Alone Together: My thoughts on Turkle's evocative book

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wikipedia

In a previous blog I wrote about Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together feeling adamant that humans who choose relationships with robots over other humans were narcissistic and weren't willing to put the work into a real relationship.  It takes patience, empathy and a degree of selflessness to have a rich, intimate relationship with another human being.  Robots are designed to meet our needs.  Where's the work?  The challenge? How empty....

Then I read Turkle's chapters on small robots that were brought to the elderly in centers as companions, and my heart broke.  My own mother needed to be in a rehabilitation center after surgery, then after a fall in the hospital, another fall in the rehab center, ultimately needed 24 hour care because she could not walk.  Even with three of us visiting her regularly, so she had a visitor daily, we could see her loneliness.  I wonder how furry little seal who listened and responded, and looked her in the eyes and seemed to care, would have made a difference in her daily routine.

In Chapter 6 "Love's Labor Lost" Turkle describes a robot invented by Takanori Shabata called Paro, as a small, seal-like, sociable robot was honored by Guiness Records as " the most therapeutic robot in the world."  (http://www.parorobots.com/)  The MIT's V Age Lab's mission was to create a robot to help senior citizens with their physical and emotional needs. Turkle spent time going to nursing homes with companion robots such as Paro, My Real Baby and AIBO, and the results were fairly consistent.  The seniors really took to them. Even those who knew they were only robots and spoke about them as robots resorted to tending to them or protecting them as if they were living within a very short period of time, appearing less depressed, more animated while holding their robots.

AIBO

PARO

Turkle goes on to explain the theory of using such robots with patients with Alzheimer's Disease, which can be difficult work requiring volumes of patience.  Robots will never lose their temper or become impatient when asked the same question repeatedly throughout the day, day after day.  They will administer medicine, and reach for groceries on a high shelf, monitor the patients safety and alert someone if the patient is lying on the floor.

This research is wrought with questions for sociologists.  Are there enough benefits to outweigh the consequences of a society losing the human touch to machines who can't care about patients but can take care of them?  Current research is gearing to create robots to care for the physically and mentally challenged, including those with autism and mental retardation. Turkle asks, "Will only the wealthy and the well adjusted be granted the company of their own kind (in these situations)?" (p 133)

Some of the 6th grade children Turkle worked with explaining the robots designed purpose said "Don't we have people for these jobs?"  Turkle states:

"Young children and the elderly are not a problem until we decide we don't have the time or resources to attend to them. We seem tempted to declare phases of the life cycle problems and to send in technologies to solve them."(p.133)

Throughout the next section of Alone Together, the song title Blurred Lines kept playing in my head.  While that song doesn't hold any meaning here the title does.  As robots are developed to be more and more human-like, the humans that interact with them project onto them human qualities, and become very attached. More that one example in the book demonstrated how the humans changed their behaviors around the robot.  Researchers are working toward making these technologies more "likeable" because people will buy them if they are easier to use.  But Turkle feels that making them "likeable" has moral implications. Rosalind Picard, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, stated:

 “I have come to the conclusion that if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent, to adapt to us, and to interact naturally with us, then they will need the ability to recognize and express emotions, to have emotions, and to have what has been called emotional intelligence."  http://www.technologyreview.com/review/400144/thinking-about-emotional-machines/

Here is where the lines blur between humans having emotions or behaving like they did.  When my children were young I would take one of their stuffed animals and hold it in a way that it looked up at them with it's head turned to one side, then the other.  Every single time I did this my daughter or son would reach out and take the animal to snuggle it. Children often attach human characteristics to inanimate objects.  As seniors lose touch with the present and live more in their past, they to will accept a stuffed animal with big eyes to snuggle up with.  Children and adults with mental challenges will too.  Where do we draw the line?

In chapter 8 Turkle speaks to cyborgs;  How we, with our smartphones, ipads, and other gadgets, that never leave our sides, are becoming more and more like robots, and the researchers who are connected to wearable computers. living "simultaneously in the physical and virtual worlds.  http://fog.ccsf.edu/~dcox/EMU/wearables.htm

Turkle said she felt moved by the cyborgs: 

"I saw a bravery, a willingness to sacrifice for a vision of being one with technology. When their burdensome technology cut into their skin, causing lesions and then scars, the cyborgs learned to be indifferent. When their encumbrances caused them to be taken as physically disabled, they learned to be patient and provide explanations." (p. 175)

Again, the lines blur as Turkle tells of a young man who who said he had "become" his device.  He was shy and his memory failed him at times due to his anxiety.  He told Turkle " It's not that I remember people or know more.  I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared.  I am naked without it.  With it I'm a better person."  This frightens me on many levels.

I know people who feel naked with out their smart phone or ipad or other device.  They will drive all the way back home to retrieve it they forgot it. My own children are guilty of this.  My middle daughter is never without her phone and/or ipad.  NEVER.  She is a slave to its pings and dings.  She will stop mid-sentence to retrieve a text/snap chat/tweet. I believe this is an addiction among teens and young adults who grew up as digital natives and so do some Korean and US researchers:  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/804666

Social media is another virtual land where people can be anyone they choose, and often are, feeling more attractive, more intelligent, more social online.  Yet it is a false reality, so they are driven more and more into the virtual world where life is easier.  Turkle makes the point that virtual relationships are shallow at best.  No one expects their Facebook friends to come over with chicken soup if they're sick, or go to their parent's funeral.  Yet they invest so much online time to these relationships.

I see the effects of this in our public schools.  Teens and tweens no longer socialize with friends through play dates or hanging out with face to face time.  They each sit in their own rooms, online with friends chatting and laughing over video games on x-box.  There is no sharing, or empathy (as they often laugh at the slaughter in Call of Duty.)  This is where they put their time and energy, yet feel they have no "life."  I have forced my son to join the town swim team with practice 4 nights a week.  He plays violin and sings in a select choral group at his school.  I try to keep him busy and well rounded so he will make choices based on real life and not always a virtual one.

I am eager to read more of Turkle's boom, yet am leary too.  I see what too much screen time does to young children.  How too much technology and not enough face to face time with their parents and caregivers is forming pathways in their brains in ways that are very different from previous generations.  I see many children who cannot socialize, have no concept of others, empathy or sharing, cannot get through the day without spending time on the computer, or they actually have melt down.  I know the pendulum always swings far in one direction before we see the errors in our decisions and begin to swing it back.  I just hope it doesn't take so long that we lose generations of children to this technology addiction.