aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
I want my relational robot!
From Sherry Turkle on Open Source the other day:
Do plans to provide relational robots to attend to children and the elderly make us less likely to look for other solutions for their care? When we see children and the elderly exchanging tenderness with robotic pets the most important question is not whether children will love their robotic pets more than their real life pets or even their parents, but rather, what will loving come to mean? If our experience with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful interchange, can it be good for us? Or might it be good for us in the “feel good” sense, but bad for us in our lives as moral beings?
They never got to that central question, which I would have found fascinating. But I enjoyed the show and agreed with much of it.
I especially enjoyed Sal Restivo a Professor of Sociology and Science Studies in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 
who was the single one among them to put aside his human bias and note that human relationships may be “fundamentally deceitful” too. He had many good observations:
If consciousness is, in fact, an outgrowth of our relationships … then I don’t see any barrier to robots developing a self awareness. And then what? ... Somebody needs to pay attention to two things that are going on. One is more and more humans with more and more machine parts, and more and more machines with biological parts.
As a childless man in a society that is making precious few public policy provisions for an aging population, I fully expect to have and enjoy a relational robot in a caretaking role in my declining years. I even expect that relationship to surpass in loving companionship the one I have now with my two dogs, Baci & Jake.
