Alone Together (6 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
And with constant connection comes new anxieties of disconnection, a kind of panic. Even Randy, who longs for a phone call from Nora on such an important matter as her wedding, is never without his BlackBerry. He holds it in his hands during our entire conversation. Once, he puts it in his pocket. A few moments later, it comes out, fingered like a talisman. In interviews with young and old, I find people genuinely terrified of being cut off from the “grid.” People say that the loss of a cell phone can “feel like a death.” One television producer in her mid-forties tells me that without her smartphone, “I felt like I had lost my mind.” Whether or not our devices are in use, without them we feel disconnected, adrift. A danger even to ourselves, we insist on our right to send text messages while driving our cars and object to rules that would limit the practice.
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Only a decade ago, I would have been mystified that fifteen-year-olds in my urban neighborhood, a neighborhood of parks and shopping malls, of front stoops and coffee shops, would feel the need to send and receive close to six thousand messages a month via portable digital devices or that best friends would assume that when they visited, it would usually be on the virtual real estate of Facebook .
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It might have seemed intrusive, if not illegal, that my mobile phone would tell me the location of all my acquaintances within a ten-mile radius.
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But these days we are accustomed to all this. Life in a media bubble has come to seem natural. So has the end of a certain public etiquette: on the street, we speak into the invisible microphones on our mobile phones and appear to be talking to ourselves. We share intimacies with the air as though unconcerned about who can hear us or the details of our physical surroundings.
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It might have seemed intrusive, if not illegal, that my mobile phone would tell me the location of all my acquaintances within a ten-mile radius.
21
But these days we are accustomed to all this. Life in a media bubble has come to seem natural. So has the end of a certain public etiquette: on the street, we speak into the invisible microphones on our mobile phones and appear to be talking to ourselves. We share intimacies with the air as though unconcerned about who can hear us or the details of our physical surroundings.
I once described the computer as a second self, a mirror of mind. Now the metaphor no longer goes far enough. Our new devices provide space for the emergence of a new state of the self, itself, split between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology.
Teenagers tell me they sleep with their cell phone, and even when it isn’t on their person, when it has been banished to the school locker, for instance, they know when their phone is vibrating. The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities. They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated. They become confused about companionship. Can they find it in their lives on the screen? Could they find it with a robot? Their digitized friendships—played out with emoticon emotions, so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection—may prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that could bring superficiality to a higher power, that is, for relationships with the inanimate. They come to accept lower expectations for connection and, finally, the idea that robot friendships could be sufficient unto the day.
Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself. We come to see what robots offer as relationship. The simplification of relationship is no longer a source of complaint. It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm.
Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead? Many roboticists are enthusiastic about having robots tend to our children and our aging parents, for instance. Are these psychologically, socially, and ethically acceptable propositions? What are our responsibilities here? And are we comfortable with virtual environments that propose themselves not as places for recreation but as new worlds to live in? What do we have, now that we have what we say we want—now that we have what technology makes easy?
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This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists.
ROMANCING THE MACHINE: TWO STORIES22
This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists.
I tell two stories in
Alone Together
: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all. I do not tell tomorrow’s story to predict an exotic future. Rather, as a dream in development, sociable robots cast new light on our current circumstances. Our willingness to consider their company says a lot about the dissatisfactions we feel in our networked lives today.
Alone Together
: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all. I do not tell tomorrow’s story to predict an exotic future. Rather, as a dream in development, sociable robots cast new light on our current circumstances. Our willingness to consider their company says a lot about the dissatisfactions we feel in our networked lives today.
Part One, “The Robotic Moment,” moves from the sociable robots in children’s playrooms to the more advanced ones in the laboratory and those being developed and deployed for elder care. As the robots become more complex, the intensity of our relationships to them ramps up. I begin my story with a kind of prehistory, going back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the introduction of the first animated, interactive computer toys into children’s lives. It was a time of curiosity about the nature of these new machines. These first computational objects of the playroom provoked a change in children’s way of sorting out the question of aliveness. Decisions about whether something was alive would no longer turn on how something moved but on what it knew: physics gave way to psychology. This set the stage for how in the late 1990s, the ground would shift again when children met sociable robots that asked for care. Unlike traditional dolls, the robots wouldn’t thrive without attention, and they let you know how you were doing. But even the most primitive of these objects—Tamagotchis and Furbies—made children’s evaluation of aliveness less about cognition than about an object’s seeming potential for mutual affection. If something asks for your care, you don’t want to analyze it but take it “at interface value.” It becomes “alive enough” for relationship.
And with this, the heightened expectations begin. Now—for adults and children—robots are not seen as machines but as “creatures,” and then, for most people, the quotation marks are dropped. Curiosity gives way to a desire to care, to nurture. From there, we look toward companionship and more. So, for example, when sociable robots are given to the elderly, it is with the suggestion that robots will cure the troubles of their time of life. We go from curiosity to a search for communion. In the company of the robotic, people are alone, yet feel connected:
in solitude, new intimacies.
in solitude, new intimacies.
Part Two, “Networked,” turns to the online life as it reshapes the self. I acknowledge the many positive things that the network has to offer—enhancing friendship, family connections, education, commerce, and recreation. The triumphalist narrative of the Web is the reassuring story that people want to hear and that technologists want to tell. But the heroic story is not the whole story. In virtual words and computer games, people are flattened into personae. On social networks, people are reduced to their profiles. On our mobile devices, we often talk to each other on the move and with little disposable time—so little, in fact, that we communicate in a new language of abbreviation in which letters stand for words and emoticons for feelings. We don’t ask the open ended “How are you?” Instead, we ask the more limited “Where are you?” and “What’s up?” These are good questions for getting someone’s location and making a simple plan. They are not so good for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling. We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone:
in intimacy, new solitudes.
in intimacy, new solitudes.
In the conclusion, I bring my stories together. Relationships with robots are ramping up; relationships with people are ramping down. What road are we travelling? Technology presents itself as a one-way street; we are likely to dismiss discontents about its direction because we read them as growing out of nostalgia or a Luddite impulse or as simply in vain. But when we ask what we “miss,” we may discover what we care about, what we believe to be worth protecting. We prepare ourselves not necessarily to reject technology but to shape it in ways that honor what we hold dear. Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.”
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We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction. I intend
Alone Together
to mark a time of opportunity.
23
We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction. I intend
Alone Together
to mark a time of opportunity.
I turn now to the story of the robotic moment. It must begin with objects of the playroom because it is there that a generation was introduced to the idea that machines might be partners in mutual affection. But my story is not about child’s play. We are on the verge of seeking the company and counsel of sociable robots as a natural part of life. Before we cross this threshold, we should ask why we are doing so. It is one thing to design a robot for an instrumental purpose: to search for explosives in a war zone or, in a more homely register, to vacuum floors and wash dishes. But the robots in this book are designed to
be
with us. As some of the children ask, we must ask, Why do people no longer suffice?
be
with us. As some of the children ask, we must ask, Why do people no longer suffice?
What are we thinking about when we are thinking about robots? We are thinking about the meaning of being alive, about the nature of attachment, about what makes a person. And then, more generally, we are rethinking, What is a relationship? We reconsider intimacy and authenticity. What are we willing to give up when we turn to robots rather than humans? To ask these questions is not to put robots down or deny that they are engineering marvels; it is only to put them in their place.
In the 1960s through the 1980s, debates about artificial intelligence centered on the question of whether machines could “really” be intelligent. These discussions were about the objects themselves, what they could and could not do. Our new encounters with sociable robots—encounters that began in the past decade with the introduction of simple robot toys into children’s playrooms—provoke responses that are not about these machines’ capabilities but our vulnerabilities. As we will see, when we are asked to care for an object, when an object thrives under our care, we experience that object as intelligent, but, more importantly, we feel ourselves to be in a relationship with it. The attachments I describe do not follow from whether computational objects really have emotion or intelligence, because they do not. The attachments follow from what they evoke in their users. Our new objects don’t so much “fool us” into thinking they are communicating with us; roboticists have learned those few triggers that help us fool ourselves. We don’t need much. We are ready to enter the romance.
PART ONE
The Robotic Moment
In Solitude, New Intimacies
CHAPTER 1
Nearest neighbors
M
y first brush with a computer program that offered companionship was in the mid-1970s. I was among MIT students using Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a program that engaged in dialogue in the style of a psychotherapist. So, a user typed in a thought, and ELIZA reflected it back in language that offered support or asked for clarification.
1
To “My mother is making me angry,” the program might respond, “Tell me more about your mother,” or perhaps, “Why do you feel so negatively about your mother?” ELIZA had no model of what a mother might be or any way to represent the feeling of anger. What it could do was take strings of words and turn them into questions or restate them as interpretations.
y first brush with a computer program that offered companionship was in the mid-1970s. I was among MIT students using Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a program that engaged in dialogue in the style of a psychotherapist. So, a user typed in a thought, and ELIZA reflected it back in language that offered support or asked for clarification.
1
To “My mother is making me angry,” the program might respond, “Tell me more about your mother,” or perhaps, “Why do you feel so negatively about your mother?” ELIZA had no model of what a mother might be or any way to represent the feeling of anger. What it could do was take strings of words and turn them into questions or restate them as interpretations.
Weizenbaum’s students knew that the program did not know or understand; nevertheless they wanted to chat with it. More than this, they wanted to be alone with it. They wanted to tell it their secrets.
2
Faced with a program that makes the smallest gesture suggesting it can empathize, people want to say something true. I have watched hundreds of people type a first sentence into the primitive ELIZA program. Most commonly they begin with “How are you today?” or “Hello.” But four or five interchanges later, many are on to “My girlfriend left me,” “I am worried that I might fail organic chemistry,” or “My sister died.”
2
Faced with a program that makes the smallest gesture suggesting it can empathize, people want to say something true. I have watched hundreds of people type a first sentence into the primitive ELIZA program. Most commonly they begin with “How are you today?” or “Hello.” But four or five interchanges later, many are on to “My girlfriend left me,” “I am worried that I might fail organic chemistry,” or “My sister died.”
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