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“People,” he says, are “risky.” Robots are “safe.” The kind of reliability they will provide is emotional reliability, which comes from their having no emotions at all.
we’re not trying to create machines that souls would want to live in but machines that we would want to live with.
the more we talk about conversation as something machines can do, the more we can end up devaluing conversations with people—because they don’t offer what machines provide.
Robots appeal to distracted parents because they are already disengaged. Robots appeal to lonely children because the robots will always be there.
The most important job of childhood and adolescence is to learn attachment to and trust in other people. That happens through human attention, presence, and conversation.
When children talk with people, they come to recognize, over time, how vocal inflection, facial expression, and bodily movement flow together. Seamlessly. Fluidly. And they learn how human emotions play in layers, again seamlessly and fluidly.
feelings and human ambivalence look like. And they need other people to respond to their own expressions of that complexity.
No robot has these things...
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In our new culture of connection, we are lonely but afraid of intimacy.
part of what makes our new technologies of connection so seductive is that they respond to our fantasies,
If, like Tara, we choose to share our frustrations with robot friends because we don’t want to upset our human friends with who we really are and what we’re really feeling, the meaning of human friendship will change.
the place you go for small talk.
We practice something new. But we are the ones who are changing. Do we like what we are changing into? Do we want to get better at it?
we all had a stake in outsourcing the thing we do best—understanding each other, taking care of each other.
it is not just that older people are supposed to be talking. Younger people are supposed to be listening.
When we celebrate robot listeners that cannot listen, we show too little interest in what our elders have to say. We build machines that guarantee that human stories will fall upon deaf ears.
Right now we work on the premise that putting in a robot to do a job is always better than nothing. The premise is flawed.
you have a problem with care and companionship and you try to solve it with a robot, you may not try to solve it with your friends, your family, and your community.
people who have grown up emotionally disconnected while constantly connected to phones, games, and social media.
looking to technology to repair the empathy gap seems an ironic rejoinder to a problem we perhaps didn’t need to have in the first place.
technologies to which we are vulnerable, to respect the resilience that has always been ours.
