This is a particularly weird time to be raising a kid who is obsessed with robots, because the whole culture is obsessed with them. Bots. Drones. AI. Blade Runner. Stories about robots (at least the ones I know of) are almost always stories about what makes humans human and what it means to be one. That, I think, is also exactly what Owen is trying to figure out: by learning what a robot is, what it doesn’t have that he does have, he’s figuring out his body and his emotions and what he is. (Do robots poop? Do robots get scared?) How interesting to have a kid trying to figure out, essentially, what the wider culture is trying to figure out: What are we? What are we good for? Are we machines? Can we be replaced by them? Do androids dream of electric sheep?