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

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

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

These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

Erikson said that identity play is the work of adolescence. And these days adolescents use the rich materials of online life to do that work. For example, in a game such as The Sims Online (think of this as a very junior version of Second Life), you can create an avatar that expresses aspects of yourself, build a house, and furnish it to your taste

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.

The flight to e-mail begins as a “solution” to fatigue. It ends with people having a hard time summoning themselves for a telephone call, and certainly not for “people in person.”

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

There are evasions. The robots are declared “lost.” In the end, wherever possible, I decide not to reclaim the robots and just buy more.

We can interact with robots in full knowledge of their limitations, comforted nonetheless by what must be an unrequited love.