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

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.

Howard thinks that as a confidant, the robot comes out way ahead. “People,” he says, are “risky.” Robots are “safe.”

is loving your life as an avatar the same as loving your life in the real? For Audrey, as for many of her peers, the answer is unequivocally yes. Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

It is not uncommon to see people fidget with their smartphones, looking for virtual places where they might once again be more.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

The machine could be preferable—for any number of reasons—to what we currently experience in the sometimes messy, often frustrating, and always complex world of people.

she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience:

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.

For him, what I would term “interruption” is the beginning of a connection.