CHAPTER 2
Alive enough
I
n the 1990s, children spoke about making their virtual creatures more alive by having them escape the com p uter. Furbies, the sensation of the 1998 holiday season, embody this documented dream. If a child wished a Tamagotchi to leap off its screen, it might look a lot like the furry and owl-like Furby. The two digital pets have other things in common. As with a Tamagotchi, how a Furby is treated shapes its personality. And both present themselves as visitors from other worlds. But Furbies are more explicit about their purpose in coming to Earth. They are here to learn about humans. So, each Furby is an anthropologist of sorts and wants to relate to people. They ask children to take care of them and to teach them English. Furbies are not ungrateful: they make demands, but they say, “I love you.”
Furbies, like Tamagotchis, are “always on,” but unlike Tamagotchis, Furbies manifest this with an often annoying, constant chatter.
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To reliably quiet a Furby, you need a Phillips screwdriver to remove its batteries, an operation that causes it to lose all memory of its life and experiences—what it has learned and how it has been treated. For children who have spent many hours “bringing up” their Furbies, this is not a viable option. On a sunny spring afternoon in 1999, I bring eight Furbies to an afternoon playgroup at an elementary school in western Massachusetts. There are fifteen children in the room, from five to eight years old, from the kindergarten through the third grade. I turn on a tape recorder as I hand the Furbies around. The children start to talk excitedly, greeting the Furbies by imitating their voices. In the cacophony of the classroom, this is what the robotic moment sounds like:
He’s a baby! He said, “Yum.” Mine’s a baby? Is this a baby? Is he sleeping now? He burped! What is “be-pah?” He said, “Be-pah.” Let them play together. What does “a lee koo wah” mean? Furby, you’re talking to me. Talk! C’mon boy. Good boy! Furby, talk! Be quiet everybody! Oh, look it, he’s in love with another one! Let them play together! It’s tired. It’s asleep. I’m going to try to feed him. How come they don’t have arms? Look, he’s in love! He called you “Mama.” He said, “Me love you.” I have to feed him. I have to feed mine too. We love you, Furby. How do you make him fall asleep? His eyes are closed. He’s talking with his eyes closed. He’s sleeptalking. He’s dreaming. He’s snoring. I’m giving him shade.
C’mon, Furby, c’mon—let’s go to sleep, Furby. Furby, shh, shh. Don’t touch him. I can make him be quiet. This is a robot. Is this a robot? What has this kind of fur? He’s allergic to me. It’s kind of like it’s alive. And it has a body. It has a motor. It’s a monster. And it’s kind of like it’s real because it has a body. It was alive. It is alive. It’s not alive. It’s a robot.
From the very first, the children make it clear that the Furby is a machine but alive enough to need care. They try to connect with it using everything they have: the bad dreams and scary movies that make one child see the Furby “as a monster” and their understanding of loneliness, which encourages another to exhort, “Let them play together!” They use logic and skepticism: Do biological animals have “this kind of fur?” Do real animals have motors? Perhaps, although this requires a new and more expansive notion of what a motor can be. They use the ambiguity of this new object to challenge their understanding of what they think they already know. They become more open to the idea of the biological as mechanical and the mechanical as biological. Eight-year-old Pearl thinks that removing the batteries from a Furby causes it to die and that people’s death is akin to “taking the batteries out of a Furby.”
Furbies reinforce the idea that they have a biology: each is physically distinct, with particular markings on its fur, and each has some of the needs of living things. For example, a Furby requires regular feeding, accomplished by depressing its tongue with one’s finger. If a Furby is not fed, it becomes ill. Nursing a Furby back to health always requires more food. Children give disease names to Furby malfunctions. So, there is Furby cancer, Furby flu, and Furby headache.
Jessica, eight, plays with the idea that she and her Furby have “body things” in common, for example, that headache. She has a Furby at home; when her sisters pull its hair, Jessica worries about its pain: “When I pull my hair it really hurts, like when my mother brushes the tangles. So, I think [the Furby’s hair pulls] hurt too.” Then, she ponders her stomach. “There’s a screw in my belly button,” she says. “[The screw] comes out, and then blood comes out.” Jessica thinks that people, like Furbies, have batteries. “There are hearts, lungs, and a big battery inside.” People differ from robots in that our batteries “work forever like the sun.” When children talk about the Furby as kin, they experiment with the idea that they themselves might be almost machine. Ideas about the human as machine or as joined to a machine are played out in classroom games.
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In their own way, toy robots prepare a bionic sensibility. There are people who do, after all, have screws and pins and chips and plates in their flesh. A recent recipient of a cochlear implant describes his experience of his body as “rebuilt.”
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We have met Wilson, seven, comfortable with his Furby as both machine and creature. Just as he always “hears the machine” in the Furby, he finds the machine in himself. As the boy sings improvised love songs about the robot as a best friend, he pretends to use a screwdriver on his own body, saying, “I’m a Furby.” Involved in a second-grade class project of repairing a broken Furby by dismantling it, screw by screw, Wilson plays with the idea of the Furby’s biological nature: “I’m going to get [its] baby out.” And then he plays with the idea of his own machine nature: he applies the screwdriver to his own ankle, saying, “I’m unscrewing my ankle.”
Wilson enjoys cataloguing what he and the Furby have in common. Most important for Wilson is that they “both like to burp.” In this, he says, the Furby “is just like me—I love burping.” Wilson holds his Furby out in front of him, his hands lightly touching the Furby’s stomach, staring intently into its eyes. He burps just after or just before his Furby burps, much as in the classic bonding scene in
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial
between the boy Elliott and the visitor from afar. When Wilson describes his burping game, he begins by saying that he makes his Furby burp, but he ends up saying that his Furby makes him burp. Wilson likes the sense that he and his Furby are in sync, that he can happily lose track of where he leaves off and the Furby begins.
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WHAT DOES A FURBY WANT?
When Wilson catalogues what he shares with his Furby, there are things of the body (the burping) and there are things of the mind. Like many children, he thinks that because Furbies have language, they are more “peoplelike” than a “regular” pet. They arrive speaking Furbish, a language with its own dictionary, which many children try to commit to memory because they would like to meet their Furbies more than half way. The Furby manual instructs children, “I can learn to speak English by listening to you talk. The more you play with me, the more I will use your language.” Actually, Furby English emerges over time, whether or not a child talks to the robot. (Furbies have no hearing or language-learning ability.
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) But until age eight, children are convinced by the illusion and believe they are teaching their Furbies to speak. The Furbies are alive enough to need them.
Children enjoy the teaching task. From the first encounter, it gives them something in common with their Furbies and it implies that the Furbies can grow to better understand them. “I once didn’t know English,” says one six-year-old. “And now I do. So I know what my Furby is going through.” In the classroom with Furbies, children shout to each other in competitive delight: “My Furby speaks more English than yours! My Furby speaks English.”
I have done several studies in which I send Furbies home with schoolchildren, often with the request that they (and their parents) keep a “Furby diary.” In my first study of kindergarten to third graders, I loan the Furbies out for two weeks at a time. It is not a good decision. I do not count on how great will be children’s sense of loss when I ask them to return the Furbies. I extend the length of the loans, often encouraged by parental requests. Their children have grown too attached to give up the robots. Nor are they mollified by parents’ offers to buy them new Furbies. Even more so than with Tamagotchis, children attach to a particular Furby, the one they have taught English, the one they have raised.
For three decades, in describing people’s relationships with computers, I have often used the metaphor of the Rorschach, the inkblot test that psychologists use as a screen onto which people can project their feelings and styles of thought. But as children interact with sociable robots like Furbies, they move beyond a psychology of projection to a new psychology of engagement. They try to deal with the robot as they would deal with a pet or a person. Nine-year-old Leah, in an after-school playgroup, admits, “It’s hard to turn it [the Furby] off when it is talking to me.” Children quickly understand that to get the most out of your Furby, you have to pay attention to what it is telling you. When you are with a Furby, you can’t play a simple game of projective make-believe. You have to continually assess your Furby’s “emotional” and “physical” state. And children fervently believe that the child who loves his or her Furby best will be most loved in return.
This mutuality is at the heart of what makes the Furby, a primitive exemplar of sociable robotics, different from traditional dolls. As we’ve seen, such relational artifacts do not wait for children to “animate” them in the spirit of a Raggedy Ann doll or a teddy bear. They present themselves as already animated and ready for relationship. They promise reciprocity because, unlike traditional dolls, they are not passive. They make demands. They present as having their own needs and inner lives. They teach us the rituals of love that will make them thrive. For decades computers have asked us to
think
with them; these days, computers and robots, deemed sociable, affective, and relational, ask us to
feel
for and with them.
Children see traditional dolls as they want them or need them to be. For example, an eight-year-old girl who feels guilty about breaking her mother’s best crystal pitcher might punish a row of Barbie dolls. She might take them away from their tea party and put them in detention, doing unto the dolls what she imagines should be done unto her. In contrast, since relational artifacts present themselves as having minds and intentions of their own, they cannot be so easily punished for one’s own misdeeds. Two eight-year-old girls comment on how their “regular dolls” differ from the robotic Furbies. The first says, “A regular doll, like my Madeleine doll . . . you can make it go to sleep, but its eyes are painted open, so, um, you cannot get them to close their eyes.... Like a Madeleine doll cannot go, ‘Hello, good morning.’” But this is precisely the sort of thing a Furby can do. The second offers, “The Furby tells you what it wants.”
Indeed, Furbies come with manuals that provide detailed marching orders. They want language practice, food, rest, and protestations of love. So, for example, the manual instructs, “Make sure you say ‘HEY FURBY! I love you!’ frequently so that I feel happy and know I’m loved.” There is general agreement among children that a penchant for giving instructions distinguishes Furbies from traditional dolls. A seven-year-old girl puts it this way: “Dolls let you tell them what they want. The Furbies have their own ideas.” A nine-year-old boy sums up the difference between Furbies and his action figures: “You don’t play with the Furby, you sort of hang out with it. You do try to get power over it, but it has power over you too.”
Children say that traditional dolls can be “hard work” because you have to do all the work of giving them ideas; Furbies are hard work for the opposite reason. They have plenty of ideas, but you have to give them what they want and when they want it. When children attach to a doll through the psychology of projection, they attribute to the doll what is most on their mind. But they need to accommodate a Furby. This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.
Daisy, six, with a Furby at home, believes that each Furby’s owner must help his or her Furby fulfill its mission to learn about people. “You have to teach it; when you buy it, that is your job.” Daisy tells me that she taught her Furby about Brownie Girl Scouts, kindergarten, and whales. “It’s alive; I teach it about whales; it loves me.” Padma, eight, says that she likes meeting what she calls “Furby requests” and thinks that her Furby is “kind of like a person” because “it talks.” She goes on: “It’s kind of like me because I’m a chatterbox.” After two weeks, it is time for Padma to return her Furby, and afterward she feels regret: “I miss how it talked, and now it’s so quiet at my house.... I didn’t get a chance to make him a bed.”
After a month with her Furby, Bianca, seven, speaks with growing confidence about their mutual affection: “I love my Furby because it loves me. . . . It was like he really knew me.”
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She knows her Furby well enough to believe that “it doesn’t want to miss fun . . . at a party.” In order to make sure that her social butterfly Furby gets some rest when her parents entertain late into the evening, Bianca clips its ears back with clothespins to fool the robot into thinking that “nothing is going on . . . so he can fall asleep.” This move is ineffective, and all of this activity is exhausting, but Bianca calmly sums up her commitment: “It takes lots of work to take care of these.”