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?8

a next generation will become accustomed to a range of relationships: some with pets, others with people, some with avatars, some with computer agents on screens, and still others with robots. Confiding in a robot will be just one among many choices.

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.

But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

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.

When I grew up, the idea of the “global village” was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete. Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home.

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

The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another.5 Without alterity, there can be no empathy.

Pete explains that the life mix is the mash-up of what you have on- and offline. Now, we ask not of our satisfactions in life but in our life mix. We have moved from multitasking to multi-lifing.