Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Sherry Turkle

American Educator and Cultural Analyst, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"AIBO (artificial intelligence robot meaning ?companion?) permits something different: attachment without responsibility."

"Another wish, and machines which he had never seen would fill the chamber with the projected images of any articles of furniture he might need. Whether they were 'real' or not was a problem that had bothered few men for the last billion years. Certainly they were no less real than that other imposter, solid matter."

"Artificial intelligence is often described as the art and science of getting machines to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people. We are coming to a parallel definition of artificial emotion as the art of getting machines to express things that would be considered feelings if expressed by people."

"As I listen for what stands behind this moment, I hear a certain fatigue with the difficulties of life with people. We insert robots into every narrative of human frailty. People make too many demands; robot demands would be of a more manageable sort. People disappoint; robots will not. When people talk about relationships with robots, they talk about cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, and children who take drugs. They talk about how hard it is to understand family and friends. I am at first surprised by these comments. Their clear intent is to bring people down a notch. A forty-four-year-old woman says, ?After all, we never know how another person really feels. People put on a good face. Robots would be safer.? A thirty-year-old man remarks, ?I?d rather talk to a robot. Friends can be exhausting. The robot will always be there for me. And whenever I?m done, I can walk away.?"

"As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves."

"As infants, we see the world in parts. There is the good?the things that feed and nourish us. There is the bad?the things that frustrate or deny us. As children mature, they come to see the world in more complex ways, realizing, for example, that beyond black and white, there are shades of gray. The same mother who feeds us may sometimes have no milk. Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.4 With this integration, we learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity. When we imagine a robot as a true companion, there is no need to do any of this work."

"Because of my training as a clinician, I believe that this kind of moment, if it happens between people, has profound therapeutic potential. We can heal ourselves by giving others what we most need."

"Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical."

"As I became a sociologist, you know, there's a fancy word for studying this; it's called bricolage. It's the science of studying meanings and the interplay of objects, and I realized that that's kind of what I'd been doing all the time. A little bit like MoliŠre's, you know, Monsieur Jourdain who'd been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I'd been a bricoleur all my life without knowing it. Again, there is psychological risk in the robotic moment. Logan?s comment about talking with the AIBO to get thoughts out suggests using technology to know oneself better. But it also suggests a fantasy in which we cheapen the notion of companionship to a baseline of interacting with something. We reduce relationship and come to see this reduction as the norm."

"But when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyber-intimacies slide into cyber-solitudes. And with constant connection comes new anxieties of disconnection,"

"But this is not a book about robots. Rather, it is about how we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting ?rid? of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they ?reveal too much.? They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in ?real time? take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world ?unplugged? does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?"

"Computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. They ask us to take care of them; in response, we imagine that they might care for us in return. Indeed, among the most talked about robotic designs are in the area of care and companionship. In summer 2010, there are enthusiastic reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on robotic teachers, companions, and therapists. And Microsoft demonstrates a virtual human, Milo, that recognizes the people it interacts with and whose personality is sculpted by them. Tellingly, in the video that introduces Milo to the public, a young man begins by playing games with Milo in a virtual garden; by the end of the demonstration, things have heated up?he confides in Milo after being told off by his parents."

"Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?"

"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."

"Connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information, they may work for saying, ?I?m thinking about you,? or even for saying, ?I love you,? but they don?t really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development."

"Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!"

"From watching children play with objects designed as amusements, we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us."

"Enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right."

"I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians?threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children?s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin?s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves."

"I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day."

"Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right."

"I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows."

"I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport."

"I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made."

"If AIBO is in some sense a toy, it is a toy that changes minds. It does this in several ways. It heightens our sense of being close to developing a post-biological life and not just in theory or in the laboratory. And it suggests how this passage will take place. It will begin with our seeing the new life as as if life and then deciding that as if may be life enough. Even now, as we contemplate creatures with artificial feelings and intelligence, we come to reflect differently on our own. The question here is not whether machines can be made to think like people but whether people have always thought like machines."

"If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine."

"If there is no underlying meaning, or a meaning we shall never know, postmodern theorists argue that the privileged way of knowing can only be through an exploration of surfaces. This makes social knowledge into something that we might navigate much as we explore the Macintosh screen and its multiple layers of files and applications."

"In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions."

"If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely."

"In sum, MUDs blur the boundaries between self and game, self and role, self and simulation. One player says, 'You are what you pretend to be...you are what you play.'"

"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 used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'"

"In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism."

"It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy."

"In the early days of cubism, the simultaneous presentation of many perspectives of the human face was subversive. But at a certain point, one becomes accustomed to looking at a face in this new way. A face, after all, does have multiple aspects; only representational conventions keep us from appreciating them together. But once convention is challenged, the new view of the face suggests depth and new complexities. Lester has a cubist view of AIBO; he is aware of it as machine, bodily creature, and mind. An AIBO?s sentience, he says, is awesome. The creature is endearing. He appreciates the programming behind the exact swing of the floppy puppy ears. To Lester, that programming gives AIBO a mind."

"It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us."

"Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly."

"Our world has more ?technology? in it than ever before and it is taking up more and more hours of our day."

"Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other."

"People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude."

"People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of 'Wired' magazine. Then things began to change. In the early '80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy."

"Sociable robotics exploits the idea of a robotic body to move people to relate to machines as subjects, as creatures in pain rather than broken objects. That even the most primitive Tamagotchi can inspire these feelings demonstrates that objects cross that line not because of their sophistication but because of the feelings of attachment they evoke."

"People are surprised by how upset they get in this theater of distress. And then they get upset that they are upset. They often try to reassure themselves, saying things like, Chill, chill, it?s only a toy! They are experiencing something new: you can feel bad about yourself for how you behave with a computer program. Adults come to the upside-down test knowing two things: the Furby is a machine and they are not torturers. By the end, with a whimpering Furby in tow, they are on new ethical terrain."

"Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are."

"Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."

"Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We?d rather text than talk."

"Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer?s imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to."

"Some people even talk about robots as providing respite from feeling overwhelmed by technology. In Japan, companionate robots are specifically marketed as a way to seduce people out of cyberspace; robots plant a new flag in the physical real. If the problem is that too much technology has made us busy and anxious, the solution will be another technology that will organize, amuse, and relax us. So, although historically robots provoked anxieties about technology out of control, these days they are more likely to represent the reassuring idea that in a world of problems, science will offer solutions. Robots have become a twenty-first-century deus ex machina. Putting hope in robots expresses an enduring technological optimism, a belief that as other things go wrong, science will go right. In a complicated world, robots seem a simple salvation. It is like calling in the cavalry."

"some children become more anxious as the operation continues. One suggests that if the Furby dies, it might haunt them. It is alive enough to turn into a ghost. Indeed, a group of children start to call the empty Furby skin the ghost of Furby and the Furby?s naked body the goblin. They are not happy that this operation might leave a Furby goblin and ghost at large. One girl comes up with the idea that the ghost of the Furby will be less fearful if distributed. She asks if it would be okay if every child took home a piece of Furby skin."

"Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup."