We can no longer afford the conceit that our helpful and powerful technologies—for all their help and all their power—come without remarkable human costs. “But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore … The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are ties that preoccupy. We text each other at family dinners, while we jog, while we drive, as we push our children on swings in the park. We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time’”

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle. New York: Basic Books, 2011, xvii + 360 pages, $28.95.

Sherry Turkle has written a thorough and interesting analysis of our curious relationship with electronic and digital technologies. The entire book examines the paradox contained in the sub-title: That we expect (even long for) human relationships with our technologies, while contenting ourselves with sub-human relationships with humans. As she says in the preface, “I leave my story at a point of disturbing symmetry: we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things” (xiv).

This is no mere editorial or screed. Turkle is Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, a licensed clinical psychologist, the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, the editor of two books, and the author of four other books. Turkle studied under the late Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1970s when he was working on his famous ELIZA program. This particular volume functions as the third part of a trilogy that includes Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1997) and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (2005). It is the result of a fifteen-year study that included interviews with over 450 individuals. The book is 360 pages long, and includes 290 footnotes spread across forty-one small-type pages. The book is divided into two parts, and the two parts disclose the paradox that constitutes the book’s thesis. Part One (chapters 1–7) is entitled “The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies” and Part Two (chapters 8–14) is entitled “Networked: In Intimacy, New Solitudes.”

When Turkle refers to ours as “the robotic moment,” she qualifies that she does “not mean that companionate robots are common among us; it refers to our state of emotional—and I would say philosophical—readiness” (9). She traces the development of social/companionate robots since Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, discussing Tamagotchis, Furbies, Paros, My Real Baby, AIBO, Cog, Kismet, Domo, and Mertz. Her observations of these devices and our usage of them lead to her basic conclusion that “now, instead of simply taking on difficult or dangerous jobs for us, robots would try to be our friends” (xii). “The robot, for some,” says Turkle “is not merely ‘better than nothing,’ but better than something, better than a human for some purposes” (7). Robots are now being developed to care for the young and the elderly, and some of each appear to be content with the circumstance. One elderly woman said of her robotic dog, “It is better than a real dog … It won’t do dangerous things, and it won’t betray you … Also, it won’t die suddenly and abandon you and make you very sad” (10). Indeed, the fifth-graders Turkle studied “worried that their grandparents might prefer robots to their company” (118), and in one case she observed such an event: “Edna’s attention remains on My Real Baby. The atmosphere is quiet, even surreal: a great grandmother entranced by a robot baby, a neglected two-year-old, a shocked mother, and researchers nervously coughing in discomfort” (117). And though the young people did not like being overlooked by (great) grandparents or parents, many of them also preferred robots to people, as one young girl said: “In some ways Cog would be better than a person-friend because a robot would never try to hurt your feelings” (93). After fifteen years of observation, Turkle noted, “children want to connect with these machines, to teach them and befriend them. And they want the robots to like, even love, them” (86). Indeed, both young and old alike, while acknowledging verbally that these robots are just machines, continued to cover and make excuses for their obvious mistakes, a trait that Turkle refers to as “complicity” (131).

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