Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together"

Children train, feed and play with virtual pets. They enjoy bedtime stories read to them by robotic teddy bears. They feel guilt when they neglect to take care of their machine friends, when one of them dies. These fanciful snapshots are not from some science fiction movie, they’re typical scenes from the late 1980s and early 90s. Anyone who ever played with a Furby, nursed a Tamagotchi or owned a Speak and Spell or a Teddy Ruxpin will recognize these scenarios. These unsophisticated forms of artificial intelligence were welcomed into the homes of countless families over twenty years ago. In the tech world, of course, the 1980s and 90s are ages ago, and artificial intelligence has come a long way. A future with indistinguishably lifelike robots, like the replicants of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is closer than one might think. Robots that were once bedtime buddies are now so much more - they’re caretakers, household servants, companions, therapists and even sex partners. What are the ethical, moral, social and societal impacts and considerations of these technological advancements?

This is what Sherry Turkle explores in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. Part One of Turkle’s book feels like a survey of commercially available and in-development technologies. She describes, in vivid detail, the studies she’s done in schools, nursing homes and other social settings. Turkle has spent her career bringing technologies into these settings to observe how people interact with them. Elementary school children are invited to play with Furbies, a robotic dog named AIBO, and other robotic friends. Retirement community residents are observed with something called Paro, a robotic therapy robot that’s shaped like a baby seal. Paro responds to the owner’s touch, and responds affectionately. Turkle spends time with MIT robotics engineers and observes human interactions with the very Johnny 5-like robot Cog, and its sister machine Kismet.

What emerges is a study not so much in robot behavior, but human. We flesh and blood humans are perfectly willing to accept robots into every aspect of our lives. Very few 90s parents had reservations about putting a Ruxpin in a child’s playroom, and the largest drawback of owning a Furby is that one has to remove its batteries to get it to be quiet. Deep study reveals that we are comfortable with machines in just about every aspect of our lives, and we behave as if they were human. We’ll snuggle with them while we fall asleep, we’ll stroke their fur as we would a real pet, we’ll engage robots in conversation, even tell them our deepest fears and secrets. 

We also react to machines as if they were alive. A furby held upside down cries out as if in pain, and children seeing their playmates torture the toy will rush to its rescue. Those same children feel guilty if they “let [a Tamagotchi] die”. A student who spends time with a sophisticated robot programmed to simulate human conversation becomes annoyed when it malfunctions, and feels jealous when the robot’s attention is diverted to another person in the room. Senior citizens who keep robotic pets talk and interact with them as if they were alive. Turkle explains that we are in the midst of what she calls the “robotic moment”, a time when robots can and do serve our almost every purpose.

Her early research seeks to catalog the human responses and surprising reactions to these machines. Some of the anecdotes will delight and surprise the reader. On more than one occasion the question, “are they alive?” is posed to adults and children alike. Children seem to have the easiest time with this - they’re comfortable with considering a robot “alive enough” for their purposes. They do know the difference between a “robot kind of alive” and the “ human kind”, but when a machine can do everything a babysitter can do, without human mistakes, it hardly matters. A machine is “alive enough” if it provides what children need it to do - if it seems to enjoy conversing and playing with the child. All in all, Turkle finds that humans interact with human-like robots in human ways, probably because it’s what we know how to do. Children are fine with robotic friends. It is adults who grapple more heartedly with the question of what is “alive”.

The second part of Turkle’s book is about what machines have done to human interaction. Indeed technology permeates our culture in unprecedented ways. Whole generations are growing up “tethered” to their technology. Describing this technology as a means of communication is to understate its role in the lives of millennials and those who proceed them. Technology is the lens through which they see the world, but it’s also the way they interact with the world. If there isn’t an app for it, it might as well not exist. 

Turkle explores the impersonal nature of today’s methods of communication. She notes that the average teen sends more than three thousand text messages a month, and today’s world is one in which most young people would choose more impersonal communication methods over ones that require interaction. A text is much more desireable than a phone call. Perhaps it is because one can be more guarded, more scripted and polished in a text. A phone call is live, one has no way to self edit. In a world in which we can interact with virtual tech support assistants, electronic bank tellers, and digital services of every kind, we have little to no need to interact with other people. Technology, robotics and artificial intelligence are not only not helping this situation, they are taking it to the extreme. Lonely lovers chatting with virtual pen pals are scarcely concerned when they find out the object of their missives and affections is a machine. Robots can stand in for pets, lovers and friends. And if they can, why burden ourselves with the messy, fraught, unpredictable nature of human relationships. Artificial intelligence is stable, programmable, and customizable to our needs and desires. Robots don’t get jealous, and if we perceive them as such, the glitch is with us, not them.

All told, Turkle exposes the reader to a staggering wealth of research on new technologies. The questions she raises have no definitive answer, because we haven’t yet reached the pinnacle of our robot saturated culture, but I an inclined to agree with her assertions that the transformation to a technology-dependent society that began long ago, when the first ones and zeroes went out over the wires, is well underway. As Turkle notes in Alone Together, “the question is not whether robots are ready for us, but whether we are ready for robots”.