In a tan polo shirt, brown leather belt, and round bolo tie, MIT PhD student Wil Norton kind of looks like a park ranger, leading our tour group through a tropical jungle. We’re not actually on safari, though — we’re at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). But what we’re about to see is even more exotic than a cheetah or a jaguar: a pair of humanoid Unitree robots, each costing about $50,000.
(“They’ll tell you they cost $16,000,” Norton says. “That’s a lie.”)
We usually only see these robots on YouTube when they’re performing a synchronized martial arts routine, or dancing on “America’s Got Talent.” Here, they’re approachable. Even though I know it isn’t sentient, I want to be its friend.
With Norton’s permission, I approach the robot, whose nickname is Gabe. For a moment, I’m not sure how to interact with something that has a LiDAR sensor where its brain should be, but I default to treating it like a person.
“Hello, sir, it’s nice to meet you,” I say, grabbing its gloved, dexterous hand and shaking it.
I think about this interaction later — my instinctive impulse to be friendly to a robot — when I attend Dr. Sherry Turkle‘s “Artificial Intimacy” book launch at MIT Future Fest.
Turkle, who joined the faculty at MIT in 1976, has been researching the relationship between humans and computers perhaps longer than anyone, charting technology’s psychological impact on us from the first home computers to ChatGPT.
“When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us,” Turkle writes in the book. “And we are wired to care for it in return.”
I’m not alone in my tendency to anthropomorphize robots and large language models (LLMs) — as Turkle notes, it seems to be in our nature. One study found that about 70% of people are polite when interacting with AI, while another showed that users are more likely to say “please” or “thank you” to chatbots once a conversation has progressed past a first prompt-and-response.
“People tend to categorize whether this is the right use or wrong use, but I don’t think that is a clear boundary,” Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, a colleague of Turkle who founded the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, told TechCrunch. “The question is, who are we becoming when we talk to [AI]?”
There’s no material consequence of my politeness toward Gabe the robot, but as LLMs infiltrate everything from Google searches to customer service interactions, it has become routine for people to interact with these seemingly sentient chatbots. We’re more vulnerable than ever to the flip side of this impulse, which is that some people can ascribe so much legitimacy to the feelings of chatbots — which are programmed to never spark conflict — that they end up favoring them over other humans.
“You can think of it like fantasy and fiction. We go to the cinema even though we know the story is completely fictional, but we want to experience a certain dimension of human experience that maybe our reality cannot give us,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we benefit from that ability to experience other dimensions of human experience without losing it to the fantasy, where you can no longer come back to the reality?”
Pataranutaporn describes himself as a “critical optimist,” and he studies AI’s potential to contribute to human flourishing. But he’s well aware of how dangerous this technology can be in the extremes. He even served as an expert in a wrongful death lawsuit over the suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer, III, whose mother sued the chatbot platform Character.AI, alleging that a chatbot modeled after a “Game of Thrones” character had encouraged her son to end his life.
“It can create a situation where people don’t feel agency in actually creating their own future — like when you say that AI will replace everyone, people ask, what are we gonna do? And these companies are not really responding ethically or responsibly,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we have imagination while still being responsible for the impact of that imagination?”
While Turkle’s book explores the risk of turning to AI for emotional support, rather than other people, she doesn’t think that AI-human interactions are universally harmful.
She recalls a project she advised in which a student created an AI bot to help people practice for job interviews.
“My big metaphor is, stay in your lane, chatbot!” Turkle said at the event. “Coaching for a job interview? That’s a lane. I can do that … A chatbot that says to a three-year-old, ‘I’m your parent, you can talk to me, not your parents,’ is not in a lane.”
But when this technology deviates from its lane even slightly, we become vulnerable to the way it can slowly chip away at our skepticism and make us trust it. It can start with something as simple as a handshake.
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