Creators of artificial intelligence measure how well machines can imitate human qualities like empathy, listening, affirmation, and love. Don’t reciprocate, says Sherry Turkle. Turkle’s latest book is “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”
“I have very strong feelings about a future in which robots become the kind of conversational agent that pretend to have emotional lives. Shortly after I finished we can make reclaiming conversation I was interviewed for an article in the New York Times about Hello Barbie. So Hello Barbie comes out of the box and says, now I’m just paraphrasing, the jest hi I’m Hello Barbie. I have a sister. You have a sister. I kind of hate my sister. I’m jealous of your sister. Do you hate your sister? Let’s talk about how we feel about our sisters. In other words it just kind of knows stuff about you and is ready to talk about the arc of a human life and sibling rivalry as though it had a life, a mother, the feelings of jealousy about a sister and was ready to relate to you on that basis. And it doesn’t. It’s teaching pretend empathy. It’s asking you to relate to an object that has pretend empathy.”
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