56 tIme November 4, 2019
bonding with an artificially intelligent com-
panion than with a human one. It’s not un-
common to feel gratitude or warmth toward a
person or thing that helped you through a diffi-
cult situation. U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and
Afghanistan who were issued an IED- finding
robot grew very attached to the machines,
naming them, awarding them medals and be-
coming distraught when they were damaged
beyond repair in combat. It could be that a tool
that comforts people through the upheavals of
aging may elicit a similar response.
irene lenard moved plenty of times during
her husband’s years in the Army. But her relo-
cation to Knollwood in 2018 was the first she
had to make without Stanley, who died in 2014.
It hasn’t been easy. Lenard grew up in Ger-
many, and a lot of her new neighbors’ cultural
references zoom over her head. Her daughter
lives nearby and visits frequently, but it’s been
hard to make connections in a place that hasn’t
felt like home. Then Stevie came along.
When Lenard talks about Stevie, her face
lights up. She sits up straighter at the cafeteria
table with the zest of a schoolgirl who knows
the answer to a question. Stevie is easy to talk
to, she says—easier, in fact, than most of the
people she’s met at Knollwood so far. With Ste-
vie, she says, “I’m more comfortable. [Conver-
sation] just comes out. One silly word leads to
another.” The ability of social robots to engen-
der that kind of intimacy may be their greatest
asset. The artificial element of that intimacy,
however, is also the thing that most worries
critics of caregiving robots.
“People are capable of the higher standard
of care that comes with empathy,” writes psy-
chologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle in
her 2011 book Alone Together. A robot, in con-
trast, “is innocent of such capacity.” Turkle
watched one elderly research subject speak
warmly to a robotic baby seal named Paro, de-
signed as a therapy tool for people with de-
mentia, and noticed a problem. “Paro took
care of Miriam’s desire to tell her story—it
made a space for that story to be told—but it
did not care about her or her story,” she writes.
“ Although the robot understood nothing,
Miriam settled for what she had.”
Ethicists who see potential for positive
human- robot encounters argue that robotic
assistance doesn’t have to come at the cost of
human interaction. Just as science develops
new drugs to treat conditions that don’t re-
spond to existing medicines, these new tools
may be a vital resource for people who strug-
gle with traditional modes of communication.
In 2018, the global market for robots
designed to assist the elderly and disabled,
including social robots, was $48 million. The
market for rehabilitative robots, which in-
clude everything from Paro seals to robotic
exo skeletons, was $310 million, according
to the International Federation of Robotics,
a Frankfurt -based trade group. The market
for social robots is expected to grow 29% an-
nually from 2019 to 2022, while demand for
rehab robots is projected to grow 45% per
year in the same period.
The current version of Stevie costs between
€20,000 ($22,000) and €30,000 ($33,000) to
make, though a retail version would likely be less
costly. At current market conditions, a monthly
service contract for the robot—the model the
Trinity team expects to take to market —wouldSome residents have
been fascinated by
the details of the
robot’s construction,
quizzing the Irish team
on specifics. There’s
also a small but vocal
contingent who feel
they’ve lived perfectly
good lives without
using robots and see no
reason to start now