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.

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.

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