Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other

In the spring of 2009, a therapeutic robot seal made for the elderly, Paro, is introduced. Nursing home residents are happy to interact with it. Turkle additionally finds that My Real Baby is accepted, although she notes that the senior citizens seem more interested in the short-lived study because they get to interact with young, attractive researchers.

In 2005, Turkle attends a symposium titled “Caring Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Eldercare.” She approaches researchers about the implications for the phrasing of the conference’s title. She thinks that it indicates a slippage—that we are now claiming that machines can “care” and that “we ask technology to perform what used to be ‘love’s labor’: taking care of each other” (107).

Turkle speaks with Tim, a middle-aged man who claims that the Paro improves his mother’s life, that she seems livelier, but Turkle questions whether she is less alone than before. She expresses worry that we seem to want to outsource the care of the old or infirm or mentally challenged to robots.

A senior citizen named Andy becomes very attached to a My Real Baby—he does not have many friends. He names the doll and talks to it as if it were real, though he assures the researchers he knows that it is not.