39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Enchantment”
My Real Baby is released in 2000. It is a slightly more advanced sociable robot. It matures and becomes more independent, and its personality is shaped by how it is treated.
Turkle traces “an emerging mythology [that] depicts benevolent robots” (68) from WALL-E to R2D2 in the Star Wars movies. She studies interactions between My Real Baby and children ages 5 to 14. They see robots in this positive light, wondering if robots might be caretakers for them someday. This is an especially common idea in those with absent parents. But precocious Kevin, age 12, asks, “‘If robots don’t feel pain, how could they comfort you?’” (69).
A group of fifth graders debates the pros and cons of robot babysitters: while they might be more efficient, they can also break down like any other machine.
Turkle finds overall that children are more behaviorist when it comes to considering robots. For example, it matters more to them that a robot behaves “as if” it has empathy and not that it really does. This is more pragmatic than Romantic. Turkle does not share this view.
Turkle then questions a number of children about whether they think a robot companion might be good for their grandparents. One says that it might be able to step in if one dies and help the other feel less alone. Turkle tells a story about how some Japanese people would pay actors to visit their ailing parents for them. Most surprising for her are the parents who know and still enjoy the visit. This reaction has to do with the cultural view of the “role” of being elderly.
Some children worry that the grandparent will come to love the robot more than them, as it could help out with the difficult tasks their elders have them do.
Turkle gives a My Real Baby to 10-year-old Callie. Her dad works a lot. She enjoys taking care of the baby, pretending like it is real: “[L]oving the robot makes her feel more loved” (77). She makes a distinction between dolls and My Real Baby. She feels she is the baby’s mom.
Seven-year-old Tucker is very ill and uses AIBO to voice his feelings about how afraid he is of his body and dying. He treats AIBO as real and compares it to his dog, frequently expressing frustration that it does everything better. He identifies it as “a being that can resist death through technology” (80).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Complicities”
Turkle meets Cogin 1994 at MIT. Cog is a robot that learns from its environment. As it looks around the room and finally meets her eyes, Turkle experiences, for the first time, the feeling of “want[ing] [a robot] to favor me” (84). Despite its rudimentary design, it can generate feelings of kinship.
Turkle introduces Cog and another robot, Kismet, to a group of children in what she calls a “first-encounters study.” The children try to please the robots, becoming necessarily complicit in the effort to make them more human than they are. They want to talk to it or dance with it, even though it is not capable of these actions. Many of the children, Turkle notes, live in homes where they are neglected by their parents.
A pair of girls is given the opportunity to control the robot, and its creator explains how it is programmed, but even despite this, the girls maintain the view that he is alive. Even when the machines are buggy, the children invent explanations for the robot’s shortcomings or malfunctioning behavior.
An 11-year-old named Neela likes Cog’s dependability. She’s from India and doesn’t like how the girls she knows pretend to be her friends one minute and make fun of her accent the next. She likes that she can have, in Turkle’s words, “love safe from rejection” (94) with Cog.
Many children act out or respond to aspects of their home lives with the robots. One girl whose dad moved away says she would never leave the robot.
A girl named Estelle seeks out the study herself and is excited for the big day, but the robot is not very talkative, and she thinks it is her failing, causing her to engage in binge-eating behavior with the provided snacks. The team ponders the ethical implications of subjecting children to a sociable robot that will reject them. Turkle tells another story about two aggressive boys who stuff objects into the robot’s mouth and yell at it. She considers the ethical implications of subjecting vulnerable children to robots.
The chapter ends with Turkle rebuking the idea that interaction with sociable robots is harmless or mostly positive as roboticists perceive by telling a story about Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist who built a robot clone of himself. In a study, his daughter, though first fearful, learns to treat it as she does her father. Turkle asks whether this is inspirational or a frightening sign of where we are headed.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
In Chapter 4, Turkle explores, through the way young children think about and treat AIBO and My Real Baby, the extent to which sociable robots generate feelings of kinship.
Turkle also expands on what she means by the robotic moment. She defines it mostly by how children approach such robots as AIBO and My Real Baby. She realizes that the robotic hallmarks (loud whirring noises made by My Real Baby for example) don’t affect the children’s belief that these are real things because the children are willing to believe. As she puts it, “what you are made of—silicon, metal, flesh—pales in comparison with how you behave” (69). In the discussion of how a robot might make an effective babysitter, the children focus only on behavior.
Turkle has a very different perspective:
The lack of robotic ‘empathy’ depends on their not being part of the human life cycle, of not experiencing what humans experience. But these are not Bridget’s concerns. She imagines a robot that could be comforting if it performed pain. This is the behaviorism of the robotic moment(72).
She feels:
This is love safe from rejection. Like any object of love, the robot becomes ‘part of you.’ But for Neela, Cog, unlike a person, does not have enough independence to hurt you. In Neela’s feelings for Cog, we see how easily a robot can become a part object: it will meet our emotional needs because we can make it give us what we want. Is this an object for our times? If so, it is not an object that teaches us how to be with people (94).
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