Romancing the Robot

                Robot love.  Or, in more general terms, loving the “almost alive” contraption, whether it be human, animal, or creature.  Sherry Turkle begins her book, Alone Together, speaking of just that: robots and sex.  While seemingly humorous, Turkle begins to tackle a wide ranging set of arguments, delving into the perhaps not so far flung future of robot companions as well as the current experiences of being glued to Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids.  She argues, an argument that will continue through the remainder of the book, that these online relationships, these robot relationships where we are attached to our technology are harmful, that they, while bringing us closer together, harshly separate us from one another as well.  They have the ability to stunt our formation as human beings.

                Turkle touches upon two very interesting notes within her first few pages which I feel are evident throughout the entirety of the first half of the book.  Turkle’s two comments are that technology allows us to develop relationships without the intimacy associated with “real” relationships, thereby damaging our growing sense of self, and two, that with this influx of technology, we have begun to “settle” for the guise of care, of intimacy.

                Settling.  Turkle mentions this often, especially in reference to the examples she gives about My Real Talking Baby, Paro, and the Furby.  In a series of experiences, Turkle would present children (or the elderly) with various robots.  These creatures are representative of a baby, a seal, and an odd gremlin type creature, and all are undeniably machines.  They may have outer skins that resemble real creatures but they do not have internal organs, brains, or more important, hearts.  This is integral, and Turkle stresses it several times throughout the course of this first section. 

                When presented with such creatures, Turkle finds that the participants understand that the toys are fake, nothing more than robots, but they are “almost alive.”  This concept of “almost alive” allows us to settle, allows us, as humans to take what we can get without putting the work into formulating deeper relationships—or, more specifically, it allows us to go without the heartache.

                However, when Turkle meets with these children and adults later, she realizes that despite knowing that their toys are just that, toys, the participants express a distinct and profound love of and loss of these toys.  For instance, when My Real Talking Baby is given to a grandmother in the presence of her great grandchild, she begins to ignore the real child, instead focusing on this toy which allows her to embrace the illusion of intimacy and love.  The robot child is pleasant and seems to focus all of it’s attention on the grandmother.  This same phenomenon happens when one child has to give his Furby back.  Unable to bear the loss of returning the Furby, and far from placated by his mother’s promise to buy him his own Furby, the reason soon came out.  He felt attached.  The Furby loved him and he loved the Furby.  It cared about him.  He had settled for the “almost alive” creature that gave him what other people in his life could not.

                Turkle is obviously disturbed by that, especially when she begins talking to children about their child care providers.  These children are evidently expressing a lack in their lives, a lack of care or good providers of care when their parents are not around.  To Turkle, this willingness to consider robot caregivers seems indicative of deeper problems.  How can a robot provide warmth and love if a child has skinned his or her knee?  How can a robot offer up words of advice?  In some ways, Turkle seems to be aligning the robot with the television babysitter.

                We’ve been in the world of robots for awhile now, and as technology continues to improve, robots are only going to become more frequent.  We’ll deal with them more, and while dealing with an ATM might not be disturbing, the concept of robot pets that command as much love as a flesh and blood pet or robots that serve as companions to provide us with instantaneous love and affection, are progressively scary.  Several years ago a movie came out entitled Smart House.  Aired on the Disney Channel, this family wins a house controlled by PAT, a female robot.  Now, in a home where the mother was deceased, it seemed like a great idea, but the robot PAT became infatuated with the family and the husband, turning a seemingly innocent cool idea into something much more sinister.  While Turkle does not conjecture over the dangerous possibilities of overly smart robots, she does express her concern that humans, with relying on robots for companionship, are settling without experiencing or building from the core experiences which make us human—which, according to Turkle is the ups and downs associated with developing human relationships, the ability to “see the world through the eyes of another” (55).

Questions:

If you had the opportunity, would you chose a robot companion over a human one?  Do you see a problem with this, as Turkle seems to?

Turkle says that we imagine that these robots can care for us.  Is that so?  Or, because the internet allows us to develop such fast and strong relationships, do we really understand the concept of caring?  Has the concept of caring changed?

Turkle speaks about the problems people have when they hear a Furby say it is scared.  Because we become distraught over a Furby telling the user it is scared, we defy what we know to be true—that the toy is fake.  So, basically, does our need to care come down to language?  What about the Furby telling us it is scared makes us reconsider its status as toy?