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.
Themes
The Behaviorist View of Life Versus the Romantic View
A behaviorist perspective in the context of the robotic movement puts more emphasis on the functionality of a robot over its internal state. This means that if a robot can easily replace a human worker and do its task more efficiently, then whether or not it has an inner life or understands what it’s doing is irrelevant. Most of the first half of the book is dedicated to exploring these two different perspectives, with Turkle representing a more Romantic viewpoint, placing her emphasis on robots’ empathetic shortcomings and what these robots might do to erode what we think of now as a social connection or even love. Turkle sums up her view when she asks, “Why would we want to be in conversation with machines that cannot understand or care for us?” (282).
On the other hand, many of the children who are growing up with sociable robots as interactive toys in the form of the Furby or the Tamagotchi tend to focus on the benefits of robots over humans, the improvements they could bring to their lives. Turkle is engaged with this debate additionally with many roboticists. When she approaches people about a robotics conference titled “Caring Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Eldercare,” she says, “they saw caring as a behavior, not a feeling” (106).
The Allure of Control
This is something that comes up in both parts of the book: in the beginning, the people who like the idea of a robot companion do so because they want to be more in control. But Turkle cautions that even if we feel better relating to robots, this is not always the goal:
What if ‘relating’ to robots makes us feel ‘good’ or ‘better’ simply because we feel more in control? Feeling good is no golden rule. One can feel good for bad reasons. What if a robot companion makes us feel good but leaves us somehow diminished? (6).
Either way it seems our fascination with robots and the network of connectivity comes out of a desire to have more control over our internal states—a robot poses less of a threat than a human being. There are fewer unknown variables. Likewise, texting promises more control—we can communicate when we like and disengage if we wish. Facebook lures us in with the promise that we can carefully mold ourselves to be the person we want others to see us as.
The Erosion of Human Concepts
Turkle is concerned about the erosion of human concepts such as love, creation, friendship, and emotion. She cites each of these as examples of concepts the robotic movement and the social internet could pollute. She writes that if we let ourselves believe that robots can “care” for us, then we demean what we have historically meant when we say “caring” (an action that could only be performed by humans). We may come to see this as the new norm, and our concept of human caring will be cheapened. Turkle seems particularly preoccupied by the language around robotics, taking issue with a conference that includes in its title the phrase “Caring Machines.” Later, she claims that a machine taken as a friend “demeans what we mean by friendship” (102).
As Turkle develops this theme, she arrives at the conclusion that such sacred human concepts might not only be devalued, but also that false, performed versions of them might be accepted as authentic:
The questions for the future are not whether children will love their robot companions more than their pets or even their parents. The questions are rather, What will love be? And what will it mean to achieve ever-greater intimacy with our machines? Are we ready to see ourselves in the mirror of the machine and to see love as our performances of love? (138).
This seems like a crucial distinction and one that echoes back to the behaviorism of the robotic movement—about whether the performance of aliveness is “alive enough.”
But Turkle shows that this sort of erosion of meaning can lurk in other places, too, such as the life of Adam, who plays the video game Civilization and finds it calming, in that he’s able to craft a new world. But this is creation where someone has already been. Like playing the guitar in The Beatles: Rock Band, it is not creation but the feeling of creation” (223).
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By Sherry Turkle
