Alone Together (21 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
In contrast to these enthusiasts, we have seen children worry. Some imagined that robots might help to cure their grandparents’ isolation but then fretted that the robots would prove
too
helpful. Quiet and compliant robots might become rivals for affection. Here we meet the grandparents. Over several years, I introduce seniors—some who live at home, some who live in nursing homes—to the robots that so intrigued their grandchildren: My Real Baby, AIBO, and Shibata’s Paro. The children were onto something: the elderly are taken with the robots. Most are accepting and there are times when some seem to prefer a robot with simple demands to a person with more complicated ones.
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too
helpful. Quiet and compliant robots might become rivals for affection. Here we meet the grandparents. Over several years, I introduce seniors—some who live at home, some who live in nursing homes—to the robots that so intrigued their grandchildren: My Real Baby, AIBO, and Shibata’s Paro. The children were onto something: the elderly are taken with the robots. Most are accepting and there are times when some seem to prefer a robot with simple demands to a person with more complicated ones.
3
In one nursing home, I leave four My Real Babies over a summer. When I return in the fall, there are seven. The demand for the robot baby was so high that the nursing staff went on eBay to increase their numbers. Indeed, however popular My Real Baby is among children, it is the elderly who fall in love. The robot asks for tending, and this makes seniors feel wanted. Its demands seem genuine, in part, of course, because the staff seems to take them seriously. The elderly need to be cared for, but there are few things that they can reliably take care of. Some fear that they might fail with a pet. My Real Baby seems a sure thing, and because it is a robot brought from MIT, it seems an adult thing as well. And having a robot around makes seniors feel they have something “important” to talk about.
The thoughtful fifth graders said their grandparents might welcome robots because, unlike pets, they do not die. The children were right. When the robots are around, seniors are quick to comment that these “creatures” do not die but can be “fixed.” Children imagined that robot baby dolls will remind older people of their time as parents and indeed, for some seniors, My Real Baby does more than bring back memories of children; it offers a way to reimagine a life. But in all of this, I do not find a simple story about the virtues of robots for the elderly. In the nursing homes I study, “time with robots” is made part of each institution’s program. So, the seniors spend time with robots. But over years of study, when given the choice between hanging out with a robot and talking to one of the researchers on the MIT team, most seniors, grateful, choose the person.
During the years of our nursing home studies, it often seemed clear that what kept seniors coming to sessions with robots was the chance to spend time with my intelligent, kind, and physically appealing research assistants. One young man, in particular, was a far more attractive object of attention than the Paro he was trying to introduce. One had the distinct feeling that female nursing home residents put up with the robot because he came with it. Their appreciation, sometimes bawdy in tone, took place in one nursing home so short of resources that the management decided our study could not continue. This incident dramatized the tension in the environment that welcomes sociable robots in geriatric care. There is a danger that the robots, if at all successful, will replace people. In this case, when residents did not pay enough attention to the robot, the people who came with it were taken away. It was a depressing time.
CARING MACHINESTwenty-five years ago the Japanese calculated that demography was working against them—there would not be enough young Japanese to take care of their aging population. They decided that instead of having foreigners take care of the elderly, they would build robots to do the job.
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While some of the robots designed for the aging population of Japan have an instrumental focus—they give baths and dispense medication—others are expressly designed as companions.
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While some of the robots designed for the aging population of Japan have an instrumental focus—they give baths and dispense medication—others are expressly designed as companions.
The Japanese robot Wandakun, developed in the late 1990s, is a fuzzy koala that responds to being petted by purring, singing, and speaking a few phrases. After a yearlong pilot project that provided the “creature” to nursing home residents, one seventy-four-year-old Japanese participant said of it, “When I looked into his large brown eyes, I fell in love after years of being quite lonely. . . . I swore to protect and care for the little animal.”
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Encouraged by such experiments, Japanese researchers began to look to artificial companionship as a remedy for the indignities and isolation of age. And with similar logic, robots were imagined for the dependencies of childhood. Children and seniors: the most vulnerable first.
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Encouraged by such experiments, Japanese researchers began to look to artificial companionship as a remedy for the indignities and isolation of age. And with similar logic, robots were imagined for the dependencies of childhood. Children and seniors: the most vulnerable first.
Over a decade, I find that most American meetings on robotics and the elderly begin with reference to the Japanese experiment and the assertion that Japan’s future is ours as well: there are not enough people to take care of aging Americans, so robot companions should be enlisted to help.
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Beyond that, some American enthusiasts argue that robots will be more patient with the cranky and forgetful elderly than a human being could ever be. Not only better than nothing, the robots will simply be better.
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Beyond that, some American enthusiasts argue that robots will be more patient with the cranky and forgetful elderly than a human being could ever be. Not only better than nothing, the robots will simply be better.
So, a fall 2005 symposium, titled “Caring Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Eldercare” began with predistributed materials that referred to the “skyrocketing” number of older adults while the “number of caretakers dwindles.”
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Technology of course would be the solution. At the symposia itself, there was much talk of “curing through care.” I asked participants—AI scientists, physicians, nurses, philosophers, psychologists, nursing home owners, representatives of insurance companies—whether the very title of the symposium suggested that we now assume that machines can be made to “care.”
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Technology of course would be the solution. At the symposia itself, there was much talk of “curing through care.” I asked participants—AI scientists, physicians, nurses, philosophers, psychologists, nursing home owners, representatives of insurance companies—whether the very title of the symposium suggested that we now assume that machines can be made to “care.”
Some tried to reassure me that, for them, “caring” meant that machines would
take
care of us, not that they would care
about us
. They saw caring as a behavior, not a feeling. One physician explained, “Like a machine that cuts your toenails. Or bathes you. That is a
caring computer.
Or talks with you if you are lonely. Same thing.” Some participants met my objections about language with impatience. They thought I was quibbling over semantics. But I don’t think this slippage of language is a quibble.
take
care of us, not that they would care
about us
. They saw caring as a behavior, not a feeling. One physician explained, “Like a machine that cuts your toenails. Or bathes you. That is a
caring computer.
Or talks with you if you are lonely. Same thing.” Some participants met my objections about language with impatience. They thought I was quibbling over semantics. But I don’t think this slippage of language is a quibble.
I think back to Miriam, the seventy-two-year-old woman who found comfort when she confided in her Paro. Paro
took care
of Miriam’s desire to tell her story—it made a space for that story to be told—but it did not
care about
her or her story. This is a new kind of relationship, sanctioned by a new language of care. Although the robot had understood nothing, Miriam settled for what she had. And, more, she was supported by nurses and attendants happy for her to pour her heart out to a machine. To say that Miriam was having a conversation with Paro, as these people do, is to forget what it is to have a conversation. The very fact that we now design and manufacture robot companions for the elderly marks a turning point. We ask technology to perform what used to be “love’s labor”: taking care of each other.
took care
of Miriam’s desire to tell her story—it made a space for that story to be told—but it did not
care about
her or her story. This is a new kind of relationship, sanctioned by a new language of care. Although the robot had understood nothing, Miriam settled for what she had. And, more, she was supported by nurses and attendants happy for her to pour her heart out to a machine. To say that Miriam was having a conversation with Paro, as these people do, is to forget what it is to have a conversation. The very fact that we now design and manufacture robot companions for the elderly marks a turning point. We ask technology to perform what used to be “love’s labor”: taking care of each other.
At the symposium, I sensed a research community and an industry poised to think of Miriam’s experience as a new standard of care. Their position (the performance of care is care enough) is made easier by making certain jobs robot ready. If human nursing care is regimented, scripted into machinelike performances, it is easier to accept a robot nurse. If the elderly are tended by underpaid workers who seem to do their jobs by rote, it is not difficult to warm to the idea of a robot orderly. (Similarly, if children are minded at day-care facilities that seem like little more than safe warehouses, the idea of a robot babysitter becomes less troubling.)
But people are capable of the higher standard of care that comes with empathy. The robot is innocent of such capacity. Yet, Tim, fifty-three, whose mother lives in the same nursing home as Miriam, is grateful for Paro’s presence. Tim visits his mother several times a week. The visits are always painful. “She used to sit all day in this smoky room, just staring at a wall,” Tim says of his mother, the pain of the image still sharp. “There was one small television, but it was so small, just in a corner of this very big room. They don’t allow smoking in there anymore. It’s been five years, but you can still smell the smoke in that room. It’s in everything, the drapes, the couches.... I used to hate to leave her in that room.” He tells me that my project to introduce robots into the home has made things better. He says, “I like it that you have brought the robot. She puts it in her lap. She talks to it. It is much cleaner, less depressing. It makes it easier to walk out that door.” The Paro eases Tim’s guilt about leaving his mother in this depressing place. Now she is no longer completely alone. But by what standard is she less alone? Will robot companions cure conscience?
Tim loves his mother. The nursing staff feels compassion for Miriam. But if our experience with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful exchange (they perform in a way that persuades us to settle for the “acting out” of caring), can they be good for us? Or, as I have asked, might they be good for us only in the “feel good” sense? The answers to such questions do not depend on what computers can do today or are likely to be able to do tomorrow. They depend on what
we
will be like, the kind of people
we
are becoming as we launch ourselves and those we love into increasingly intimate relationships with machines.
we
will be like, the kind of people
we
are becoming as we launch ourselves and those we love into increasingly intimate relationships with machines.
Some robots are designed to deliver medication to the elderly, to help them reach for grocery items on high shelves, and to monitor their safety. A robot can detect if an elderly person is lying on the floor at home, a possible signal of distress. I take no exception to such machines. But Paro and other sociable robots are designed as companions. They force us to ask why we don’t, as the children put it, “have people for these jobs.” Have we come to think of the elderly as nonpersons who do not require the care of persons? I find that people are most comfortable with the idea of giving caretaker robots to patients with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Philosophers say that our capacity to put ourselves in the place of the other is essential to being human. Perhaps when people lose this ability, robots seem appropriate company because they share this incapacity.
But dementia is often frightening to its sufferers. Perhaps those who suffer from it need the most, not the least, human attention. And if we assign machine companionship to Alzheimer’s patients, who is next on the list? Current research on sociable robotics specifically envisages robots for hospital patients, the elderly, the retarded, and the autistic—most generally, for the physically and mentally challenged. When robots are suggested, we often hear the familiar assertion that there are not enough people to take care of these “people with problems.” People are scarce—or have made themselves scarce. But as we go through life, most of us have our troubles, our “problems.” Will only the wealthy and “well adjusted” be granted the company of their own kind?
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When children ask, “Don’t we have people for these jobs?” they remind us that our allocation of resources is a social choice. Young children and the elderly are not a problem until we decide that we don’t have the time or resources to attend to them. We seem tempted to declare phases of the life cycle problems and to send in technologies to solve them. But why is it time to bring in the robots ? We learned to take industrial robots in stride when they were proposed for factory assembly lines. Now the “work” envisaged for machines is the work of caring. Will we become similarly sanguine about robotic companionship?
This is contested terrain. Two brothers are at odds over whether to buy a Paro for their ninety-four-year-old mother. The robot is expensive, but the elder brother thinks the purchase would be worthwhile. He says that their mother is “depressed.” The younger brother is offended by the robot, pointing out that their mother has a right to be sad. Five months before, she lost her husband of seventy years. Most of her friends have died. Sadness is appropriate to this moment in her life. The younger brother insists that what she needs is human support: “She needs to be around people who have also lost mothers and husbands and children.” She faces the work of saying good-bye, which is about the meaning of things. It is not a time to cheer her up with robot games. But the pressures to do just that are enormous. In institutional settings, those who take care of the elderly often seemed relieved by the prospect of robots coming to the rescue.
CURING A LIFEWhen I introduce sociable robots—AIBO, My Real Baby, and Paro—into nursing homes, nurses and physicians are hopeful. Speaking of Paro, one nursing home director says, “Loneliness makes people sick. This could at least partially offset a vital factor that makes people sick.” The robot is presented as cure. Caretakers entertain the idea that the robot might not just be better than no company but better than
their
company. They have so little time and so many patients. Sometimes, using a kind of professional jargon, nurses and attendants will say that seniors readily “tolerate” the robots—which is not surprising if seniors are not offered much else. And sometimes, even the most committed caretakers will say that robots address the “troubles” of old age by providing, as one put it, “comfort, entertainment, and distraction.”
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One physician, excited by the prospect of responsive robot pets, sees only the good: “Furbies for grandpa,” he says.
their
company. They have so little time and so many patients. Sometimes, using a kind of professional jargon, nurses and attendants will say that seniors readily “tolerate” the robots—which is not surprising if seniors are not offered much else. And sometimes, even the most committed caretakers will say that robots address the “troubles” of old age by providing, as one put it, “comfort, entertainment, and distraction.”
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One physician, excited by the prospect of responsive robot pets, sees only the good: “Furbies for grandpa,” he says.
Indeed, seniors generally begin their time with robots as children do, by trying to determine the nature of the thing they have been given. When given a Paro, they have many questions: “Can it do more? Is it a seal or a dog? Is it a he or a she? Can it swim? Where is it from? Does it have a name? Does it eat?” and finally, “What are we supposed to be doing with this?” When the answer is, “Be with it,” only some lose interest. Over time, many seniors attach to Paro. They share stories and secrets. With the robot as a partner, they recreate the times of their lives. To do these things, the adults must overcome their embarrassment at being seen playing with dolls. Many seniors handle this by saying something like, “People would think I’m crazy if they saw me talking to this.” Once they have declared themselves not crazy, they can proceed in their relationship with a robot seal. Or with a robot baby doll.
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