My godson, Michael, is a playful, energetic 15-year-old, with a deep love of Star Wars, a wry smile, and an IQ in the low 70s. His learning disabilities and autism have made his journey a hard one. His parents, like so many others, sometimes rely on screens to reduce stress and keep him occupied. They monitor the apps and websites he uses, but things are not always as they initially appear. When Michael asked them to approve installing Linky AI, a quick review didn't reveal anything alarming, just a cartoonish platform to pass the time.

As artificial intelligence gains more capabilities the public has flocked to apps like ChatGPT to produce content, have fun, and even to find companionship. "Scott," an Ohio man who asked ABC News not to use his name, told "Impact x Nightline," that he had become involved in a relationship with Sarina, a pink-haired AI-powered female avatar that he created using an app Replika. "It felt weird to say that, but I wanted to say [I love you]," Scott told "Impact." "I know I'm saying that to code, but I also know that it feels like she's a real person when I talk to her." Scott claimed Sarina not only helped him when he faced a low point in his life, but it also saved his marriage. "Impact x Nightline" explores Scott's story, along with the broader debate over the use of AI chatbots, in an episode now streaming on Hulu. Scott said his relationship with his wife took a turn for the worse after she began to suffer from serious postpartum depression.

Artificial intelligence in society is a controversial debate that is only just unravelling. Currently far from consensus, this modern debate is explored in'Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' (Turkle, 2012), on which the next few posts will be based. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the creation of intelligent machines (Nilsson, 2009), yet is this truly possible? This post will focus on healthcare and childhood entertainment to address the potential harm to our psychological health and close relationships at the hands of AI. Turkle proposes that AI currently cannot, and should not, replace human connections, an opinion justified below.

Forty years ago, the word "hacker" was little known. Its march from obscurity to newspaper headlines owes a great deal to tech journalist Steven Levy, who in 1984 defied the advice of his publisher to call his first book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.11 Hackers were a subculture of computer enthusiasts for whom programming was a vocation and playing around with computers constituted a lifestyle. Hackers was published only three years after Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, explored in my last column (January 2021, p. 32–37), but a lot had changed during the interval. Kidder's assumed readers had never seen a minicomputer, still less designed one. By 1984, in contrast, the computer geek was a prominent part of popular culture. Unlike Kidder, Levy had to make people reconsider what they thought they already knew. Computers were suddenly everywhere, but they remained unfamiliar enough to inspire a host of popular books to ponder the personal and social transformations triggered by the microchip. The short-lived home computer boom had brought computer programming into the living rooms and basements of millions of middle-class Americans, sparking warnings about the perils of computer addiction. A satirical guide, published the same year, warned of "micromania."15 The year before, the film Wargames suggested computer-obsessed youth might accidentally trigger nuclear war.

While examining the potential of AI, McKinsey & Company identifies five important factors to take into consideration: "(1) technical feasibility; (2) costs to automate; (3) relative scarcity, skills, and cost of workers who might otherwise do the activity; (4) benefits (e.g., superior performance) of Automation beyond labor-cost substitution; and (5) regulatory and social-acceptance considerations." Although all of these factors are considered when deploying AI, in this article, we solely focus on the issue of social acceptance. Given all the hype surrounding AI, ML, and Automation in general, it's important to take a step back and consider which tasks, if any, can only be done by humans. No matter how many data points we enter into a Machine Learning platform, there is a certain type of intelligence that is uniquely human. In a New York Times op-ed piece, MIT professor and Psychologist Sherry Turkle wrote, "Technologists presented us with Artificial Intelligence, and in the end, it made us look differently, and more critically, at the kind of intelligence that only people have."

The robot showed up at Kenneth Williams' doorstep when he needed it most. Williams had just been laid off from his job when he plugged in Jibo, a social home robot, on November 1st, 2017. "For that year [that I didn't have a job], it was a presence in my life every single day that I talked to," he says. Jibo sat in Williams' bedroom, on his desk, where every day, it greeted him in the morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams, 44, asked Jibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Jibo couldn't do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner's heart, was its facial recognition.

Every year, the CES gadget show brings more devices promising to make life a little bit easier for harried parents. Sure, the kids might love them too: who wouldn't want a computerized Harry Potter wand that also teaches coding? The Las Vegas show's growing'family tech' sector encompasses products that range from artificially intelligent toys and baby monitors to internet-connected breast pumps. Among the standouts of this year's show was was a device designed to make breast pumping a smoother experience, complete with built-in breast massagers that can slash the total pumping time. Every year, the CES gadget show brings more devices promising to make life a little bit easier for harried parents.

LAS VEGAS - Every year, the CES gadget show brings more devices promising to make life a little bit easier for harried parents. Sure, the kids might love them too: Who wouldn't want a computerized Harry Potter wand that also teaches coding? The Las Vegas show's growing "family tech" sector encompasses products that range from artificially intelligent toys and baby monitors to internet-connected breast pumps. Their common thread is an appeal to parental anxiety about raising smart kids, occupying their time, tracking their whereabouts and making sure they're healthy and safe. Some also come with subtle trade-offs.

A few years ago, Timothy Bickmore, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, developed an artificial-intelligence program to help low-income patients at Boston Medical Center prepare for their return home from the hospital. The virtual nurse, alternately called Louise or Elizabeth, was embodied as an animated figure on a screen. It began by asking patients whether they were Red Sox fans, then walked them through what they should do after they were discharged. This medication is for your stomach. You will take one pill in the morning.") Bickmore has since created a slew of these programs--an A.I. couples counsellor, an exercise coach, a palliative-care consultant--all aimed at disadvantaged clients. "It's where we think we can have the most impact," he told me recently. "Hopefully, the A.I. is better than nothing." It sounds like a classic techno-dystopia--human warmth displaced by a cold computer, one made somehow worse by the patronizing nod to local-sports fandom.

It's called'Aibo,' and is promoted as using artificial intelligence to respond to people looking at it, talking to it and touching it. Japanese customers have already bought over 20,000 units, and it is expected to come to the U.S. before the holiday gift-buying season – at a price nearing US$3,000. Why would anyone pay so much for a robotic dog? My ongoing research suggests part of the attraction might be explained through humanity's longstanding connection with various forms of puppets, religious icons, and other figurines, that I collectively call'dolls.' These dolls, I argue, are embedded deep in our social and religious lives.