Part 1: The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies

In the first half of the book, the author’s focus is on robots and people’s interactions with them at different ages, studying how their role in our society and their uses have changed over the last fifteen years. Some of her experiments included bringing robot toys to schools, sending them home with the children, watching them interact with the more advanced communicable robots at MIT, as well as bringing some of these same robots to elderly individuals to observe their behavior and attitudes towards the robots.

When asking younger kids about how they felt about the robots, their opinions were all very similar. Most of them agreed that the robots, such as ELIZA, Speak and Spell and Sim games Tomagatchis, Furbys, My Real Baby, and AIBO weren’t just a toy to them, they required care and time, just like an actual pet or baby. The more effort the child had to put into taking care of the robot, the more they became attached and dependent on the robots companionship, reliant on the fact that the robots were always available to comfort them when they needed. In the journals Turkle asked the families to keep recording their experiences with the robots they brought home, some of the repeated themes she noticed was that they envisioned that robots were more reliable, could be a better caretaker, provided better companionship, and were more indestructible than humans providing the same services. Because these robots are given human like qualities, we develop relationships with them due to the idea that “we love what we nurture,” so as we interact with our robots, the more they become “alive enough” for us to consider them a companion (31).

During interviews and observations of the elderly’s interactions with robots, the opinions were a lot more varied. Many thought that having a fake baby doll sitting in their room was obnoxious and annoying, while others really enjoyed having a sociable robot to keep them company. The PARO robot, a sociable seal robot, has shown to be beneficial for patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, helping them practice communicating and keeping their minds busy.  The children interviewed thought that the idea of having a robot keeping their grandparents company would be helpful in case something were to happen to them, circling back to how the kids thought robots were “indestructible,” unlike people, who could, for lack of a better phrase, collapse dead at any moment.