A.I. Can Pretend to Love Us, but is that Dangerous for Children? With Sherry Turkle | Big Think

A.I. Can Pretend to Love Us, but is that Dangerous for Children? With Sherry Turkle

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A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle is constantly questioning the role that technology plays in our lives. From personal computers and medical technology to children's toys that now include sophisticated artificial intelligence, the pace of technological progress has sped rapidly within the last several decades. But has often been the case in the past, our emotional and ethical progress lags substantially behind the advance of technology, and this is what principally concerns Turkle.

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SHERRY TURKLE:

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen:  Identity in the Age of the Internet(Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other was published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Professor Turkle's newest book is Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, October 2015).

TRANSCRIPT:

Sherry Turkle:  I have very strong feelings about a future in which robots become the kind of conversational agent that pretend to have emotional lives. Shortly after I finished we can make reclaiming conversation I was interviewed for an article in the New York Times about Hello Barbie. So Hello Barbie comes out of the box and says, now I'm just paraphrasing, the jest hi I'm Hello Barbie. I have a sister. You have a sister. I kind of hate my sister. I'm jealous of your sister. Do you hate your sister? Let's talk about how we feel about our sisters. In other words it just kind of knows stuff about you and is ready to talk about the arc of a human life and sibling rivalry as though it had a life, a mother, the feelings of jealousy about a sister and was ready to relate to you on that basis. And it doesn't. It's teaching pretend empathy. It's asking you to relate to an object that has pretend empathy.

And this is really not a, in my view, this is really a not good direction for AI to go. There are so many wonderful things for robots to do, so many wonderful things for robots to do. Having pretend empathy, having pretend conversations about caring and love and things that a robot can feel about their body's and about their lives and about their mothers and about their sisters gets children and gets elders, which are the other target group for these robots into a kind of fantasy miasma that is not good for anybody. Children don't need to learn pretend empathy, they need to learn real empathy, which they get from having real conversations with real people who do have sisters, who do have mothers. And I think this is a very dangerous and indeed very toxic direction.

We worry so much about whether we can get people to talk to robots, you know, can you get a child to talk to this Hello Barbie? Can you get an elderly person to talk to a sociable robot? What about who's listening? There's nobody listening. These robots don't know how to listen and understand what you're saying. They know how to respond. They're programmed to make something of what you say and respond but they don't know what it means if you say my sister makes me feel depressed because she's more beautiful than I am and I feel that my mother loves her more. That robot really does not do anything useful to you with that information. That's not empathy. And children need to know that they're being heard by a human being that can do this empathy game with them, this empathy dance wit...

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