Alone Together Read Online Free PDF Page A

worlds to live in? What do we have, now that we have what we say we want—now that we have what technology makes easy? 22 This is the time to begin these conversations, together. It is too late to leave the future to the futurists.

ROMANCING THE MACHINE: TWO STORIES
     
    I tell two stories in Alone Together : today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all. I do not tell tomorrow’s story to predict an exotic future. Rather, as a dream in development, sociable robots cast new light on our current circumstances. Our willingness to consider their company says a lot about the dissatisfactions we feel in our networked lives today.
    Part One, “The Robotic Moment,” moves from the sociable robots in children’s playrooms to the more advanced ones in the laboratory and those being developed and deployed for elder care. As the robots become more complex, the intensity of our relationships to them ramps up. I begin my story with a kind of prehistory, going back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the introduction of the first animated, interactive computer toys into children’s lives. It was a time of curiosity about the nature of these new machines. These first computational objects of the playroom provoked a change in children’s way of sorting out the question of aliveness. Decisions about whether something was alive would no longer turn on how something moved but on what it knew: physics gave way to psychology. This set the stage for how in the late 1990s, the ground would shift again when children met sociable robots that asked for care. Unlike traditional dolls, the robots wouldn’t thrive without attention, and they let you know how you were doing. But even the most primitive of these objects—Tamagotchis and Furbies—made children’s evaluation of aliveness less about cognition than about an object’s seeming potential for mutual affection. If something asks for your care, you don’t want to analyze it but take it “at interface value.” It becomes “alive enough” for relationship.
    And with this, the heightened expectations begin. Now—for adults and children—robots are not seen as machines but as “creatures,” and then, for most people, the quotation marks are dropped. Curiosity gives way to a desire to care, to nurture. From there, we look toward companionship and more. So, for example, when sociable robots are given to the elderly, it is with the suggestion that robots will cure the troubles of their time of life. We go from curiosity to a search for communion. In the company of the robotic, people are alone, yet feel connected: in solitude, new intimacies.
    Part Two, “Networked,” turns to the online life as it reshapes the self. I acknowledge the many positive things that the network has to offer—enhancing friendship, family connections, education, commerce, and recreation. The triumphalist narrative of the Web is the reassuring story that people want to hear and that technologists want to tell. But the heroic story is not the whole story. In virtual words and computer games, people are flattened into personae. On social networks, people are reduced to their profiles. On our mobile devices, we often talk to each other on the move and with little disposable time—so little, in fact, that we communicate in a new language of abbreviation in which letters stand for words and emoticons for feelings. We don’t ask the open ended “How are you?” Instead, we ask the more limited “Where are you?” and “What’s up?” These are good questions for getting someone’s location and making a simple plan. They are not so good for opening a dialogue about complexity of feeling. We are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone: in intimacy, new solitudes.
    In the conclusion, I