'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us. Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along. Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents. Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education. #Younger children want to do what older children do: Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had; I wanted to join that club." Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can be as helpful as positive ones. -- #Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they do not help or advise too much: Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control. Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it, the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. -- #Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children: Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand, and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching. -- #Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones: Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for by others. -- Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, who range in age from 4 on through high-school age (age 18 or so). It seems to work great for everyone in that age range, and I think such a broad mix is valuable for everyone. The 18-year-olds are sometimes almost like uncles or aunts to some of the 4-year-olds. They are, I think, learning to be parents. In our culture we provide very little opportunity for people to learn how to be parents, until they actually are.'

'School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress. ...researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. "For years studies have underscored the importance of an early, nurturing environment for good, healthy outcomes for children," Luby says. "But most of those studies have looked at psychosocial factors or school performance. This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing. Having a hippocampus that's almost 10 percent larger just provides concrete evidence of nurturing's powerful effect."'

'Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In "Alone Together", MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools...' -- "...Alone Together is about human vulnerability and technological affordances. People are actually willing and wanting to substitute robots – that seem to care – for people... Nurturance is the killer app for sociable robotics. Human beings are programmed to love what we nurture." -- "'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' When we use other people in this way, you can get used to seeing them as spare parts; as ways to support our too fragile selves."

'Alone Together is the result of hundreds of interviews that Turkle has carried out over the last 15 years with a broad cross section of children, adults and old people. What Turkle finds is that, out of a sense of disappointment with each other, we’ve turned to robots as a substitute for human interaction.' -- "[The robotic moment] is the moment when we think that robots care about us. It's the moment when we ratchet up our expectations that we can put robots in the place of human beings." -- ("6 year-olds aren't disappointed, are they?") [Neglect] "There's this seduction by the robotic... Children attach to these robots and want to love them... there's a slide from better-than-nothing to better-than-everything: I want to robot dog because it's better than nothing. Then: a robot dog, it can always stay a puppy and that is kind of nice. And then only few conversations down the road: this robot will never die." -- "We've invented a form where we propose to substitute for our selves."

The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Milo?

'Thom Hartmann's approach showing the differences between "Hunters" and "Farmers". -- Hunter: #Constantly monitoring their environment. Farmer: #Nurturing; creates and supports community values; attuned to whether something will last.'

Shame in nurturing games within social environments eg. Farmville: "If you know your friends are visiting your farm everyday you'll spend more time and money to keep it tidy." -- Thoughts/gists: Gameification is inevitable in an attention economy. Once offered, people like maximising reward/loyalty points. New real-time tracking/feedback technology will enable more compelling collecting/optimising/completion experiences. Companies are going to be trying to figure out ways to give you points for doing things. They want to own data you care about. "As a game designer you better figure out what side you're on: 4 groups: #persuaders: motivated by money, #fulfillers: create deep experiences, #artists: advance the medium, #humanitarians: motivate 'better' behaviours"

'Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and Choi Mi-sun, 25, would feed their three-month-old baby only when not at 12-hour-online sessions in a local internet café. The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter. After one such session in September the couple found their daughter dead and called police. An autopsy found the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. "It seems that taking care of their on-line game character erased any sense of guilt they may have had for neglecting their daughter."' -- Push button parenting.

'...cuteness is physically addicting. -- As the essayist Daniel Harris argued our enjoyment of adorable stuff has a hidden dark side. “Adorable things are often most adorable in the middle of a pratfall or a blunder.” He mentions Winnie-the-Pooh’s getting his head stuck in a beehive as an example and goes on to argue that children themselves are not really so cute; cuteness, instead, is something we do to them. “There is something dark about using children for the pleasure of our maternal needs,” Harris says. “We enjoy being caretakers so much that we will create situations in which they need our care.” -- Roland Kelts: "...if you are desperate to be known, you need a strategy for being known, and a very good strategy is the old evolutionary one of being so cute that you need to be cared for. That was, in a sense, Japan’s position for the last 60 years: ‘We will make your products really, really well, and we’re going to be the best little boy you can imagine.’”

'Objectum sexuals experience intense emotional connections with everyday things – bridges, stereos, the Eiffel Tower. Some even get 'married.' It's not a fetish, they say, but a sexual orientation. -- Objectum sexuals are animists, who believe everything in the world has a spirit and a soul, Ms. Eiffel explains. “The misconceptions are that OS people are social introverts, that they can't connect with people, therefore they choose objects instead,” Ms. Eiffel says. “Most OS people go to work, some are even married with kids.” “On the [one] side of the scale, we have people who just simply use sex toys for fun, but there's no emotional connection,” she says. “I like to say intimacy, not sex, because being physically close to my partners satisfies that,” he says. “Just like you would get pleasure from seeing and smelling and touching and tasting the person that you're with, they would get pleasure in the same way.”' -- And you know sneaker freaks and vinyl headz do this. (Ahem!)

'Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia. For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded. What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: "It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it's alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it's alive enough to be tortured." We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us.'

'The Facebook status is the result of a significant shift in thinking within Generation I. The concept of being social has adapted, now requiring that a person be eternally connected and no longer differentiate between personal and public information. Young people have accepted that sharing private information about themselves is simply a part of having friends. The advice your mother provided long ago finally makes sense: Sharing is caring.'

'Rough cut of a documentary which details, amongst other things, the personal beliefs of Hugo de Garis and Kevin Warwick on the possibilities of artificial life.'

'Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter.' -- It's a Robot-Japanese Tourist!

'Power-Hog is a power consumption metering piggy bank designed to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use.'

"Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love."

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

'This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. “You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics. There is a danger that we’ll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions," says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to “live” forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. “Roboticists have come to speak of ‘I Thou’ relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers.”

'... three major themes that emerged from our study of first encounters: Children display #perseverance in their efforts to communicate with the robots, including finding ways to explain and excuse the robots' failures to communicate with them, perseverance that expresses a range of personal styles. A similar range of styles marks children's ways of #anthropomorphizing the robots. For the most part, children come to see the robots as ‚"sort of alive" because they feel in a social relationship with them and use a range of strategies to overcome disappointments and system failures. Finally, children's stake in preserving a sense of relationship is so strong that they actively resist any #demystification of the robots. With few exceptions, children were uninterested to the point of unwilling to understand the robots in terms of underlying mechanism. Once defined as social, any lack of particular competencies is treated as an unfortunate disability for which the robot deserves empathy."

'The new generation of "sociable" or "relational" robots has been built to engage us, creature to creature. They can recognize faces, learn the names of individuals, make eye contact, all things that push our simple Darwinian buttons. When an entity does these things, we are toast; we believe there is a sentient creature before us.' -- 'Q: Have we gone too far in our devotion? A: 'I call it technological promiscuity. We are prone to attaching to technologies even if there is no authenticity in the forthcoming "relationship". From there, it is a small step to wanting the object to care for you in return. So we have to exercise our critical faculties. We have to ask about our human purposes. The first thing designers as well as consumers should think about is the human purposes being served by the design. It is more crucial now than ever before to consider how to respect, not exploit, our human vulnerabilities–particularly the emotional programming of our animal past and present.'

"... computational objects do not simply do things for us, they do things to us as people, to our ways of being [in] the world, to our ways of seeing ourselves an others. Increasingly, technology also puts itself into a position to do things with us, particularly with the introduction of 'relational artifacts,' here defined as technologies that have 'states of mind' and where encounters with them are enriched through understanding these inner states. In the case of relational artifacts for children and the elderly, nurturance is the new 'killer app.' We attach to what we nurture. How will interacting with relational artifacts affect people's way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special?"

"From the earliest stages of life, we have a profound need to connect. Infants experience themselves as if the objects in the world are pat of them and they are part of the objects in the world. These objects, such as Linus's baby blanket or a teddy bear, are perceived as being imbued with the self. A computer, too, can evoke in its users a sense of connection and personality." -- "Toys like the Tamagotchi ask for nurturance. By doing so, they push a profound button is us. As a species, we're programmed to attach to the things that we take care of and that blossom under our care."

"... children and seniors develop philosophical positions that are inseparable from their emotional needs. Affect and cognition wok together in the subjective response to relational technologies." -- "Orelia wants the kind of love that only a living creature can provide. She fears the ability of any creature to behave 'as if' it could love. She denied a chilly emotional reality by attributing qualities of intuition, transparency and connectedness to all people and animals. A philosophical position about robots is linked to an experience of the machine-like qualities of which people are capable, a good example of the interdependence of philosophical position and psychological motivation." -- "Relational artifacts, as objects between the living and not living, may have some special. As one nursing home resident said about Paro: 'I don't care if he is real or not. I love him."

'We are ill prepare for the new psychological world we are creating. We make objects that are emotionally powerful; at the same time, we say things such as "technology is just a tool" that deny the power our creations both on us as individuals and on our culture. I find it amazing how in less than one generation people have gotten used to the idea of giving their children Ritalin–not because the childen are hyperactive but because it will enhance their performance in school. who are you, anyway–your unmedicated self or your Ritalin self? for a lot of people, it has become unproblematic that their self is their self with Ritalin or their self with the addiction of a Web connection as an extension of mind. As one student with a wearable computer with a 24-hour Internet connection put it, "I become my computer. It's not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I'm a better person."'

'... no matter how attentive its owner, Tamagotchis either died or sprouted wings after a couple of weeks or so, often prompting gloom and guilt. Furbys evoked similar emotions. "I would rush over to the house with a new Furby, and every single time, the child showed no interest in the new one." Ms Audley recalled. "They gave lots of indications that they felt betrayed, taken in and fooled. It had revealed its nature as a machine and they felt embarrassed and angry. They were totally unwilling to invest that kind of emotional relationship in an object again." -- And what about creatures that seem to be alive but immortal? Professor Turkle said one woman told her hat Aibo was better than a real dog because it would not die suddenly and plunge its owner into grief. The comment startled Professor Turkle... "The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents potentially dramatic changes in our psychology."

'"The transition is from objects-to-think with to objects-to-nurture. The new hook for these kids, and not just for kids, is nurturance instead of control and mastery." -- "I am trying in one way or another to get people to look at the subjective side of technology. My focus is on the individual experience, on the construction of identity and the way technology is used in the construction of identity." -- Turkle describes how people visit chat rooms and other kinds of multiuser domains to explore facets of their personalities–and how they integrate what they learn into "RL,"or "Real Life." (Turkle herself prefers the acronym "ROL," or "Rest of Life.")'

"Eliza had a strong emotional effect on many who used it. Weizenbaum was surprised that his students were eager to chat with the program and some even wanted to be alone with it. What made Eliza a valued interlocutor? What matters were so private that they could only be discussed with a machine? Eliza not only revealed people's willingness to talk to computers but their reluctance to talk to other people. Students' trust in Eliza did not speak to what they thought Eliza would understand but their lack of trust in the people who would understand. Relational artifacts have become evocative objects, object that clarify our relationships to the world and ourselves. People who meet these objects feel a desire to nurture them. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. People begin to care for these objects and want the objects to care about them."

'SPARKS, a quirky new web-based serial about the stories--and the new modes of storytelling--that new media technologies are provoking in people's lives: "Equal parts absurdist comedy, mystery, and documentary, Sparks is a web-based serial about humans and technology. The story follows 30 year-old Sarah Sparks in her quest to serve the tech-dependent citizenry of New York as a freelance technologist. Her special "connection" with technology, however, takes her far beyond simple repair jobs, and into both the lives of her clients as well as some of the city's darkest, most chaotic corners.' -- "My computer, Dennis. At first he was everything the advertisements said he would be. But then after about two years there was trouble..." -- Brillziant!

"Paro is a therapeutic robot baby harp seal, intended to have a calming effect on and elicit emotional responses in patients of hospitals and nursing homes, similar to Animal-Assisted Therapy, but without its negative aspects. The robot has tactile sensors and responds to petting by moving its tail and opening and closing its eyes. It also responds to sounds and can learn a name. It can show emotions such as surprise, happiness and anger. It produces sounds similar to a real baby seal and (unlike a real baby seal) is active during the day and goes to sleep at night."

'Paro (a robotic seal-like creative) is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is treated. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." and then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself. The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computation objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. They are potent objects-to-think-with for asking the questions, posed by all machines that tether us to new socialities: "What is an authentic relationship with a machine?" "What are machines doing to our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship?"'

'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects ... play ... on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'

"... children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to nurture, that might nurture them. How are we going to feel when our computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what interests me now."

'For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?'

"Care is seen as passive and ineffectual, while our culture is intoxicated with independence and self-expression. The care ethic is not just about children and the elderly... but also, crucially, care of the self."

"Myrl allows you to share your virtual life. Your avatar has a Karma and you build it up the more you interact, play and live your virtual life. The higher the Karma, the more visible your discoveries will be."