I think part of her concern comes from the fact that the rehabilitative robots are actually engineered to partly emulate distinctly and recognizably human characteristics, and the article gets into this. (Groopman spends a lot of time talking about efforts to avoid the uncanny valley.) One of the people interviewed for the article, for example, is David Hanson, whose contributions to the art of robot-making include the invention of a material called Frubber, intended to function like human skin. I suspect the verisimilitude is part of what makes Sherry Turkle uncomfortable, as well as what Matt P mentions above.

There is something qualitatively different about a relationship with a robot compared to a relationship with a cat — chiefly, the fact that you can turn a robot off. Robots will never make demands on you when you don’t want them to. They will never require responsibility from you in the way that a cat or (especially) a human would. In that sense, I think Turkle is on to something — a person whose major emotional relationships are with entities that they can utterly control is not a person likely to experience much emotional growth.

Maybe that’s too narrow a reading of the social possibilities of the robot; but it seems like something worth being aware of.

** ** **

“I am not a Lud­dite,” Turkle said. “But there is no upside to being social­ized by a cat.” Based on her obser­va­tion of groups of dif­fer­ent ages, Turkle has found that “chil­dren and the elderly start to relate to the animal as a per­son. They begin to love it, and nur­ture it, and feel they have to attend to the cat’s inner state.” With this attach­ment and pro­jec­tion of their emo­tions, Turkle says, peo­ple begin to seek reci­procity, want­ing the cat to care for them. “We were wired through evo­lu­tion to feel that when some­thing looks us in the eye, then some­one is at home in it.”

Cats, Turkle argues, risk dis­tort­ing the mean­ing of rela­tion­ships, the bonds of love, and the types of emo­tional accom­mo­da­tion required to form authen­tic human attachments.

** ** **

We have been ascribing nonexistent emotional richness to non-human entities for a looong time.

Baby birds are likewise hardwired by evolution to only accept food from their mothers. But these birds can be fooled by puppets, which allows zookeepers to keep them alive. We might have a thing for eye contact from real live human beings, but we can be fooled by movies, photographs, cartoons, pets, and yes, robots.

There’s almost an alternate, weaker version of the Turing Test at work here: if a person interacts with something they KNOW to be a robot, and nevertheless talk about “fooling them,” stick their tongue out at them, and treat them as an adequate social companion, then they ARE an adequate social companion. Grandiloquent dismissals based on a narrow notion of what evolution “ought” to permit aren’t just a waste of time; they’re an intellectual disease.