make the robot seem not just cute but somehow alive.

Seeking Zen for Aibo at the Rock Garden

Established in 1450, Ryōan-ji is a Rinzai Zen sanctuary known for its meticulously raked rock garden featuring five distinctive groups of stones. The stones invite observers to quietly contemplate the space, and perhaps even the universe, and that’s what Noma did. He realized what Doi wanted Aibo to convey: a sense of tranquility. The same concept had been incorporated into the design of what was arguably Japan’s first humanoid robot, a large, smiling automaton named Gakutensoku that was unveiled in 1928.

The rock garden at the Ryōan-ji Zen temple features carefully composed groupings of stones with unknown meaning. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikipedia

Roboticist Masahiro Mori, originator of the Uncanny Valley concept for android design, had written about the relationship between Buddhism and robots back in 1974, stating, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.” Essentially, he believed that even nonliving things were imbued with spirituality, a concept linked to animism in Japan. If machines can be thought of as embodying tranquility and spirituality, they can be easier to relate to, like living things.

“When you make a robot, you want to show what it can do. But if it’s always performing, you’ll get bored and won’t want to live with it,” says Noma. “Just as cats and dogs need quiet time and rest, so do robots.” Noma modified the robot’s behaviors so that it would sometimes slow down and sleep. This reinforced the illusion that it was not only alive but had a will of its own. Otsuki then gave the little robot dog the green light.

The cybernetic canine was named Aibo for “Artificial Intelligence roBOt” and aibō, which means “partner” in Japanese.

In a press release, Sony billed the machine as “an autonomous robot that acts both in response to external stimuli and according to its own judgment. ‘AIBO’ can express various emotions, grow through learning, and communicate with human beings to bring an entirely new form of entertainment into the home.” But it was a lot more than that. Its 18 degrees of freedom allowed for complex motions, and it had a color charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and sensors for touch, acceleration, angular velocity, and range finding. Aibo had the hardware and smarts to back up Sony’s claim that it could “behave like a living creature.” The fact that it couldn’t do anything practical became irrelevant.

The debut Aibo ERS-110 was priced at 250,000 yen (US $2,500, or a little over $4,700 today). A motion editor kit, which allowed users to generate original Aibo motions via their PC, sold for 50,000 yen ($450). Despite the eye-watering price tag, the first batch of 3,000 robots sold out in 20 minutes.

Noma wasn’t surprised by the instant success. “We aimed to realize a society in which people and robots can coexist, not just robots working for humans but both enjoying a relationship of trust,” Noma says. “Based on that, an entertainment robot with a sense of self could communicate with people, grow, and learn.”

Hideko Mori plays fetch with her Aibo ERS-7 in 2015, after it was returned to her from an Aibo hospital. Aibos are popular with seniors in Japan, offering interactivity and companionship without requiring the level of care of a real dog.Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images

Aibo as a Cultural Phenomenon

Aibo was the first consumer robot of its kind, and over the next four years, Sony released multiple versions of its popular pup across two more generations. Some customer responses were unexpected: as a pet and companion, Aibo was helping empty-nest couples rekindle their relationship, improving the lives of children with autism, and having a positive effect on users’ emotional states, according to a 2004 paper by AI specialist Masahiro Fujita, who collaborated with Doi on the early version of Aibo.

“Aibo broke new ground as a social partner. While it wasn’t a replacement for a real pet, it introduced a completely new category of companion robots designed to live with humans,” says Minoru Asada, professor of adaptive machine systems at Osaka University’s graduate school of engineering. “It helped foster emotional connections with a machine, influencing how people viewed robots—not just as tools but as entities capable of forming social bonds. This shift in perception opened the door to broader discussions about human-robot interaction, companionship, and even emotional engagement with artificial beings.”

Building a Custom Robot

• To create Aibo, Noma and colleagues had to start from scratch—there were no standard CPUs, cameras, or operating systems for consumer robots. They had to create their own, and the result was the Sony Open-R architecture, an unusual approach to robotics that enabled the building of custom machines.
• Announced in 1998, a year before Aibo’s release, Open-R allowed users to swap out modular hardware components, such as legs or wheels, to adapt a robot for different purposes. High-speed serial buses transmitted data embedded in each module, such as function and position, to the robot’s CPU, which would select the appropriate control signal for the new module. This meant the machine could still use the same motion-control software with the new components. The software relied on plug-and-play prerecorded memory cards, so that the behavior of an Open-R robot could instantly change, say, from being a friendly pet to a challenging opponent in a game. A swap of memory cards could also give the robot image- or sound-recognition abilities.
• “Users could change the modular hardware and software components,” says Noma. “The idea was having the ability to add a remote-control function or swap legs for wheels if you wanted.”
• Other improvements included different colors, touch sensors, LED faces, emotional expressions, and many more software options. There was even an Aibo that looked like a lion cub. The various models culminated in the sleek ERS-7, released in three versions from 2003 to 2005.
• Based on Scratch, the visual programming system in the latest versions of Aibo is easy to use and lets owners with limited programming experience create their own complex programs to modify how their robot behaves.
• The Aibo ERS-1000, unveiled in January 2018, has 22 degrees of freedom, a 64-bit quad-core CPU, and two OLED eyes. It’s more puppylike and smarter than previous models, capable of recognizing 100 faces and responding to 50 voice commands. It can even be “potty trained” and “fed” with virtual food through an app.
  —T.H.

Aibo also played a crucial role in the evolution of autonomous robotics, particularly in competitions like RoboCup, notes Asada, who cofounded the robot soccer competition in the 1990s. Whereas custom-built robots were prone to hardware failures, Aibo was consistently reliable and programmable, and so it allowed competitors to focus on advancing software and AI. It became a key tool for testing algorithms in real-world environments.

By the early 2000s, however, Sony was in trouble. Leading the smartphone revolution, Apple and Samsung were steadily chipping away at Sony’s position as a consumer-electronics and digital-content powerhouse. When Howard Stringer was appointed Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO in 2005, he implemented a painful restructuring program to make the company more competitive. In 2006, he shut down the robot entertainment division, and Aibo was put to sleep.

What Sony’s executives may not have appreciated was the loyalty and fervor of Aibo buyers. In a petition to keep Aibo alive, one person wrote that the robot was “an irreplaceable family member.” Aibo owners were naming their robots, referring to them with the word ko (which usually denotes children), taking photos with them, going on trips with them, dressing them up, decorating them with ribbons, and even taking them out on “dates” with other Aibos.

For Noma, who has four Aibos at home, this passion was easy to understand.

Hideki Noma [right] poses with his son Yuto and wife Tomoko along with their Aibo friends. At right is an ERS-110 named Robbie (inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot”), at the center is a plush Aibo named Choco, and on the left is an ERS-1000 named Murphy (inspired by the film Interstellar). Hideki Noma

“Some owners treat Aibo as a pet, and some treat it as a family member,” he says. “They celebrate its continued health and growth, observe the traditional Shichi-Go-San celebration [for children aged 3, 5, and 7] and dress their Aibos in kimonos.…This idea of robots as friends or family is particular to Japan and can be seen in anime like Astro Boy and Doraemon. It’s natural to see robots as friends we consult with and sometimes argue with.”

The Return of Aibo

With the passion of Aibo fans undiminished and the continued evolution of sensors, actuators, connectivity, and AI, Sony decided to resurrect Aibo after 12 years. Noma and other engineers returned to the team to work on the new version, the Aibo ERS-1000, which was unveiled in January 2018.

Fans of all ages were thrilled. Priced at 198,000 yen ($1,760), not including the mandatory 90,000-yen, three-year cloud subscription service, the first batch sold out in 30 minutes, and 11,111 units sold in the first three months. Since then, Sony has released additional versions with new design features, and the company has also opened up Aibo to some degree of programming, giving users access to visual programming tools and an application programming interface (API).

A quarter century after Aibo was launched, Noma is finally moving on to another job at Sony. He looks back on his 17 years developing the robot with awe. “Even though we imagined a society of humans and robots coexisting, we never dreamed Aibo could be treated as a family member to the degree that it is,” he says. “We saw this both in the earlier versions of Aibo and the latest generation. I’m deeply grateful and moved by this. My wish is that this relationship will continue for a long time.”

Whenever Pizza Hut Taiwan releases a new flavor, the internet braces itself. In my decade covering the island’s food scene, I’ve noticed few dishes spark as much excitement—and outrage—as their pies. One commenter on Reddit called their 2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle, “a crime against humanity.” Another called the 2023 April Fools’ special, a ring made out of dough with nothing in the middle, “dumb.”

The Oreo-crusted pie sold out in three days. The giant ring was the best-selling specialty pizza in Taiwanese Pizza Hut history. Contrary to popular disbelief, they seem to know what they’re doing.

Since 2019, the Taiwanese outpost of Pizza Hut has been a bastion of weirdness. They’re the progenitor of a series of eyebrow-raising combinations, from pig’s blood and intestine toppings to boba pizza with milk-tea sauce drizzled on top to spicy hot pot pies. Sometimes, the pizza is even contorted into shapes representing Olympic rings or a cartoon star.

In spring 2024, their latest creation—a turtle-shaped sticky rice pizza with mugwort and red bean—set my social media feeds ablaze. In a seemingly irrelevant twist, the turtle looked as though it had been flattened by a truck and tossed into radioactive sewage. International commenters were bewildered. But Taiwanese netizens immediately recognized it as a riff of a traditional Taiwanese rice pastry tied to the Tomb Sweeping Festival. As for its unconventional appearance, “making a perfect turtle is difficult,” admits Anthony Leung, general manager of Pizza Hut Taiwan.

Offending people, as it turns out, is part of Pizza Hut Taiwan’s marketing playbook. “The whole objective is to get people to talk about Pizza Hut,” Leung tells me.

I meet Leung at the Taipei office of Jardine Restaurant Group, the company that operates the Pizza Hut and KFC franchises in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Vietnam. Dressed sharply in a slim gray blazer, Leung speaks fluent English with a distinct Hong Kong twang. He came to Pizza Hut Taiwan in 2019, and had cut his teeth at multinational consumer goods companies like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

When Leung first arrived in Taiwan, sales at the local Pizza Huts were stagnant. Although the chain had been in Taiwan since 1986, it struggled to capture the everyday consumer because Taiwanese people typically ate pizza only for the holidays, like Lunar New Year, Christmas, and Mother’s Day. It wasn’t an integral part of the Taiwanese diet.

Leung was brought on to ignite the Taiwanese appetite for pizza, and hold their attention. “How do we get people to think and talk about Pizza Hut during the non-holiday season?” he says.

He parsed through the data and noticed that 80 percent of Pizza Hut Taiwan’s sales came from online channels like apps and Pizza Hut’s website. “We are quite a digital company here,” Leung adds.

Inspired by McDonald’s viral black-and-white burgers, which had sparked a surge in online searches for the burger brand, he proposed a progression of shocking toppings that could generate buzz, but were still familiar to the Taiwanese market. His idea was three different pizzas topped with durian, stinky tofu, and boba, respectively.

When he presented his ideas to Pizza Hut’s international team for approval, he was met with skepticism. “The boss looked at me and said, ‘I honestly don’t know whether or not this will work, but we trust our franchisee. You know the customer better.’”

Leung was given the green light for a limited-edition trial run, and in August, October, and November 2019, the flagship pizzas were rolled out.

The strategy proved successful: The pizzas sold out. Though the quirky creations contributed less than 5 percent of total sales, they sparked conversations that ultimately drove more business. “It created double-digit growth in both traffic and revenue for the brand,” says Leung. Suddenly, Pizza Hut became part of everyday talk in Taiwan, well beyond the holiday celebrations, and Leung’s unconventional pizza strategy became a core tenet of the brand’s marketing strategy. “We are the fastest-growing pizza brand [in Taiwan] in the past five years,” he says.

To maintain momentum, Leung and his team roll out roughly six new flavors a year and have a product library stacked with unconventional flavors. He personally taste-tests each creation, a process that can stretch for weeks. Each pizza is evaluated internally for flavor and shock value before launch. They consider everything: type of cheese, crust, number of toppings, taste, and supply chain logistics. “The finances have to make sense,” he says.

On the other side, they’ve cultivated a loyal ecosystem of influencers and diehard fans who follow and taste every new pizza with bated breath.

“People who are excited to try these pizza flavors don’t genuinely think of them as culinary innovations that are meant to be delicious,” says Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University, who has been a fan and consumer of the chain’s ludicrous pizza flavors since 2019. “It’s totally ridiculous and bonkers, and it brings people a sense of excitement because pizza is supposed to be fun.” Nachman was drawn in by the boba pizza, but was especially impressed by the regional sticky rice dumpling pizza of 2021, which had sticky rice stuffed in the crust. “It brought me a lot of joy,” he notes.

Not everyone, however, has been super happy with the pies. “Grandma forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” an Italian commenter wrote on a viral Facebook post touting Pizza Hut’s cilantro, century egg, and blood cake toppings.

But a reaction—whether positive or negative—is exactly what Pizza Hut Taiwan aims for. When it comes to developing new pizzas, their main criteria are clear: “How do we appeal to the Taiwanese tastes and how do we make Italians angry?” Leung says.

In fact, if an idea is not polarizing enough, it gets scrapped. Leung recounts how an idea for a pizza topped with popcorn chicken—bite-size fried chicken seasoned with five spice—was shelved because it was too tame. “It sounds tasty. Why would people talk about it?” he says. Eventually a coworker revived the idea by suggesting they pair the popcorn chicken with deep-fried Oreos and calamari—other popular night market staples. The trio of ingredients would be an homage to Taiwanese street food.

“People thought it was funny,” Leung notes. “It sold through the roof.”

Five years later, Leung acknowledges that the shock factor isn’t as effective as it once was. The appetite for bizarre pizza flavors has reached a point where even extreme ideas struggle to impress. “It’s not going to work forever. People have too high expectations,” he says.

To adapt, they’ve shifted focus to collaborations targeting Gen Z, like partnering with local celebrities to create viral content, and launching themed pizzas tied to popular video game characters or major sports leagues.

Their messaging at times has even veered a bit meta.

In 2020, Pizza Hut Taiwan released a tongue-in-cheek video directed at Italians, with Leung and his team at a press conference solemnly apologizing for their offensive pizza flavors.

“The whole video is that we apologize for all the harm we’ve done to Italians, and that we finally made something really Italian—pasta,” Leung says.

The video got over 200,000 views. After the campaign, Pizza Hut Taiwan’s pasta sales doubled.