Part 2
Robots and the elderly
Why give objects that don’t understand a life to people who are trying to understand their own?
Robots are inevitable for the elderly
Deference to technology because we see ourselves as depleted
Nurse-bot
People, too, may only seem to care – feigned interest
Value of caring machines == seeming or pretending behavior
Humans as a species need to deal with synthetic emotions
Turkle reframes: people pretend to care, robots can’t pretend
Programmers felt they had compmany

Meaning: robots don’t have meaning
Robotic companions
Also assuage the regrets of the families of elders
If you …become accustomed to the diminished emotions

Part 1
Fully networked life
Infinite landscape
The network was with us, on us, all the time
We could be with each other all the time

Revolution in robotics
As friends
Digital creatures

Insecure in our relationships and TKTK technology…we look to technology
Turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves….new solicitude

The product as an intimate ethnography

Give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things

Second self – traced computers to our ways of thinking abt ourselves..to being human
Used computers to reflect on the self
Children were most like to see the new category as “sort of” alive

Life on the screen
Forging new identities

Alone together
Creating meaning?

May deny ourselves solitude

Love with robots will be the same as with humans
Levy
Robots will teach us to be better friends and lovers and will substitute where people fail
Virtues of marriage to robots

The inauthentic has a new aesthetic

Pado – has states of mind.
Robots as friends, confidants, even lovers
Poised to attach to the inanimate
Technological promiscuity

We might navigate intimacy by skirting it
Robots programmed to provide simulations of love
Robots will tend to the elderly and the young
No judgement

Sociable robots serve as symptom and dream
Sidestep intimacy issues
Dream – a way to be together and alone in relationships

Feel in possession of a full social life and then feel alone