better than anything

Matthew Crawford reports on attending a recent symposium about social life and AI:

The wisest person in attendance was Sherry Turkle, and the most interesting exchange was between her and the founder-CEO of Replika, a woman named Eugenia Kuyda. Turkle pointed out that apologetics for tech often come in the form of a slippery slope that begins by invoking some disability or another. She told a story from her own research (she interviews people about their use of various technologies) of a family who got an AI robot dog for grandma. They got the robot because grandma is allergic to dogs, and wouldn’t it be nice for grandma to have companionship? It’s better than nothing! When Turkle revisited the family a few months later, they’d gotten rid of their own dog and replaced it with a robot. She says the usual trajectory is from “better than nothing” to “better than anything,” where “better” means without friction between self and world.