This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.
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These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all. The compounds that trigger romantic love are forthcoming from the laboratory. And yet, even with biochemical explanations for attraction, nothing seems different about the thrill of falling in love. And seeing that an abused child has a normal brain scan does not mean one feels any less rage about the abuse. Pluralistic in our attitudes toward the self, we turn this pragmatic sensibility toward other things in our path—for example, sociable robots. We approach them like Wilson: they can be machines, and they can be more.
Writing in his diary in 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson described “dreams and beasts” as “two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature.... They are our test objects.”
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If Emerson had lived today, he would have seen the sociable robot as our new test object. Poised in our perception between inanimate program and living creature, this new breed of robot provokes us to reflect on the difference between connection and relationship, involvement with an object and engagement with a subject. These robots are evocative: understanding how people think about them provides a view onto how we think about ourselves. When children talk about these robots, they move away from an earlier cohort’s perception of computers as provocative curiosities to the idea that robots might be something to grow old with. It all began when children met the seductive Tamagotchis and Furbies, the first computers that asked for love.
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THE TAMAGOTCHI PRIMER
When active and interactive computer toys were first introduced in the late 1970s, children recognized that they were neither dolls nor people nor animals. Nor did they seem like machines. Computers, first in the guise of electronic toys and games, turned children into philosophers, caught up in spontaneous debates about what these objects might be. In some cases, their discussions brought them to the idea that the talking, clever computational objects were close to kin. Children consider the question of what is special about being a person by contrasting themselves with their “nearest neighbors.” Traditionally, children took their nearest neighbors to be their dogs, cats, and horses. Animals had feelings; people were special because of their ability to think. So, the Aristotelian definition of man as a rational animal had meaning for even the youngest children. But by the mid-1980s, as thinking computers became nearest neighbors, children considered people special because only they could “feel.” Computers were intelligent machines; in contrast, people were emotional machines.
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But in the late 1990s, as if on cue, children met objects that presented themselves as having feelings and needs. As emotional machines, people were no longer alone. Tamagotchis and Furbies (both of which sold in the tens of millions) did not want to play tic-tac-toe, but they would tell you if they were hungry or unhappy. A Furby held upside down says, “Me scared,” and whimpers as though it means it. And these new objects found ways to express their love.
Furbies, put on the market in 1998, had proper robotic “bodies”; they were small, fur-covered “creatures” with big eyes and ears. Yet, the Tamagotchi, released in 1997, a virtual creature housed in a plastic egg, serves as a reliable primer in the psychology of sociable robotics—and a useful one because crucial elements are simplified, thus stark. The child imagines Tamagotchis as embodied because, like living creatures and unlike machines, they need constant care and are always on. A Tamagotchi has “body enough” for a child to imagine its death.
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To live, a Tamagotchi must be fed, amused, and cleaned up after. If cared for, it will grow from baby to healthy adult. Tamagotchis, in their limited ways, develop different personalities depending on how they are treated. As Tamagotchis turn children into caretakers, they teach that digital life can be emotionally roiling, a place of obligations and regrets.
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The earliest electronic toys and games of thirty years ago—such as Merlin, Simon, and Speak & Spell—encouraged children to consider the proposition that something smart might be “sort of alive.” With Tamagotchis, needy objects asked for care, and children took further steps.
As they did with earlier generations of hard-to-classify computational objects, curious children go through a period of trying to sort out the new sociable objects. But soon children take them at interface value, not as puzzles but as play-mates. The philosophical churning associated with early computer toys (are they alive? do they know?) quickly gives way to new practices. Children don’t want to comprehend these objects as much as take care of them. Their basic stance: “I’m living with this new creature. It and many more like it are here to stay.” When a virtual “creature” or robot asks for help, children provide it. When its behavior dazzles, children are pleased just to hang out with it.
In the classic children’s story
The Velveteen Rabbit
, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature. It is alive enough to share a bit of your life. Children approach sociable machines in a spirit similar to the way they approach sociable pets or people—with the hope of befriending them. Meeting a person (or a pet) is not about meeting his or her biochemistry; becoming acquainted with a sociable machine is not about deciphering its programming. While in an earlier day, children might have asked, “What is a Tamagotchi?” they now ask, “What does a Tamagotchi want?”
When a digital “creature” asks children for nurturing or teaching, it seems alive enough to care for, just as caring for it makes it seem more alive. Neil, seven, says that his Tamagotchi is “like a baby. You can’t just change the baby’s diaper. You have to, like, rub cream on the baby. That is how the baby knows you love it.” His eight-year-old sister adds, “I hate it when my Tamagotchi has the poop all around. I am like its mother. That is my job. I don’t like it really, but it gets sick if you just leave it messy.” Three nine-year-olds consider their Tamagotchis. One is excited that his pet requires him to build a castle as its home. “I can do it. I don’t want him to get cold and sick and to die.” Another looks forward to her digital pet’s demands: “I like it when it says, ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘Play with me.’” The third boils down her relationship to a “deceased” Tamagotchi to its most essential elements: “She was loved; she loved back.”
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Where is digital fancy bred? Most of all, in the demand for care. Nurturance is the “killer app.” In the presence of a needy Tamagotchi, children become responsible parents: demands translate into care and care into the feeling of caring. Parents are enlisted to watch over Tamagotchis during school hours. In the late 1990s, an army of compliant mothers cleaned, fed, and amused their children’s Tamagotchis; the beeping of digital pets became a familiar background noise during business meetings.
This parental involvement is imperative because a Tamagotchi is always on. Mechanical objects are supposed to turn off. Children understand that bodies need to be always on, that they become “off ” when people or animals die. So, the inability to turn off a Tamagotchi becomes evidence of its life. Seven-year-old Catherine explains, “When a body is ‘off,’ it is dead.” Some Tamagotchis can be asked to “sleep,” but nine-year-old Parvati makes it clear that asking her Tamagotchi to sleep is not the same as hitting the pause button in a game. Life goes on: “When they sleep, it is not that they are turned off. They can still get sick and unhappy, even while they are sleeping. They could have a nightmare.”
In the late 1970s, computers, objects on the boundary between animate and inanimate, began to lead children to gleeful experiments in which they crashed machines as they talked about “killing” them. And then, there would be elaborate rituals of resuscitation as children talked about bringing machines back to life. After these dramatic rebirths, the machines were, in the eyes of children, what they had been before. Twenty years later, when Tamagotchis die and are reset for a new life, children do not feel that they come back as they were before. Children looked forward to the rebirth of the computers they had crashed, but they dread the demise and rebirth of Tamagotchis. These provoke genuine remorse because, as one nine-year-old puts it, “It didn’t have to happen. I could have taken better care.”
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UNFORGETTABLE
I took care of my first Tamagotchi at the same time that my seven-year-old daughter was nurturing her own. Since I sometimes took a shift attending to her Tamagotchi, I could compare their respective behaviors, and I convinced myself that mine had idiosyncrasies that made it different from hers. My Tamagotchi liked to eat at particular intervals. I thought it prospered best with only small doses of amusement. I worked hard at keeping it happy. I did not anticipate how bad I would feel when it died. I immediately hit the reset button. Somewhat to my surprise, I had no desire to take care of the new infant Tamagotchi that appeared on my screen.
Many children are not so eager to hit reset. They don’t like having a new creature in the same egg where their virtual pet has died. For them, the death of a virtual pet is not so unlike the death of what they call a “regular pet.” Eight-year-olds talk about what happens when you hit a Tamagotchi’s reset button. For one, “It comes back, but it doesn’t come back as exactly your same Tamagotchi. . . . You haven’t had the same experiences with it. It has a different personality.” For another, “It’s cheating. Your Tamagotchi is really dead. Your one is really dead. They say you get it back, but it’s not the same one. It hasn’t had the same things happen to it. It’s like they give you a new one. It doesn’t remember the life it had.” For another, “When my Tamagotchi dies, I don’t want to play with the new one who can pop up. It makes me remember the real one [the first one]. I like to get another [a new egg]. . . . If you made it die, you should start fresh.” Parents try to convince their children to hit reset. Their arguments are logical: the Tamagotchi is not “used up”; a reset Tamagotchi means one less visit to the toy store. Children are unmoved.
Sally, eight, has had three Tamagotchis. Each died and was “buried” with ceremony in her top dresser drawer. Three times Sally has refused to hit the reset button and convinced her mother to buy replacements. Sally sets the scene: “My mom says mine still works, but I tell her that a Tamagotchi is cheap, and she won’t have to buy me anything else, so she gets one for me. I am not going to start up my old one. It died. It needs its rest.”
In Sally’s “It died. It needs its rest,” we see the expansiveness of the robotic moment. Things that never could go together—a program and pity for a weary body—now do go together. The reset button produces objects that are between categories: a creature that seems new but is not really new, a stand-in for something now gone. The new creature, a kind of imposter, is a classic case of Sigmund Freud’s uncanny—it’s familiar, yet somehow not.
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The uncanny is always compelling. Children ask, “What does it mean for a virtual creature to die?” Yet, while earlier generations debated questions about a computer’s life in philosophical terms, when faced with Tamagotchis, children quickly move on to day-to-day practicalities. They temper philosophy with tearful experience. They know that Tamagotchis are alive enough to mourn.
Freud teaches us that the experience of loss is part of how we build a self.
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Metaphorically, at least, mourning keeps a lost person present. Child culture is rich in narratives that take young people through the steps of this fitful process. So, in
Peter Pan
, Wendy loses Peter in order to move past adolescence and become a grown woman, able to love and parent. But Peter remains present in her playful and tolerant way of mothering. Louisa May Alcott’s Jo loses her gentle sister Beth. In mourning Beth, Jo develops as a serious writer and finds a new capacity to love. More recently, the young wizard Harry Potter loses his mentor Dumbledore, whose continuing presence within Harry enables him to find his identity and achieve his life’s purpose. With the Tamagotchi, we see the beginning of mourning for artificial life. It is not mourned as one would mourn a doll. The Tamagotchi has crossed a threshold. Children breathe life into their dolls. With the Tamagotchi, we are in a realm of objects that children see as having their own agendas, needs, and desires. Children mourn the life the Tamagotchi has led.
A child’s mourning for a Tamagotchi is not always a solitary matter. When a Tamagotchi dies, it can be buried in an online Tamagotchi graveyard. The tomb-stones are intricate. On them, children try to capture what made each Tamagotchi special.
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A Tamagotchi named Saturn lived to twelve “Tamagotchi years.” Its owner writes a poem in its memory: “My baby died in his sleep. I will forever weep. Then his batteries went dead. Now he lives in my head.” Another child mourns Pumpkin, dead at sixteen: “Pumpkin, Everyone said you were fat, so I made you lose weight. From losing weight you died. Sorry.” Children take responsibility for virtual deaths.
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These online places of mourning do more than give children a way to express their feelings. They sanction the idea that it is appropriate to mourn the digital—indeed, that there is something “there” to mourn.