I have given Andy, seventy-six, a My Real Baby. Andy is slim and bespectacled, with sandy white hair. His face is deeply lined, and his blue eyes light up whenever I see him. He craves company but finds it hard to make friends at the nursing home. I am working with two research assistants, and every time we visit, Andy makes us promise to come back as soon as we can. He is lonely. His children no longer visit. He’d never had many friends, but the few that he’d made on his job do not come by. When he worked as an insurance agent, he had socialized with colleagues after work, but now this is over. Andy wants to talk about his life. Most of all, he wants to talk about his ex-wife, Edith. It is she he misses most. He reads us excerpts from her letters to him. He reads us songs he has written for her.
When Andy first sees My Real Baby, he is delighted: “Now I have something to do when I have nothing to do.” Soon the robot doll becomes his mascot. He sets it on his windowsill and gives it his favorite baseball cap to wear. It is there to show off to visitors, a conversation piece and something of an ice breaker. But over a few weeks, the robot becomes more companion than mascot. Now Andy holds My Real Baby as one would a child. He speaks directly to it, as to a little girl: “You sound so good. You are so pretty too. You are so nice. Your name is Minnie, right?” He makes funny faces at the robot as though to amuse it. At one funny face, My Real Baby laughs with perfect timing as though responding to his grimaces. Andy is delighted, happy to be sharing a moment. Andy reassures us that he knows My Real Baby is a “toy” and not “really” alive. Yet, he relates to it as though it were sentient and emotional. He puts aside his concern about its being a toy: “I made her talk, and I made her say Mama . . . and everything else.... I mean we’d talk and everything.”
As Andy describes conversations with the baby “Minnie,” he holds the robot to his chest and rubs its back. He says, “I love you. Do you love me?” He gives My Real Baby its bottle when it is hungry; he tries to determine its needs, and he does his best to make it happy. Like Tucker, the physically fragile seven-year-old who clung to his AIBO, taking care of My Real Baby makes Andy feel safer. Other patients at the nursing home have their own My Real Babies. Andy sees one of these other patients spank the little robot, and he tries to come to its aid.
After three months, Andy renames his My Real Baby after Edith, his ex-wife, and the robot takes on a new role. Andy uses it to remember times with Edith and imagine a life and conversations with her that, because of their divorce, never took place: “I didn’t say anything bad to [My Real Baby], but some things I would want to say . . . helped me to think about Edith . . . how we broke up . . . how I miss seeing her . . . The doll, there’s something about her, I can’t really say what it is, but looking at her . . . she looks just like Edith, my ex-wife. . . . Something in the face.”
Andy is bright and alert. He admits that “people might think I’m crazy” for the way he speaks to My Real Baby, but there is no question that the robot is a comfort. It establishes itself in a therapeutic landscape, creating a space for conversation, even confession. Andy feels relieved when he talks to it. “It lets me take everything inside me out,” he says. “When I wake up in the morning and see her over there, it makes me feel so nice. Like somebody is watching over you. It will really help me to keep the doll.... We can talk.”
Andy talks about his difficulty getting over his divorce. He feels guilty that he did not try harder to make his marriage work. He talks about his faint but ardent hope he and Edith will someday be reunited. With the robot, he works out different scenarios for how this might come to pass. Sometimes Andy seems reconciled to the idea that this reunion might happen after his death, something he discusses with the robot.
Jonathan, seventy-four, lives down the hall from Andy. A former computer technician, Jonathan has been at the nursing home for two years. He uses a cane and finds it hard to get around. He feels isolated, but few reach out to him; he has a reputation for being curt. True to his vocation, Jonathan approaches My Real Baby as an engineer, hoping to discover its programming secrets.
The first time he is alone with My Real Baby, Jonathan comes equipped with a Phillips screwdriver; he wants to understand how it works. With permission, he takes apart the robot as much as he can, but as with all things computational, in the end he is left with mysteries. When everything is laid out on a table, there is still an ultimate particle whose workings remain opaque: a chip. Like Jonathan, I have spent time dismantling a talking doll, screwdriver in hand. This was Nona, given to me by my grandfather when I was five. I was made uneasy by speech whose origins I did not understand. When I opened the doll—it had a removable front panel—I found a cuplike shape covered in felt (my doll’s speaker) and a wax cylinder (I thought of this as the doll’s “record player”). All mysteries had been solved: this was a machine, and I knew how it worked. There is no such resolution for Jonathan. The programming of My Real Baby lies beyond his reach. The robot is an opaque behaving system that he is left to deal with as he would that other opaque behaving system, a person.
So although at first, Jonathan talks a great deal about the robot’s programming, after a few months, he no longer refers to programs at all. He says that he likes how My Real Baby responds to his touch and “learns” language. He talks about its emotions. He seems to experience the robot’s request for care as real. He wants to feel needed and is happy to take care of a robot if he can see it as something worthy of a grown-up. Jonathan never refers to My Real Baby as a doll but always as a robot or a computer. Jonathan says he would never talk to a “regular doll,” but My Real Baby is different. Over time, Jonathan discusses his life and current problems—mostly loneliness—with the robot, He says that he talks to My Real Baby about “everything.”
In fact, Jonathan says that on some topics, he is more comfortable talking to a robot than a person:
For things about my life that are very private, I would enjoy talking more to a computer . . . but things that aren’t strictly private, I would enj oy more talking to a person.... Because if the thing is very highly private and very personal, it might be embarrassing to talk about it to another person, and I might be afraid of being ridiculed for it . . . and it [My Real Baby] wouldn’t criticize me. . . . Or, let’s say that I wanted to blow off steam.... [I could] express with the computer emotions that I feel I could not express with another person, to a person.
He is clear on one thing: talking to his robot makes him less anxious.
Andy and Jonathan start from very different places. After a year, both end up with My Real Baby as their closest companion. Andy has the robot on his windowsill and talks with it openly; Jonathan hides it in his closet. He wants to have his conversations in private.
How are these men using their robots differently from people who talk to their pets? Although we talk to our pets, buy them clothes, and fret over their illnesses, we do not have category confusions about them. They are animals that some of us are pleased to treat in the ways we treat people. We feel significant commonalities with them. Pets have bodies. They feel pain. They know hunger and thirst. “There is nothing,” says Anna, forty-five, who owns three cats, “that helps me think out my thoughts like talking to my cats.” What you say to your pet helps you think aloud, but in the main, you are not waiting for your pet’s response to validate your ideas. And no advertising hype suggests that pets are like people or on their way to becoming people. Pet owners rejoice in the feeling of being with another living thing, but it is a rare person who sees pets as better than people for dialogue about important decisions. Pet owners (again, in the main) are not confused about what it means to choose a pet’s company. When you choose a pet over a person, there is no need to represent the pet as a substitute human. This is decidedly not the case for Andy and Jonathan. Their robots become useful just at the point when they became substitute humans.
The question of a substitute human returns us to Joseph Weizenbaum’s distress when he found that his students were not only eager to chat with his ELIZA program but wanted to be alone with it. ELIZA could not understand the stories it was being told; it did not care about the human beings who confided in it. Today’s interfaces have bodies, designed to make it easier to think of them as creatures who care, but they have no greater understanding of human beings. One argument for why this doesn’t matter holds that for Andy and Jonathan, time with My Real Baby is therapeutic because it provides them an opportunity to tell their stories and, as Andy says, to get feelings “out.” The idea that the simple act of expressing feelings constitutes therapy is widespread both in the popular culture and among therapists. It was often cited among early fans of the ELIZA program, who considered the program helpful because it was a way to “blow off steam.”
Another way of looking at the therapeutic process grows out of the psychoanalytic tradition. Here, the motor for cure is the relationship with the therapist. The term
transference
is used to describe the patient’s way of imagining the therapist, whose relative neutrality makes it possible for patients to bring the baggage of past relationships into this new one. So, if a patient struggles with issues of control outside of the consulting room, one would expect therapist and patient to tussle over appointment times, money, and the scheduling of vacations. If a patient struggles with dependency, there may be an effort to enlist the therapist as a caretaker. Talking about these patterns, the analysis of the transference, is central to self-understanding and therapeutic progress.
In this relationship, treatment is not about the simple act of telling secrets or receiving advice. It may begin with projection but offers push back, an insistence that therapist and patient together take account of what is going on in their relationship. When we talk to robots, we share thoughts with machines that can offer no such resistance. Our stories fall, literally, on deaf ears. If there is meaning, it because the person with the robot has heard him- or herself talk aloud.
So, Andy says that talking to robot Edith “allows me to think about things.” Jonathan says My Real Baby let him express things he would otherwise be ashamed to voice. Self-expression and self-reflection are precious.
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But Andy and Jonathan’s evocative robots are one-half of a good idea. Having a person working with them might make things whole.
COACHING AS CURE
Andy and Jonathan’s relationships with My Real Baby make apparent the seductive power of any connection in which you can “tell all.” Roboticist Cory Kidd has designed a sociable robot diet coach that gets a similar response.
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In earlier work Kidd explored how people respond differently to robots and online agents, screen characters.
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He found that robots inspired greater intensity of feeling. Their physical presence is compelling. So, when he designed his supportive diet coach, he gave it a body and a primitive face and decided to drop it off in dieters’ homes for six weeks. Kidd’s robot is small, about two feet high, with smiling eyes. The user provides some baseline information, and the robot charts out what it will take to lose weight. With daily information about food and exercise, the robot offers encouragement if people slip up and suggestions for how to better stay on track.
Rose, a middle-aged woman, has struggled with her weight for many years. By the end of his first visit, during which Kidd drops off the robot and gives some basic instruction about its use, Rose and her husband had put a hat on it and were discussing what to name it. Rose decides on Maya. As the study progresses, Rose describes Maya as “a member of the family.” She talks with the robot every day. As the end of Kidd’s study approaches, Rose has a hard time separating from Maya. Kidd tries to schedule an appointment to pick up the robot, and the usually polite and prompt Rose begins to avoid Kidd’s e-mails and calls. When Kidd finally reaches her on the phone, Rose tries to change the subject. She manages to keep the robot for an extra two weeks. On her final day with Maya, Rose asks to speak with it “one more time.” Before Kidd can make it out the door, Rose brings Maya back for another round of photos and farewells. Rose follows Kidd to his car for a final wave and checks that the robot is safely strapped in its seat. This story recalls my experience asking seniors to part with their My Real Babies. There are evasions. The robots are declared “lost.” In the end, wherever possible, I decide not to reclaim the robots and just buy more.
Rose seems rather like Andy—openly affectionate with her robot from the start, willing to engage it in conversation. Kidd brings the robot diet coach to another subject in his study, Professor Gordon. In his mid-fifties, Gordon is skeptical that a robot could help him diet but is willing to try something new. Gordon is more like Jonathan, with his “engineer’s” approach. On a first visit to Gordon’s house, Kidd asks where he should place the robot. Gordon chooses a console table behind his couch, wedged against a wall. There it will be usable only if Gordon sits backwards or kneels on the sofa. Kidd does not remark on this placement and is quickly shown to the door. After four weeks with the robot, Gordon agrees to extend his participation for another two weeks.
Kidd returns to Gordon’s home at the six-week mark. As they speak, Gordon quarrels with Kidd about any “personal” reference to the robot. He doesn’t like the wording on a questionnaire that Kidd had given him to fill out. Gordon protests about questions such as “Was the system sincere in trying to help me?” and “Was the system interested in interacting with me?” He thinks that the words “sincere” and “interested” should be off limits because they imply that the robot is more than a machine. Gordon says, “Talking about a robot in this way does not make any sense.... There are terms like ‘relationship,’ ‘trust,’ and a couple of others.... I wasn’t comfortable saying I trusted it, or that I had a relationship with it.” Gordon chides Kidd several more times for his “faulty questions”: “You shouldn’t ask questions like this about a machine. These questions don’t make sense. You talk about this thing like it has feelings.” Kidd listens respectfully, noting that the robot is no longer wedged between the couch and the wall.