Relational Artifacts/Children/Elders : The Complexities of CyberCompanions

摘要

This is a report that reflects work from several studies in which commercially available robotic creatures, Furbies, My Real Babies and AIBOs, were introduced into two nursing home settings in Massachusetts as well as into the lives of children, both in school settings and in their homes. The purpose of integrating case studies from these disparate studies is to open up a conversation about the range of issues that are raised by even very simple relational artifacts as a matrix for building relationships. These issues are important for two main reasons. First, ethnographic work with even simple robots illustrates how cybercompanions are evocative objects for reflection on such issues as what is essential about aliveness, about being a person and about the roles of thought and feeling, affect and cognition in defining human uniqueness. Second, this paper reports on individual differences among the users of robotic technology, differences that have to do with personality and cognitive style. As robots move into the therapeutic domain, such individual differences will become increasingly relevant to the field of “clinical robotics.” Relational Artifacts Here I report on studies in which I used Tiger Electronics’ Furby, Sony’s AIBO, and Hasbro’s My Real Baby to study the reaction of senior citizens and children to simple robotic creatures. My working hypothesis: even the simplest encounters with an object that simulates social interaction provides a window onto the psychology of the encounters between people and relational artifacts, here defined as artifacts that have inner “states of mind” and where encounters with the artifacts are enriched through understanding these inner states. In the literature, such creatures are otherwise discussed, sometimes, for example as “sociable robots”(Breazeal, 2000, 2002, Breazeal and Scasselatti, 1999, 2000). I prefer to talk of them as relational artifacts because of the connection of this way of speaking to the psychoanalytic/psychodynamic tradition (Turkle, 2004a, 2004b). Case Studies of Seniors Interacting with computational objects has an effect on how we think about ourselves. For example, people tend to define what is special about being human by comparing themselves to their “nearest neighbors,” so when our nearest neighbors were pets, people declared themselves special because of their intellects (Turkle, 1984, Turkle, 1995). When computers were primitive machines and began to be analogized to people, people were superior because of their superior intellects as well. As the computers became smarter, people’s emphasis shifted to the soul and the spirit in the human machine in order to maintain a sense of difference. In case studies of seniors, they too, searched for what set them apart from machines, and reached, first of all, for emotion. But even the fairly primitive My Real Baby posed some challenges to this strategy because it seemed to have emotions. Seniors then turned to biological criteria, a response exemplified in the case of Jonathan. In the presence of relational artifacts, what makes people special is the fact that we are biological beings rather than mechanical ones. People’s “feelings” are not devalued, but they no longer seem equal to the task of putting enough distance between ourselves and the robots we have created in our image. Our bodies, our sexuality, and our spirituality simply do a better job. Beyond the evocation of philosophical reflection, interacting with relational artifacts seemed to put some seniors in touch with significant life relationships. (See Drexler, 1999; Hirsch, et al, 2000) For example, it was not unusual over time for seniors to re-enact scenes from their children’s youth or important moments in their relationships with spouses. Although many of the seniors I interviewed had non-robotic dolls or stuffed animals in their possession, the staff of one of the nursing homes felt the seniors’ relationships with the robots were different enough to ju