39 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Alive Enough”
In the spring of 1999, Turkle brings eight Furbies to an elementary school. The kids immediately try to connect with the Furbies by talking to them and notice that the Furbies share a lot in common with them: they have needs, are distinct from one another, and require feeding. One boy not only applies biological language to the Furby, saying he’s going to unscrew it and get its baby out, but also applies machine language to himself, saying at one point he is unscrewing his ankle.
Turkle believes that the Furbies represent a new frontier beyond the “Rorschach approach” that she saw in people’s relationship with more primitive computers. The Furbies “promise reciprocity because, unlike traditional dolls, they are not passive” (39).
At MIT, Freedom Baird proposes an experiment called the “upside-down test” where adults hold three things upside down: a Barbie, a gerbil, and then a Furby, which is more complicated because people do not like hearing it say, “Me scared!” when held upside down, even though they know it is a robot.
Hasbro later releases a lifelike doll, My Real Baby, without enabling the doll’s pain responses for fear that it can “‘enable’ sadistic behavior” (46).
A grad student at MIT makes an appointment to talk to the developers of a humanoid robot, Nexi. Due to a misunderstanding, she ends up sitting in the room alone with the blindfolded robot. The student is disturbed by this. She brings it up to her seminar, and a debate is ignited about the uncanniness of a blindfolded robot—something that suggests the robot has sight and an inner life.
Turkle tells of two boys’ opinions on robots, twenty-five years apart. In 1983, Turkle talks to Bruce, who thinks that while a robot may make fewer mistakes, humans’ flaws are what make them special. In 2008 she speaks with Howard, who sees a robot’s infallibility as a pure advantage and thinks that a robot could give better advice from an infinite well of knowledge it has been uploaded with. Says Turkle: “From Bruce to Howard, human fallibility has gone from being an endearment to a liability” (51). Howard’s perspective betrays an optimism that put sour society squarely in the middle of the “robotic movement” and is not without risk.
Chapter 3 Summary: “True Companions”
In 1999 Sony introduces the robot dog AIBO, which convincingly learns new tricks and ways of expressing feeling. Turkle calls this the “‘as if’ life” and says that we will soon reckon with the question of whether “‘as if’ life” can be “life enough” (53). It is important to consider, when thinking about this, whether human emotions are more machinelike than we often think.
There are a couple of teenage boys who care for their AIBOs like pets.One even takes it to college with him. Turkle claims that we cheapen relationships when we cheapen companionship to this baseline. “Alterity”—the ability to see the world through the eyes of another—is lacking in such relationships. Because the robot is not alive, it becomes a “selfobject”—something that occurs when another person is unhealthily experienced as part of one’s self—and Turkle argues that the robotic movement could exacerbate narcissism and lead to hollow, unfulfilling “relationships.”
Turkle studies the ways various children think about and interact with AIBO. They are mostly pragmatic, thinking about the routines of the robot in the sense of it as a pet rather and not considering the philosophical questions. AIBO is fundamentally different from a teddy bear because of its ability to learn: it goes through stages.
One girl says that AIBO is easier than pets in some ways because she can turn it off, whereas real pets might beg for attention when she doesn’t feel like giving it. Turkle calls this “attachment without responsibility” (59). She uses two examples of children, Henry and Tamara (both of whom play with AIBO aggressively), to show that AIBO can cause children inner turmoil and anger.
John Lester, a computer scientist, provides a different perspective: of AIBO as simultaneously “alive” and an inanimate computer. But Wesley, 64 and thrice divorced, offers the concerning perspective of someone who wants an uncomplicated relationship, which Turkle claims could be detrimental to emotional well-being.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
These chapters introduce two key robotic companions, the Furby and AIBO, that Turkle will use to test the benefits and limits of robotic companionship. Unlike ELIZA, the Furby is alive enough for the children to instinctually believe that it needs to be cared for, that it needs them. Furbies require feeding and can become ill.
Turkle explores how the robotic movement can veer into uncanny territory via the Furby’s expressions of fear, its suggestion that it can experience bodily pain. Similarly, the sight of the feminine robot Nexi’s blindfold implies sight and an inner life, which is both unsettling but also compelling. In AIBO’s case, the anxiety about the robot/human uncanny effect causes hostility.
Lastly, the romantic view of a robot is a theme that will come back again and again, and it’s first really delineated with these two boys Turkle interviews twenty-five years apart. Bruce represents the romantic view while Howard falls into the purely unsentimental behaviorist category.
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