Millions of us appear to find simulations of life more alluring than life. Adults are matching the pace of digitisation set by their children, eking out proxy lives on blogs, in multi-player games and chatrooms. (Email, Turkle reports, is considered old-fashioned by most under-25s.) None of these things existed a generation ago. The average American teenager sends thousands of text messages every month, and spends hours each day on Instant Messenger, MySpace and Facebook.
Plainly, technology is doing peculiar things to us. Her inquiry starts out clinical and becomes philosophical: can humanity transform the way it communicates without altering, at some level, what it means to be human? Turkle has watched people interact with machines and socialise on digital networks. Alone Together is the culmination of years of empirical research. Flesh-and-blood people with their untidy impulses are unreliable, a source of stress, best organised through digital interfaces – BlackBerries, iPads, Facebook. Meanwhile, real-world interactions are becoming onerous. Soon, 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. We already filter companionship through machines the next stage, she says, is to accept machines as companions. The test is one of many cited by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together as evidence that humanity is nearing a "robotic moment". They know the toy has no feelings, but the simulation is enough to provoke empathetic urges. People ignore the plea, but only for a few moments. The Furby says "Me scared" in a convincingly infantile voice. The Barbie doesn't react and can be inverted indefinitely. The rodent writhes in obvious discomfort and people quickly release it. In an intriguing psychological experiment, subjects are asked to take a Furby, a Barbie doll and a live gerbil and hold them upside down in turn. It has no intelligence, but it can fake attachment. It looks part owl, part hamster and is programmed to respond to human attention.
T he Furby is a fluffy robot toy that was popular in the late 90s.
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