39 pages • 1 hour read
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
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Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Love’s Labor Lost”
In the spring of 2009, a therapeutic robot seal made for the elderly, Paro, is introduced. Nursing home residents are happy to interact with it. Turkle additionally finds that My Real Baby is accepted, although she notes that the senior citizens seem more interested in the short-lived study because they get to interact with young, attractive researchers.
In 2005, Turkle attends a symposium titled “Caring Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Eldercare.” She approaches researchers about the implications for the phrasing of the conference’s title. She thinks that it indicates a slippage—that we are now claiming that machines can “care” and that “we ask technology to perform what used to be ‘love’s labor’: taking care of each other” (107).
Turkle speaks with Tim, a middle-aged man who claims that the Paro improves his mother’s life, that she seems livelier, but Turkle questions whether she is less alone than before. She expresses worry that we seem to want to outsource the care of the old or infirm or mentally challenged to robots.
A senior citizen named Andy becomes very attached to a My Real Baby—he does not have many friends. He names the doll and talks to it as if it were real, though he assures the researchers he knows that it is not. It makes him feel safer. His relationship with it evolves, and he begins to treat it as a stand-in for his ex-wife, saying things that he is not able to say to her now.
Johnathan, another senior and former engineer, takes My Real Baby apart when he first gets it but finds a computer chip whose programming he can’t see. Turkle contrasts this with a doll she owned as a child that she took apart; that doll’s innerworkings were more apparent. Jonathan warms to My Real Baby. Talking to it makes him less anxious.
Roboticist Cory Kidd designs a robot intended to act as a diet coach. A middle-aged woman named Rose grows so attached to it that she stalls the pickup and ends up keeping it an extra two weeks. Another experiment subject named Gordon first resists the implication that the robot can have feelings noted in the provided questionnaire but then reveals that he named it. This seems to be universal; people bond with sociable robots, whether they want to or not.
A senior woman named Edna provides a case study where she prefers the toy to her real 2-year-old great-granddaughter seemingly because she can act out motherhood without any of the risks. The robot relaxes her.
Nursebot is a robot that can aid seniors by doing things such as “reminding them of their medication schedule and to eat regular meals” (121). When first introduced to a number of retirement facilities in 2006, it is met with ambivalence. The consensus is that it excels at doing the more chore-like tasks around the house and falls short in its social functions. Turkle is concerned by the way that these robot companions can devalue relationships in general and undermine those already there in a specific sense: “But in the long term, do we really want to make it easier for children to leave their parents?” (126).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Communion”
Twenty-six-year-old Rich participates in an experiment to determine how well the robot Kismet can carry on adult conversation. It begins simply: Rich tries to put Kismet in the best light with his questions, in order to maintain the illusion. Rich talks about his girlfriend, and Kismet responds warmly; Rich moves to more personal topics and gets more flirtatious in tone. He seems to feel a real connection. Turkle assesses this encounter by pointing out that “complicity gratifies by offering a fantasy of near communion” (129).
A second generation of robots includes Domo, an improved version of Kismet. It provides help with household chores. But more than that, in spending time with it, one “feels the robot’s attention; more than this, one senses the robot’s desire” (130). The creator admits when interacting with it and teaching it, he thinks of it as a “creature” more than a machine, complete with its own desires and preferences. He argues that it doesn’t matter if the robot doesn’t care; what matters is what one feels when a robot, for example, holds one’s hand. Turkle disagrees and claims that the convincingly caring façade hides the robot’s “ultimate indifference” (133).
Turkle gives a brief overview of a debate in the AI community over mind/body dualism—whether intelligence is “embodied”—whether a robot must have a body in order to have human-level intelligence. This debate is far from resolved.
In 2005 performance artist Pia Lindman engages with Domo and its creator, Aaron Edsinger, and then creates a series of experimental drawings that depict human and machine melding together to make the point that “the boundaries between humans and things are shifting” (135). She then acts out Domo’s side of the interaction and finds she can play the robot effectively only if she creates a human narrative for herself: “[S]he had to create emotions to become an object without emotion” (137).
Mertz is a robot that improves on several aspects of Kismet. It can speak English. Lindman wants to hook herself up to it, to commune with the machine by having an apparatus force her facial expression into a mirror of the robot’s.
Clifford Nass, a psychologist, has done a number of experiments on people’s social behavior toward technologies, which, independent of their beliefs, tends toward an avoidance of conflict or hurting the computer’s “feelings.” (Turkle puts the word in quotes.)
Turkle believes the idea of “affective computing,” a term coined by Rosalind Picard at MIT, blurs the line between a robot seeming emotional and actually being emotional. She believes it is best perhaps that Lindman has to add in her own emotion when she is studying the relationship between Domo and its creator.
One Israeli entrepreneur imagines a robot that is informed and enlivened by the information in his phone. A man named Tony agonizes over the benefits and costs of giving his aging mother-in-law to the care of a robot. He acknowledges that some of needs he has trump the “luxury of authenticity” (145).
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Here, at the end of the first section, Turkle reaches a more decisive conclusion that a robot’s companionship is fundamentally unfulfilling, even when, for example, Tim claims that his elderly mother seems “livelier” with Paro around. She frames it as an example of “Love’s Labor Lost,” which she uses as one of the section headings. She asks:
if our experience with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful exchange (they perform in a way that persuades us to settle for the ‘acting out’ of caring), can they be good for us? Or, as I have asked, might they be good for us only in the ‘feel good’ sense? (107-08).
The story of Rich and Kismet at the beginning of Chapter 7 shows a glimpse of how easily a “deceitful exchange,” as Turkle sees it, can happen. Turkle portrays Rich as completely “dazzled” by Kismet and openly flirty with it. She again circles back to the idea of complicity and a robot that is so lifelike that it preys on our vulnerabilities for communion, for being enlivened by our robotic creations.
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