Artificial Emotion
Sherry Turkle interview to Boston Globe

She says, we become attached to sophisticated machines not for their smarts but their emotional reach.

"They seduce us by asking for human nurturance, not intelligence," she says.

"We're suckers not for realism but for relationships."

Kids, she has found, define aliveness in terms of emotion: "In meeting objects as simple as Furbys, their conversations of aliveness have to do with if a computer loves them and if they love the computer."