No longer. Computer scientists have been working on endowing robots with artificial intelligence for several decades. The field known as “afective computing” is extending this project to encompass emotional intelligence. The aim is for computers to be able to simulate emotions and feelings, to behave as if they have emotions. To this end, for example, a nursebot named “Flo” developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs was given basic facial features so that it could take an anthropomorphic form. Sociable robots in the form of Tamagotchi pets are commonplace in Japan. Indeed, Japan is in the forefront of care automation because it has an aging population and is a society with strong political resistance to immigration as a source of cheap domestic labor. (It should be noted that this project remains an aspiration of roboticists and their funders, rather than working technologies, as machines are yet to deliver the most basic forms of practical care.)
While innovations in robotics may well succeed in saving time, there are some who believe that it comes at too high a price. Sherry Turkle, who has written eloquently over many years about the creative potential of human-machine interaction, is worried.35 Her book Alone Together sees humanity as nearing a “robotic moment” in which robots will be employed in caring roles, entertaining children or nursing the elderly, filling gaps in the social fabric left where the threads of community have frayed.
Human susceptibility to developing feelings of attachment to machines is a longstanding preoccupation of Turkle. Her studies of children and the elderly interacting with robots that imitate living companions reveal that, universally, a bond is formed. The Furby exerts a hold over anyone who nurtures it for a few weeks. More sophisticated models provoke deep emotional connections. Scientists developing the latest robots report feelings of pseudo-parental attachment. They hate leaving the machines “alone” in empty laboratories at night. “People attribute personality traits and gender to computers and even adjust their responses to avoid hurting the machines’ ‘feelings.’”36 The extraordinary capacity people have for projecting human traits on to inanimate objects has been at the core of her writing. Now she is at pains to warn us that this intense relationship cannot be reciprocated. We are in danger of conflating caring as a behavior with caring as a feeling—machines can take care of us, but do not care about us.
Chapter five
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