If you take care of something, you begin to love it — which makes us very vulnerable. By pushing your Darwinian button, if a roboticist can get you to take care of the robot, you will attach to it. Once that happens, even if you tell a person, “It’s programmed. Here’s how it makes eye contact, it’s looking for the color red,” it doesn’t matter — because these things are so strong.

We are tempted to use robots as companions, and I think there are two situations where it is really inappropriate: with children and the elderly.

In Japan, there’s this giant push for robots for the elderly. They argue there aren’t enough people to take care of the elderly. There’s a second vulnerability at work, as well: The guy who visits his mother and says, “If I leave her staring at a wall when I leave the nursing home, I feel terrible; if I leave her staring at the television, I feel not so terrible; if I leave her playing with a robot, I feel OK.” It makes us feel better as children to see the interaction. But not all interaction is equal.

To me, having an elderly woman talk about the death of a child, the loss of a spouse, fear about the end of life, to something that doesn’t understand what a life is, what a child is, what death is, what it means to face the end of life — this is not an appropriate companion.