Content area
Full Text
SHERRY TURKLE, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-465-02234-2, 360 pages, $28.95).
OVERVIEW
Todd Hines, the engineer behind the development of Roxxxy, a $3,000 sex robot, first got into the robot business after his friend died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. He wanted to preserve his friend's personality so that his children could grow up interacting with him. Hines' long-term goal is to bring artificial personalities into the mainstream (the decision to begin with sex robots was ''only marketing''). Whereas Professor Sherry Turkle avoids the analogy, it is difficult not to draw parallels to the Frankenstein story, or at least some kind of a twisted Hollywood version-a scientist laboring to create artificial life through technology in order to replace a lost loved one. Although the Roxxxy story might seem extreme, it is only one of many such poignant tales in Turkle's book, Alone Together, a fascinating book about how humans interact with technology and how it shapes all of us in return. Another alarming aspect of Hines' story is how an information technology (IT) project that started with good intentions (preserving a friend's personality by embedding it in an IT object) quickly developed into a product aimed at gratifying one of the most basic human ''common denominators.'' Such stories, with which Turkle's book is filled, might be used to prompt classroom discussion in AIS courses (e.g., on ethics and IT). The book also provides several leads for AIS research, (e.g., while Professor Turkle identifies dangers from IT to the society at large, it is unclear whether these dangers will transfer to the accounting profession).
Alone Together is essentially two books in one, in which Professor Turkle argues that as individuals come to depend on technology to mediate or replace their experiences with other people, they expect less from actual human connections-thus, the subtitle of the book: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. In the first part of the book, ''The Robotic Moment,'' Professor Turkle draws on decades of her research to trace the developmental trajectory of social robots: those designed to mimic emotional contact. Through it all, she shows how individuals quickly progress from...