As Robot Pets and Dolls Multiply, Children React in New Ways to Things That
Are 'Almost Alive'
By KATIE HAFNER
Tony Cenicola for The New York Times
MOOD SWINGS A matrix of sensors and chips allows My Real Baby, made by Hasbro,
to interact with people. At first, it simply stares and coos. After the doll
is played with, it asks for things, and over time, it forms sentences.
In the 1930s, when the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget quizzed
children to find out if they could tell the difference between living creatures
and inanimate objects, he concluded that they defined life by figuring out which
objects could move by themselves, without an outside push or pull.
In the last 20 years or so, that particular theory of Piagets has been
almost completely overturned by research showing that young children are not
fooled by things like garage doors that move by remote control. That is, children
can tell the difference between animals and machines even if the machines appear
to move by themselves.
Now children are encountering a new category of objects, things that seem to
possess intentions, preferences and other characteristics previously reserved
for living beings.
What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can
children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research
into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of
interest in childrens reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan,
first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners.
But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys
and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers.
Tiger Toys, maker of the chatty, needy Furby, will soon introduce Shelby, a
talking clam that many of the things Furby does. Tiger also has a new robot
dog, Poo-Chi, on toy store shelves. Panasonic is testing a robotic cat for isolated
old people. And Hasbro, with help from artificial intelligence experts, has
developed an animatronic doll that not only says "ba-ba" and makes
babylike facial expressions but can also mimic human expressions in other ways.
"The proliferation of virtual pets is raising new questions about what
kinds of relationships seem appropriate to have with nonbiological objects,"
said Prof. Sherry Turkle, a professor and psychoanalyst who studies the sociology
of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This is about
a new kind of relationship that we dont know enough about. We need to
continue to study this very carefully."
Professor Turkle, who studies the relationships between computers and people,
is among the first researchers to stake a claim in this fertile new area. For
the past two years, she and her research assistant, Jennifer Audley, have studied
virtual pets, like Tamagotchis and electronic dolls like Furbies. They are trying
to understand how interacting with these pet impersonators - what Professor
Turkle calls "relational artifacts" - affects the way people think
about their human identity.
In a research project still in its early stages, Professor Turkle and Ms. Audley
have visited after-school centers in the Boston area to watch the ways children
5 to 10 years old play with Furbies. They have also sent Furbies home with children
and asked the children and their parents to keep diaries of the interactions.
Again and again, Ms. Audley said, the researchers have asked the children: "Is
it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?"
"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled
on was, 'Its not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby
kind of way.' "
Watching children assign personality and emotion to toys is nothing new for
children, but this category of "sort of alive" breaks new ground.
It is showing up more and more as a first generation of children plays with
interactive toys that need attention and nurturing.
"When a doll of 10 years ago said, 'I love you,' " Professor Turkle
said, "the children knew that there was a little tape recorder inside.
The language did not come from a relationship of nurturance, of there being
a sense that a consciousness internal to the doll was processing the quality
of the relationship between child and doll."
An emerging class of dolls and toys is designed to give exactly that sense.
Hasbros $100 animatronic infant, called My Real Baby, will be in toy stores
in November. The doll, which Hasbro developed with the iRobot Corporation of
Somerville, Mass., is a complex matrix of sensors and chips. The result is an
object that mimics some of a real childs moods and needs. To be put to
sleep, it must be laid down or rocked. If it is tickled, it giggles.
It seems to go beyond another product from Hasbro coming out in August: eSpecially
My Barney, which connects to a computer so a child or parent can download activities
like songs and games for the toy to play.
The doll, which does not have a serial cable, develops over time. When it is
first taken out of the box, it simply stares and coos. After the doll is played
with for a while, it starts asking for things, like its bottle. Over time, the
baby starts to form more complete sentences.
While designing the doll, toy makers at Hasbro hired Dr. Gar Roper, a child
psychologist in Fairfield, Conn., to observe little girls as they played with
it. He noticed that the unpredictability of the dolls responses confused
the children but also fascinated them.
Dr. Roper said the girls seemed to consider the doll more alive than other dolls.
"They seemed to be aware that this was a middle ground of some kind,"
he said. "They desperately wanted to hold it, but they were very uncertain
of how to hold it. They held it very gently, with uncertain tenderness."
But Prof. Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California
at Berkeley and co-author of "The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains
and How Children Learn" (William Morrow, 1999), cautioned against drawing
hasty conclusions from such behavior.
While it may be true that the children pretended that the doll was alive, Professor
Gopnik said, "children behave as if practically everything is alive when
theyre engaged in pretend play. That in itself doesnt mean theyre
confused about whats alive and what isnt."
Prof. Susan Gelman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
agreed that even very young children could make a distinction between animals
like dogs and inanimate objects like chairs.
"But do they maintain such a distinction even when confronted with creatures
that defy our usual expectations," she said, "that present what seems
to be a fuzzy boundary between animals and objects?"
Professor Gelman agreed with Professor Turkle that the new digital dolls coming
on the market bent the familiar boundaries between the animate and the inanimate.
"By looking at lively, responsive robotic creatures," she said, "researchers
can test the boundaries of some of our most fundamental concepts in very new
and provocative ways.
"If it turns out that robots pose difficulties that self-moving machines
do not, then this would be very interesting indeed, suggesting that maybe the
social, interactive features are particularly central and salient to children."
Then there is the question of electronic death. The Tamagotchi, the palm-size
screen character from Japan that was very popular a few years ago, demanded
continual care and feeding, and it responded to the quality of care. But 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. Some children panicked when the toys broke,
a sign to their small owners that the pseudopets had died untimely deaths.
Ms. Audley tells of midnight calls from frantic parents whose children were
beside themselves because their Furby had suddenly gone on the blink. "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."
Children are not the only ones grappling with the new world of lifelike objects.
"We are finding ourselves in a different world from the old artificial-intelligence
debates in which researchers argued about whether machines could be really intelligent,"
Professor Turkle said. "The new objects sidestep arguments about what is
inherent in the machines and play instead on what they evoke in us."
In that vein, Panasonic is currently testing a furry robotic cat called Tama
and a robotic teddy bear called Kuma, which are intended to provide companionship
to elderly people; each is expected to cost about $500. Tama and Kuma react
to touch and sound and can be programmed to say a number of things, like reminders
to take medication.
Paul Liao, chief technology officer in Panasonics United States office,
emphasized that unlike Sonys $2,500 Aibo robotic dog -- which wanders
around the room and chases balls and even lifts its leg to scratch -- the Panasonic
creatures were not intended as entertainment.
And what about creatures that seem to be alive but immortal? Professor Turkle
said one woman told her that Aibo was better than a real dog because it would
not die suddenly and plunge its owner into grief.
The comment startled Professor Turkle, she said, putting her in mind of a 1969
story by Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric!" In the story, a
robotic grandmother wins the trust of a young girl who has recently lost her
mother only after the girl learns that the grandmother cannot die.
"In many ways throughout the story we learn that the grandmother is actually
better than a human caretaker," Professor Turkle said, "more able
to attend to each family members needs, less needy, with perfect memory
and inscrutable skills, and most importantly, not mortal."
Mortality has traditionally defined the human condition, Professor Turkle said.
"A shared sense of mortality has been the basis for feeling a commonality
with other human beings," she said, "a sense of going through the
same life cycle, a sense of the preciousness of time and life, of its fragility.
"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."
And what of other lessons learned in the cycle of life, lessons that are less
traumatic than death but still difficult?
Hasbro, for its part, sidesteps those lessons. The company has gone out of its
way to make sure that its new doll, however lifelike, will not disappoint young
customers. Put the doll down and it may fuss for a while. Continue to ignore
it and instead of working itself up into real screams, it quiets down and drifts
off into a blissful sleep.
"At the end of the day," said Helen Greiner, president of iRobot,
"its a toy, and weve developed play patterns that dont
upset kids. If you dont change its diaper, after a while it gets over
it."
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Texte paru dans The New York Times, 1999.