Virtuality and loneliness
I have found a few links about virtuality and loneliness. First this post tells about the Tamagotchis and the issues it raises for young kids. This article talks about virtual pets as a way for old people to overcome loneliness. I also found this post where a mother tells about how his 6-year old boy was extremely sad when, right after buying a tamagotchi, he found out his tamagotchi was a girl! There is this issue I would like to raise about how these electronic toys, and viruality, are crafted in a very consumerist way. It's not just that it's a way to escape your life, it also makes everything more easy: in the virtual world, animals have three buttons and you can revive them by pressing "reset". Again, this thing with old people is so simplistic imho, it feels like a way for us to avoid taking care of them. It's all so much easier to give these elder people animated teddy bears than to give them some company.
Responsibility
There is the notion of responsibility behind all this that is kind of worrying wrt my project.
The problem is that if I create an artificial creature that is too simple and easy, then it removes your sense of responsibility because it's NOT like a real (aka complex) living creature, it's too functionalist (like Tamagotchi's ABC buttons).
On the other hands, if the object is complex, with its own agenda, etc. then it might also removes your sense of responsibility wrt real living creatures. Because even if it somehow manifests some living-like behavior, in the end you know it's a pile of replaceable electronic pieces. So taking care of such a creature might feel just like taking care of a real, living animal, but it is not. Suppose it breaks, as opposed to an animal dying. I guess you won't feel so bad about it: it's just electronic junk after all. But then, if you DO feel bad, and sad, then maybe it's even worse because it means you have attributed to that pile of junk an importance and empathy similar to that of a real, living animal. But it's not the same, because seen from the inside, we have strong reasons to believe that a living animal has some form of consciousness, in the sense that it can feel emotions, where the artificial one cannot.
Real dogs in Japan
I've found this article talking about how, in Japan, the fad for high-breed dogs has lead to a situation where dogs have strong malformations. They are often produced like an industry and people seem to forget that they are more than just cute little things, but living animals.