Alone Together (13 page)

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Authors: Sherry Turkle

BOOK: Alone Together
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AIBO also “wants” attention in order to learn. And here children become invested. Children don’t just grow up with AIBO around; they grow AIBO up. Oliver is a lively, engaged nine-year-old who lives in a suburban house with many pets. His mother smilingly describes their home life as “controlled chaos,” and for two weeks an AIBO has been part of this scene. Oliver has been very active in raising his AIBO. First came simple things: “I trained it to run to certain things and wave its tail.” And then came more complicated things, like teaching AIBO soccer. Oliver also spends time just “keeping AIBO company” because he says, “AIBO prefers to be with people.” Oliver says, “I went home with a puppy, but now it knows me. . . . It recognizes so many things.... It can feel when you pet him. . . . The electricity in AIBO is like blood in people.... People and robots both have feelings, but people have more feelings. Animals and robots both have feelings, but robots have more feelings that they can say.”
But when Oliver has a problem, he doesn’t talk to AIBO but to his hamster. He says that although AIBO can “
say
more of his feelings, my hamster
has
more feelings.” Oliver does not see AIBO’s current lack of emotionality as a fixed thing. On the contrary. “Give him six months,” Oliver says. “That’s how long it took Peanut [the hamster] to really love.... If it advanced more, if it had more technology, it could certainly love you in the future.” In the meantime, taking care of AIBO involves more than simply keeping it busy. “You also have to watch out for his feelings. AIBO is very moody.” This does not bother Oliver because it makes AIBO more like the pets he already knows. The bottom line for Oliver: “AIBO loves me. I love AIBO.” As far as Oliver is concerned, AIBO is alive enough for them to be true companions.
The fact that AIBO can develop new skills is very important to children; it means that their time and teaching make a difference. Zara, eight, says of her time with AIBO, “The more you play with it, the more actful [Zara’s word!] it gets, the more playful. And I think the less you play with it, the lazier it gets.” Zara and her eleven-year-old cousin Yolanda compare their AIBO puppies to their teddy bears. Both girls make it clear that AIBO is no doll. Yolanda says that turning a teddy bear into a companion requires “work” because her teddy’s feelings “come from my brain.” The AIBO, on the other hand, “has feelings all by itself.”
7
Zara agrees. You can tell a teddy bear what it should feel, but AIBO “can’t feel something else than what it is expressing.” AIBO has its “own feelings.” She says, “If AIBO’s eyes are flashing red, you can’t say that the puppy is happy just because you want it to be.”
A teddy bear may be irreplaceable because it has gone through life with a child. It calls up memories of one’s younger self. And, of course, only that special teddy calls up the experiences a child had in its company. But when children don’t want to replace an AIBO, something else is in play. A particular AIBO is irreplaceable because it calls back memories not only of one’s younger self but of the robot’s younger self as well, something we already saw as children connected to their Tamagotchis and Furbies. In comparing her AIBO to her teddy bear, Yolanda stresses that AIBO is “more real” because as it grows up, “it goes through all the stages.”
FROM BETTER THAN NOTHING TO BETTER THAN ANYTHING
 
Yolanda’s feelings about AIBO also go through all the stages. She first sees AIBO as a substitute: “AIBO might be good practice for all children whose parents aren’t ready to take care of a real dog.” But then she takes another step: in some ways AIBO might be better than a real dog. “The AIBO,” says Yolanda, “doesn’t shed, doesn’t bite, doesn’t die.” More than this, a robotic companion can be made as you like it. Yolanda muses about how nice it would be to “keep AIBO at a puppy stage for people who like to have puppies.” Children imagine that they can create a customized AIBO close to their heart’s desire.
8
Sometimes their heart’s desire is to have affection when that pleases them and license to walk away, something not possible with a biological pet.
Two nine-year-olds—Lydia and Paige—talk through the steps that take a robot from better than nothing to better than anything. Lydia begins by thinking of AIBO as a substitute for a real pet if you can’t have one: “An AIBO, since you can’t be allergic to a robot, that would be very nice to have.” But as she gets to know AIBO better, she sees a more enticing possibility. “Sometimes,” she says, “I might like [AIBO] more than a real living animal, like a real cat or a real dog, because, like if you had a bad day . . . then you could just turn this thing off and it wouldn’t bug you.” Paige has five pets—three dogs, two cats—and when she is sad, she says, “I cuddle with them.” This is a good thing, but she complains that pets can be trouble: “All of them want your attention. If you give one attention you have to give them all attention, so it’s kinda hard.... When I go somewhere, my kitten misses me. He’ll go into my room and start looking for me.” AIBO makes things easy: “AIBO won’t look at you like ‘play with me’; it will just go to sleep if there is nothing else to do. It won’t mind.”
Paige explains that the worst thing that ever happened to her was when her family “had to put their dog to sleep.” She hasn’t wanted a new one since. “But the thing about AIBO,” she says, “is that you don’t have to put him to sleep.... I think you could fix [AIBO] with batteries . . . but when your dog actually dies, you can’t fix it.” For now, the idea that AIBO, as she puts it, “will last forever” makes it better than a dog or cat. Here, AIBO is not practice for the real. It offers an alternative, one that sidesteps the necessity of death.
9
For Paige, simulation is not necessarily second best.
Pets have long been thought good for children because they teach responsibility and commitment. AIBO permits something different: attachment without responsibility. Children love their pets, but at times, like their overextended parents, they feel burdened by their pets’ demands. This has always been true. But now children see a future where something different may be available. With robot pets, children can give enough to feel attached, but then they can turn away. They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves. And yet, since these new pets seem betwixt and between what is alive and what is not, this turning away is not always easy. It is not that some children feel responsible for AIBO and other do not. The same children often have strong feelings on both sides of the matter.
So for example, Zara likes the idea that AIBO won’t get sick if she forgets to walk or feed it. She likes the idea that she can “get credit” for training AIBO even without the burden of being consistent. Yet, Zara also says that “AIBO makes you feel responsible for it.” Her cousin Yolanda also likes it that AIBO does not make her feel guilty if she doesn’t give it attention, but she feels an even greater moral commitment: “I would feel just as bad if my puppy’s or my AIBO’s arms broke. I love my AIBO.”
Zara and Yolanda are tender with their AIBO. But other children, equally attached to the robot, are very rough. AIBO is alive enough to provoke children to act out their hostility, something we have seen with Furbies and My Real Babies and something we will see again with more advanced robots. Of course, this hostility causes us to look at what else is going on in a child’s life, but in the case of AIBO, we see how it can be provoked by anxiety about the robot itself. Uncanny objects are disquieting as well as compelling.
Recall four-year-old Henry who categorized robots by their degree of Pokémon powers. He believes that his AIBO recognizes him and that they have a special relationship. Nevertheless, Henry takes to increasingly aggressive play with AIBO. Over and over, he knocks it down, slapping its side, as he makes two contradictory claims about the robot. First he says that “AIBO doesn’t really have feelings,” which would make his aggression permissible. But he also says that AIBO prefers him to his friends, something that indicates feelings: “AIBO doesn’t really like my friend Ramon,” he says with a smile. The more Henry talks about how AIBO dislikes other children, the more he worries that his aggression toward AIBO might have consequences. AIBO, after all, could come to dislike him. To get out of his discomfort, Henry demotes AIBO to “just pretend.” But then he is unhappy because his belief in AIBO’s affection increases his self-esteem. Henry is caught in a complicated, circular love test. In our passage to postbiological relationships, we give ourselves new troubles.
As soon as children met computers and computer toys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they used aggression as a way to animate them and to play with ideas about life and death. Children crashed and revived computer programs; they “killed” Merlin, Simon, and Speak & Spell by pulling out their batteries and then made them come back to life. Aggression toward sociable robots is more complex because children are trying to manage more significant attachments. To take only one example, robots disappoint when they do not display the affection children lead themselves to expect. To avoid hurt, children want to dial things down. Turning robots into objects that can be hurt with impunity is a way to put them in their place. Whether we have permission to hurt or kill an object influences how we think about its life.
10
To children, being able to kill spiders without punishment makes spiders seem less alive, and hurting a robot can make it seem less alive as well. But as in the discussion about whether My Real Baby should cry in “pain,” things are complicated. For the idea that you can hurt a robot can also make it seem
more
alive.
Like Henry, twelve-year-old Tamara is aggressive toward AIBO and troubled by what this implies. She wants to play with AIBO in the same way that she plays with her much-loved cat. But she worries that AIBO’s responses to her are generic. She says, “AIBO acts the same to everyone. It doesn’t attach herself to one person like most animals do.” Tamara says that sometimes she stops herself from petting AIBO: “I start to pet it, and then, like, I would start to be, like, ‘Oh wait. You’re not a cat. You’re not alive.’” And sometimes she gives in to an urge to “knock it over because it was just so cute when it was getting up and then it would, like, shake its head, because then it seemed really alive because that’s what dogs do.” She tries to reassure me: “I’m not like this with my animals.”
From their earliest experiences with the electronic toys and games of the late 1970s, children split the notion of consciousness and life. You didn’t have to be biologically alive to have awareness. And so, Tamara who knows AIBO is not alive, imagines that it still might feel pain. In the end, her aggression puts her in a tough spot; AIBO is too much like a companion to be a punching bag. For Tamara, the idea that AIBO might “see” well enough to recognize her is frightening because it might know she is hitting it. But the idea of AIBO as aware and thus more lifelike is exciting as well.
Tamara projects her fear that AIBO knows she is hurting it and gives herself something to be afraid of.
11
She says of her AIBO, “I was afraid it would turn evil or something.” She worries that another AIBO, a frightening AIBO with bad intentions and a will of its own, lives within the one she complains of as being too generic in its responses. This is a complicated relationship, far away from dreaming of adventures with your teddy bear.
The strong feelings that robots elicit may help children to a better understanding of what is on their minds, but a robot cannot help children find the meaning behind the anger it provokes. In the best case, behavior with an AIBO could be discussed in a relationship with a therapist. One wonders, for example, if in her actions with AIBO, Tamara shows her fears of something within herself that is only partially mastered. Henry and Tamara are in conflicted play with a robot that provokes them to anger that they show no signs of working through.
AIBO excites children to reach out to it as a companion, but it cannot be a friend. Yet, both children and adults talk as though it can. Such yearnings can be poignant. As Yolanda’s time with AIBO is ending, she becomes more open about how it provides companionship when she is “down” and suggests that AIBO might help if someone close to you died. “For the person to be happy, they would have to focus on someone that is special to them, someone that is alive.... That could be an AIBO.”
SIMULTANEOUS VISIONS AND COLD COMFORTS
 
Ashley, seventeen, is a bright and active young woman who describes herself as a cat lover. I have given her an AIBO to take home for two weeks, and now she is at my office at MIT to talk about the experience. During the conversation, Ashley’s AIBO plays on the floor. We do not attend to it; it does tricks on its own—and very noisily. After a while, it seems as though the most natural thing would be to turn AIBO off, in the same spirit that one might turn off a radio whose volume interferes with a conversation. Ashley moves toward the AIBO, hesitates, reaches for its off switch, and hesitates again. Finally, with a small grimace, she hits the switch. AIBO sinks to the ground, inert. Ashley comments, “I know it’s not alive, but I would be, like, talking to it and stuff, and then it’s just a weird experience to press a[n off] button. It made me nervous.... [I talk to it] how I would talk to my cat, like he could actually hear me and understand praise and stuff like that.” I am reminded of Leah, nine, who said of her Furby, “It’s hard to turn it off when it is talking to me.”
Ashley
knows
AIBO is a robot, but she experiences it as a biological pet. It becomes alive for her not only because of its intelligence but because it seems to her to have real emotions. For example, she says that when AIBO’s red lights shone in apparent frustration, “it seemed like a real emotion.... So that made me treat him like he was alive.... And that’s another strange thing: he’s not really physically acting those emotions out, but then you see the colors and you think, ‘Oh, he’s upset.’”

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