There are other debts: Thad Kull tirelessly tracked down sources. Ada Brustein, William Friedberg, Katie Hafner, Roger Lewin, David McIntosh, Katinka Matson, Margaret Morris, Clifford Nass, Susan Pollak, Ellen Poss, Catherine Rea, and Meredith Traquina gave excellent advice at key moments. Jill Ker Conway’s reading of my first full draft provided encouragement and direction. Thomas Kelleher at Basic Books contributed organizational ideas and a much-appreciated line editing; Jennifer Kelland Fagan copyedited this manuscript with great care. Any infelicities of language are surely the result of my not taking their good advice. Grace Costa and Judith Spitzer provided the administrative support that freed my time so I could interview, think, and write.
I have worked with Kelly Gray on six book projects. In each one, her dedication, intelligence, and love of language have been sustaining. In
Alone Together
, whose primary data spans thirty years of life in the computer culture, it was Kelly who helped me find the narrative for the book I wanted to write. Additionally, some of my favorite turns of phrase in this book are ones that Kelly introduced into our many conversations. I wanted to list them; she told me not to, but her modesty should not deceive my readers about her profound contribution.
My work on robotics has been funded by the Intel Corporation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, the Kurzweil Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant # SES-0 115 668, “Relational Artifacts”). Takanori Shibata, the inventor of Paro, provided me with the baby seal robots to use in my studies. The Sony Corporation donated one of their very first AIBOs. My work on adolescents has been funded by the Intel Corporation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Among all this generosity, the contribution of Mitchell Kapor must be singled out. He understood what I was trying to accomplish with an Initiative on Technology and Self and gave it his full support. In all cases, the findings and opinions expressed here are mine and do not reflect the positions of the organizations and individuals who have helped me.
I have worked on the themes of this book for decades. It is certain that I have many unacknowledged debts. I take this opportunity to say thank you.
There is a final debt to my daughter Rebecca. Since she was six, she has patiently made friends with the talkative robots—simple and fancy—that I have brought into our home. I have asked her to take care of Tamagotchis, to play with Kismet and Cog, to befriend our own stay-at-home Paro. The My Real Babies frightened her, but she made a good effort to tell me why. Rebecca calls our basement storage room “the robot cemetery” and doesn’t much like to go down there. I thank Rebecca for her forbearance, for her insightful and decisive editorial support, and for giving me permission to quote her. She refused to friend me on Facebook, but she taught me how to text. The story of digital culture has been the story of Rebecca’s life. The book is written as a letter to her about how her mother sees the conversations in her future.
Now Rebecca is nineteen, and I know that, out of love for me, she is glad this book is finished. As for me, I’m not so sure. Thinking about robots, as I argue in these pages, is a way of thinking about the essence of personhood. Thinking about connectivity is a way to think about what we mean to each other. This book project is over; my preoccupation with its themes stays with me.
Sherry Turkle
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
AUGUST 2010
INTRODUCTION
Alone together
T
echnology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. These days, it suggests substitutions that put the real on the run. The advertising for Second Life, a virtual world where you get to build an avatar, a house, a family, and a social life, basically says, “Finally, a place to love your body, love your friends, and love your life.”
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On Second Life, a lot of people, as represented by their avatars, are richer than they are in first life and a lot younger, thinner, and better dressed. And we are smitten with the idea of sociable robots, which most people first meet in the guise of artificial pets. Zhu Zhu pet hamsters, the “it” toy of the 2009-2010 holiday season, are presented as “better” than any real pet could be. We are told they are lovable and responsive, don’t require cleanup, and will never die.
Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk. A simple story makes this last point, told in her own words by a harried mother in her late forties:
I needed to find a new nanny. When I interview nannies, I like to go to where they live, so that I can see them in their environment, not just in mine. So, I made an appointment to interview Ronnie, who had applied for the job. I show up at her apartment and her housemate answers the door. She is a young woman, around twenty-one, texting on her BlackBerry. Her thumbs are bandaged. I look at them, pained at the tiny thumb splints, and I try to be sympathetic. “That must hurt.” But she just shrugs. She explains that she is still able to text. I tell her I am here to speak with Ronnie; this is her job interview. Could she please knock on Ronnie’s bedroom door? The girl with the bandaged thumbs looks surprised. “Oh no,” she says, “I would never do that. That would be intrusive. I’ll text her.” And so she sent a text message to Ronnie, no more than fifteen feet away.
This book, which completes a trilogy on computers and people, asks how we got to this place and whether we are content to be here.
In
The Second Self
, I traced the subjective side of personal computers—not what computers do for us but what they do to us, to our ways of thinking about ourselves, our relationships, our sense of being human. From the start, people used interactive and reactive computers to reflect on the self and think about the difference between machines and people. Were intelligent machines alive? If not, why not? In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as “sort of” alive—a story that has continued to evolve. In
Life on the Screen
, my focus shifted from how people see computers to how they forge new identities in online spaces. In
Alone Together
, I show how technology has taken both of these stories to a new level.
Computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. They ask us to take care of them; in response, we imagine that they might care for us in return. Indeed, among the most talked about robotic designs are in the area of care and companionship. In summer 2010, there are enthusiastic reports in the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
on robotic teachers, companions, and therapists. And Microsoft demonstrates a virtual human, Milo, that recognizes the people it interacts with and whose personality is sculpted by them. Tellingly, in the video that introduces Milo to the public, a young man begins by playing games with Milo in a virtual garden; by the end of the demonstration, things have heated up—he confides in Milo after being told off by his parents.
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We are challenged to ask what such things augur. Some people are looking for robots to clean rugs and help with the laundry. Others hope for a mechanical bride. As sociable robots propose themselves as substitutes for people, new networked devices offer us machine-mediated relationships with each other, another kind of substitution. We romance the robot and become inseparable from our smartphones. As this happens, we remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines. People talk about Web access on their BlackBerries as “the place for hope” in life, the place where loneliness can be defeated. A woman in her late sixties describes her new iPhone: “It’s like having a little Times Square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.” People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
THE ROBOTIC MOMENT
In late November 2005, I took my daughter Rebecca, then fourteen, to the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From the moment you step into the museum and come face-to-face with a full-size dinosaur, you become part of a celebration of life on Earth, what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful.” Millions upon millions of now lifeless specimens represent nature’s invention in every corner of the globe. There could be no better venue for documenting Darwin’s life and thought and his theory of evolution by natural selection, the central truth that underpins contemporary biology. The exhibition aimed to please and, a bit defensively in these days of attacks on the theory of evolution, wanted to convince.
At the exhibit’s entrance were two giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands, the best-known inhabitants of the archipelago where Darwin did his most famous investigations. The museum had been advertising these tortoises as wonders, curiosities, and marvels. Here, among the plastic models at the museum, was the life that Darwin saw more than a century and a half ago. One tortoise was hidden from view; the other rested in its cage, utterly still. Rebecca inspected the visible tortoise thoughtfully for a while and then said matter-of-factly, “They could have used a robot.” I was taken aback and asked what she meant. She said she thought it was a shame to bring the turtle all this way from its island home in the Pacific, when it was just going to sit there in the museum, motionless, doing nothing. Rebecca was both concerned for the imprisoned turtle and unmoved by its authenticity.
It was Thanksgiving weekend. The line was long, the crowd frozen in place. I began to talk with some of the other parents and children. My question—“Do you care that the turtle is alive?”—was a welcome diversion from the boredom of the wait. A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: “Its water looks dirty. Gross.” More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looked at her, mystified: “But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point.”
The Darwin exhibition put authenticity front and center: on display were the actual magnifying glass that Darwin used in his travels, the very notebook in which he wrote the famous sentences that first described his theory of evolution. Yet, in the children’s reactions to the inert but alive Galápagos tortoise, the idea of the original had no place. What I heard in the museum reminded me of Rebecca’s reaction as a seven-year-old during a boat ride in the postcard-blue Mediterranean. Already an expert in the world of simulated fish tanks, she saw something in the water, pointed to it excitedly, and said, “Look, Mommy, a jellyfish! It looks so realistic!” When I told this story to a vice president at the Disney Corporation, he said he was not surprised. When Animal Kingdom opened in Orlando, populated by “real”—that is, biological—animals, its first visitors complained that they were not as “realistic” as the animatronic creatures in other parts of Disneyworld. The robotic crocodiles slapped their tails and rolled their eyes—in sum, they displayed archetypal “crocodile” behavior. The biological crocodiles, like the Galápagos tortoises, pretty much kept to themselves.
I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin’s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves. I asked the children a further question: “If you put a robot instead of a living turtle in the exhibit, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?” Not really, said many children. Data on aliveness can be shared on a “need-to-know basis”—for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things?
Only a year later, I was shocked to be confronted with the idea that these purposes were more up for grabs than I had ever dreamed. I received a call from a
Scientific American
reporter to talk about robots and our future. During that conversation, he accused me of harboring sentiments that would put me squarely in the camp of those who have for so long stood in the way of marriage for homosexual couples. I was stunned, first because I harbor no such sentiments, but also because his accusation was prompted not by any objection I had made to the mating or marriage of people. The reporter was bothered because I had objected to the mating and marriage of people to robots.
The call had been prompted by a new book about robots by David Levy, a British-born entrepreneur and computer scientist. In 1968 Levy, an international chess master, famously wagered four artificial intelligence (AI) experts that no computer program would defeat him at the game in the subsequent decade. Levy won his bet. The sum was modest, 1,250 British pounds, but the AI community was chastened. They had overreached in their predictions for their young science. It would be another decade before Levy was bested in chess by a computer program, Deep Thought, an early version of the program that beat Gary Kasparov, the reigning chess champion in the 1990s.
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These days, Levy is the chief executive officer at a company that develops “smart” toys for children. In 2009, Levy and his team won—and this for the second time—the prestigious Loebner Prize, widely regarded as the world championship for conversational software. In this contest, Levy’s “chat bot” program was best at convincing people that they were talking to another person and not to a machine.