Programmed for Love

[struggle4progress]

January 14, 2011
Programmed for Love
In a skeptical turn, the MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology

... The girl holds up a yellow toy dinosaur and waves it in front of Kismet. She moves the toy to the right, then to the left, and the robot turns its head to follow. Turkle, who can be seen off to the side (with a shorter haircut and larger glasses than now), says she gave almost no guidance to the girl—the goal was to put robot and child together and see what would happen. "It's called a first-encounter study. I say, 'I want you to meet an interesting new thing.'" ...

Most of the kids in the study loved Kismet and described the robot as a friend that liked them back, despite careful explanations by Turkle's colleagues that it was simply programmed to respond to certain cues and was definitely not alive. The response appears to be a natural one, Turkle says. "We are hard-wired that if something meets extremely primitive standards, either eye contact or recognition or very primitive mutual signaling, to accept it as an Other because as animals that's how we're hard-wired—to recognize other creatures out there." ...

One day during Turkle's study at MIT, Kismet malfunctioned. A 12-year-old subject named Estelle became convinced that the robot had clammed up because it didn't like her, and she became sullen and withdrew to load up on snacks provided by the researchers. The research team held an emergency meeting to discuss "the ethics of exposing a child to a sociable robot whose technical limitations make it seem uninterested in the child," as Turkle describes in Alone Together. "Can a broken robot break a child?" they asked. "We would not consider the ethics of having children play with a damaged copy of Microsoft Word or a torn Raggedy Ann doll. But sociable robots provoke enough emotion to make this ethical question feel very real." ...

"What if we get used to relationships that are made to measure?" Turkle asks. "Is that teaching us that relationships can be just the way we want them?" After all, if a robotic partner were to become annoying, we could just switch it off ...

http://chronicle.com/article/Programmed-for-Love-The/125922/

[struggle4progress]

1. We, Robots

By JONAH LEHRER
Published: January 21, 2011

... Turkle describes the behavior of Edna, an 82-year-old who is given a robotic doll called My Real Baby during a visit with her 2-year-old great-granddaughter. When Edna is asked if the doll is alive, she scoffs at the absurdity of the question. But then the doll starts to cry. Edna cradles the robot in her arms and gently caresses its face. “Oh, why are you crying?” she asks the robot. “Do you want to sit up?” When her great-granddaughter starts whining, Turkle reports, Edna ignores her ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/books/review/Lehrer-t.html?src=twrhp

[XemaSab]

2. I think we're hard wired to be superstitious

and we're hard wired to take things personally.

Look at all the Christians who think Jesus is behind it when a child is found in the rubble of a building, but think it's God's judgement when the building collapses in the first place.