id="article-body" section="articleBody"> "I'm an IT guy, so I'm just a down-and-out geek. It's all about the AI for me," Chris Benham tells me, as we sit in his home in sleepy Burlington, Wisconsin, roughly 80 miles northwest of Chicago. He invited me to see his Aibo, named Bentley, and to learn exactly what it is that endears people to Sony's robot dog. 

Aibo looks like a puppy, albeit a robo-approximation. It makes vaguely dog-like sounds, walks around, plays with toys, responds to commands, occasionally misbehaves and uses cameras and facial recognition technology to interact differently with each person it encounters.

If you take the "robot" part out of that equation, Aibo is a lot like a real dog. Love it or hate it, that's what makes Aibo so darn compelling. It's also why researchers are studying companion bots more and more, asking important questions about how the AI makes decisions, how it manipulates your emotions and what that could mean as these robots become more pre