OPINION:
Harry S. Truman once told a frustrated newcomer to the ways of Washington to expect permanently tough times. “If you want a friend in Washington,” he said, “get a dog.” That’s still good advice, but now there’s an alternative and it comes already housebroken. The robots are coming!
One of them is Barbie, the best friend of little girls of a certain age. This one is called the Hello Barbie, and she’s on her way to the market. She has a microphone at her tiny waist to connect her to an Internet server in a cloud. She is designed to put a little girl’s head in the clouds, programmed to speak 8,000 sentences that relate to her world.
How strange that we think we can instill in toys of metal and plastic the roots of feeling and empathy for others. But that’s what programmers in the high-tech world see as the future. Barbie is merely symptomatic of the most simple-minded techniques of robotics. More sophisticated robots are programmed to show sensitivity and care in conversations with aging adults who have no one to talk to, or to patients alone in a hospital or nursing home.
We’re moving toward a world where robots are set up to be companions to save busy friends, family and professionals the trouble of doing it themselves.
It sounds like science fiction, and it may be science but it’s not fiction. Simulated relationships are the latest in interactive technology, new rungs on the ladder to success. In a world where “friend” is a verb — “friend me on Facebook” — and we “interface” with a computer, “losing face” takes on new meanings. What we’re losing is the ability to read a face, to feel pain and pleasure in an actual voice, to sense the suffering beneath the surface of a text or tweet.
In one session of testing Hello Barbie, to see how the tiny robot would work in a conversation between a real tot and a doll, Barbie asked a 7-year real girl named Tiara whether she had ever felt jealousy about something. Tiara answered yes, “other people talking about me.”
This stumped Barbie, who hadn’t been programmed to deal with such a human answer. But her creators expect her to learn such tasks soon. (If only Medea, who killed her children to punish their father for leaving her for another woman, had waited to arrive in the 21st century her children might be alive with her.) In another session, with a child in kindergarten, Barbie sought advice for mending a friendship, having argued with a friend, and the child suggested that she apologize. Barbie agreed. Robots can be fast learners when a child shall lead them.
All this is fun and sounds harmless enough, but Hello Barbie aims to be the most advanced toy with artificial intelligence. This is the high-tech high point, suggesting that dolls can have actual feelings, but it’s a low point for a child trying to develop authentic insight by interacting with a lifeless doll. Hello Barbie has been compared to Pinocchio, in the story about a doll that yearned to be human and ultimately becomes a boy, but there’s a big difference between the telling of Gepetto’s carving and learning from a digital doll. The Pinocchio story develops emotional and moral imagination around a delightful and touching story, but Pinocchio was intended to be read to or by a child, inviting a conversation with an adult about the richer meanings in the story.
The interactive Barbie, with only 8,000 lines of available answering dialogue, not only promises to intrude into the imaginative process of the child, but to replace the flesh-and-blood adult in actual conversations where moral decisions and empathy are nurtured.
In her book “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle, a professor of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that we expect more from our small and wondrous machines and less from each other. The manipulation of technology is particularly fraught in relationships between adults and children with a scarcity of “eye contact.” Smart phones are saddest when they deprive parents and children of undivided attention.
Sherry Turkle tells of a 15-year old girl who grew angry with her father when he took out his smartphone to check facts in their conversation: “Daddy, please stop Googling,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” Conversation humanizes and teaches empathy and understanding inside thoughts and feelings. No matter how smart Barbie gets with her digital assets and transplants, her frozen smile betrays the empty head of a doll. It takes the beating heart of a parent to understand the bleeding heart of a child. A friendly dog might do it, too, but a bark is no substitute for a kind human word.
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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