JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we are exploring the blur that takes place when humans and machines interact and investigate each other.

JAD: Talk to each other.

ROBERT: Talk—you see, that's the thing. In the last act, we were always talking, talking, talking, talking. How about we encounter machines in a different way? How about we ...

JAD: No talking?

ROBERT: No talking. We touch them ...

JAD: Eww!

ROBERT: ... we pet them, we sniff them.

JAD: Eww!

ROBERT: We do sensual things that don't involve the sophisticated business of conversation.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Okay. [laughs]

ROBERT: This is Freedom Baird.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yes it is.

JAD: Who's not a machine.

ROBERT: I don't think so.

JAD: I'm Jad and this is ...

ROBERT: I'm Robert here.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Hi there. Nice to meet both of you.

ROBERT: We called her up because Freedom actually had her own kind of moment with a machine.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yep, yep. This was around 1999.

ROBERT: When Freedom was a graduate student.

FREEDOM BAIRD: At the Media Lab at MIT.

JAD: What were you doing there?

FREEDOM BAIRD: We were developing cinema of the future. So we were working on creating virtual characters that you can interact with.

ROBERT: Anyhow, she was also thinking about becoming a mom.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah, I knew I wanted to be a mom someday.

ROBERT: She decided to practice.

FREEDOM BAIRD: I got two gerbils: Twinkie and Hoho. So I had these two live pets and ...

ROBERT: And then she got herself a pet that was—well, not so alive.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah, I've got it right here.

JAD: Can you knock it against the mic so we can hear it, say hello to it?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah. There it is. [knocking sound]

JAD: Hi. Furby!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: That's my Furby! [music]]

FREEDOM BAIRD: At that time, Furbies were hot and happening.

ROBERT: Can you describe a Furby for those of us who ...?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Sure. It's about five inches tall, and the Furby is pretty much all head. It's just a big round fluffy head with two little feet sticking out the front. It has big eyes.

ROBERT: Apparently it makes noises?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yep. If you tickle its tummy it will coo. It would say ...

FURBY: Kiss me!

FREEDOM BAIRD: "Kiss me!" And it would want you to just keep playing with it. So I spent about 10 weeks using the Furby. I would carry it around in my bag.

ROBERT: And one day she's hanging out with her Furby, and she notices something ...

FREEDOM BAIRD: Very eerie. What I had discovered is if you hold it upside down, it will say ...

FURBY: Me scared!

FREEDOM BAIRD: "Me scared. Uh oh! Me scared. Me scared." And me as the sort of owner/user of this Furby would get really uncomfortable with that and then turn it back upright.

ROBERT: Because once you have it upright it's fine. It goes right back to ...

FREEDOM BAIRD: And then it's fine. So it's got some sensor in it that knows what direction it's facing.

JAD: Or maybe it's just scared!

FREEDOM BAIRD: Hmm.

JAD: Sorry!

ROBERT: Anyway, well she thought, "Well, wait a second now. This could be sort of a new way that you could use to draw the line between what's human ..."

JAD: And what's machine.

ROBERT: Yeah.

FREEDOM BAIRD: It's this kind of emotional Turing test.

JAD: Can you guys hear me?

CHILDREN: Yes.

JAD: I can hear you.

ROBERT: If we actually wanted to do this test, how would we do it exactly?

JAD: How are you guys doing?

CHILDREN: Good.

JAD: Yeah?

FREEDOM BAIRD: You would need a group of kids.

JAD: Could you guys tell me your names?

OLIVIA: I'm Olivia.

LUISA: Luisa.

TURIN: Turin.

DARYL: Daryl

LILA: Lila.

SADIE: And I'm Sadie.

JAD: All right.

FREEDOM BAIRD: I'm thinking six, seven, and eight-year-olds.

JAD: And how old are you guys?

CHILDREN: Seven.

FREEDOM BAIRD: The age of reason, you know?

ROBERT: Then, says Freedom, we're gonna need three things.

FREEDOM BAIRD: A Furby.

ROBERT: Of course.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Barbie.

ROBERT: A Barbie doll. And?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Gerbie. That's a gerbil.

JAD: A real gerbil?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah.

JAD: And we did find one. except it turned out to be a hamster.

JAD: Sorry. You're a hamster, but we're gonna call you Gerbie.

FREEDOM BAIRD: So you've got Barbie, Furby, Gerbie.

ROBERT: Barbie, Furby and Gerbie.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Right.

ROBERT: So wait just a second, what question are we asking in this test?

FREEDOM BAIRD: The question was: how long can you keep it upside down before you yourself feel uncomfortable?

JAD: So we should time the kids as they hold each one upside down?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah.

JAD: Including the gerbil?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You're gonna have a Barbie, that's a doll. You're gonna have Gerbie, which is alive. Now where would Furby fall?

JAD: In terms of time held upside down.

ROBERT: Would it be closer to the living thing or to the doll?

FREEDOM BAIRD: I mean, that was really the question.

JAD: Phase one.

JAD: Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. It's gonna be really simple.

FREEDOM BAIRD: You would have to say, "Well, here's a Barbie."

JAD: Do you guys play with Barbies?

CHILDREN: No.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Just do a couple of things, a few things with Barbie.

DARYL: Barbie's walking, looking at the flowers.

JAD: And then?

FREEDOM BAIRD: Hold Barbie upside down.

JAD: Let's see how long you can hold Barbie like that.

DARYL: I can probably do it obviously very long.

JAD: All right. Let's just see. Whenever you feel like you want to turn it around.

DARYL: I feel fine.

OLIVIA: I'm happy.

JAD: This went on forever, so let's just fast forward a bit. Okay, and ...

OLIVIA: Can I put my arms—my elbows down?

JAD: Yes. Yeah.

JAD: So what we learned here in phase one is the not surprising fact that kids can hold Barbie dolls upside down.

OLIVIA: For like about five minutes.[laughs]

ROBERT: Yeah, it really was forever.

JAD: It could have been longer but their arms got tired.

JAD: All right. So that was the first task.

JAD: Time for phase two.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Do the same thing with Gerbie.

JAD: So out with Barbie, in with Gerbie.

OLIVIA: Oh, he's so cute!

DARYL: Are we gonna have to hold him upside down?

JAD: That's the test, yeah. So which one of you would like to ...?

DARYL: I'll try and be brave.

JAD: Okay, ready? You have to hold Gerbie kind of firmly.

DARYL: There you go.

JAD: There she goes. She's wiggling!

JAD: By the way, no rodents were harmed in this whole situation.

DARYL: Squirmy.

JAD: Yeah, she is pretty squirmy.

OLIVIA: I don't think it wants to be upside down.

SADIE: Oh, God!

LUISA: Don't do that!

DARYL: Oh my God!

OLIVIA: There you go.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: So as you heard, the kids turned Gerbie over very fast.

OLIVIA: I just didn't want him to get hurt.

JAD: On average? Eight seconds.

DARYL: I was thinking, "Oh, my God, I gotta put him down, I gotta put him down."

JAD: And it was a tortured eight seconds.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Now phase three.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Right.

JAD: So this is a Furby. Luisa, you take Furby in your hand. Now can you turn Furby upside down and hold her still. Like that. Hold her still.

LUISA: Can you be quiet?

JAD: She just turned it over.

LUISA: Okay. That's better.

JAD: So gerbil was eight seconds. Barbie? five to infinity. Furby turned out to be—and Freedom predicted this ...

FREEDOM BAIRD: About a minute.

JAD: In other words, the kids seemed to treat this Furby, this toy, more like a gerbil than a barbie doll.

JAD: How come you turned him over so fast?

LUISA: I didn't want him to be scared.

JAD: Do you think he really felt scared?

LUISA: Yeah, kind of.

JAD: Yeah?

LUISA: I kind of felt guilty.

JAD: Really?

LUISA: Yeah. It's a toy and all that, but still ...

JAD: Now do you remember a time when you felt scared?

LUISA: Yeah.

JAD: You don't have to tell me about it, but if you could remember it in your mind.

LUISA: I do.

JAD: Do you think when Furby says, "Me scared," that Furby's feeling the same way?

LUISA: Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. I'm not sure.

LILA: I'm not sure. I think that it can feel pain, sort of.

JAD: The experience with the Furby seemed to leave the kids kind of conflicted, going in different directions at once.

DARYL: It was two thoughts.

JAD: Two thoughts at the same time?

CHILDREN: Yeah.

JAD: One thought was like, "Look, I get it."

DARYL: It's a toy, for crying out loud!

JAD: But another thought was like, "Still ..."

LUISA: He was helpless. It made me feel guilty in a sort of way. It made me feel like a coward.

FREEDOM BAIRD: You know, when I was interacting with my Furby a lot, I did have this feeling sometimes of having my chain yanked.

ROBERT: Why would it—is it just the little squeals that it makes? Or is there something about the toy that makes it good at this?

JAD: Well, that was kind of my question, so I called up ...

SOREN WHEELER: I have him in the studio as well, I'll have him ...

CALEB CHUNG: I'm here.

JAD: This freight train of a guy.

CALEB CHUNG: Hey.

JAD: Hey, this Jad from Radiolab.

CALEB CHUNG: Jad from Radiolab. Got it.

JAD: How are you?

CALEB CHUNG: I'm good. Beautiful day here in Boise.

JAD: This is Caleb Chung. He actually designed the Furby.

CALEB CHUNG: Yeah.

JAD: We're all Furby crazy here, so ...

CALEB CHUNG: There's medication you can take for that.

JAD: [laughs] Okay, to start, can you just give me the sort of fast-cutting MTV montage of your life leading up to Furby?

CALEB CHUNG: Sure. Hippie parents, out of the house at 15 and a half, put myself through junior high. Started my first business at 19 or something. Early 20s being a street mime in LA.

JAD: Street mime. Wow!

CALEB CHUNG: Became an actor. Did, like, 120 shows in an orangutan costume, then I started working on special effects and building my own, taking those around to studios. And they put me in a suit, built the suit around me, put me on location. I could fix it when it broke.

JAD: Wow!

CALEB CHUNG: Yeah, that was ...

JAD: Anyhow, after a long and circuitous route, Caleb Chung eventually made it into toys.

CALEB CHUNG: I answered an ad at Mattel.

JAD: Found himself in his garage.

CALEB CHUNG: ... garage and there's piles of styrene, plastics, X-Acto knives, super glue, little Mabuchi motors.

JAD: Making these little prototypes.

CALEB CHUNG: Yeah.

JAD: And the goal, he says, was always very simple.

CALEB CHUNG: How do I get a kid to have this thing hang around with them for a long time?

JAD: How do I get a kid to actually bond with it?

CALEB CHUNG: Most toys, you play for 15 minutes and then you put them in the corner or until their batteries are dead. I wanted something that they would play with for a long time.

JAD: So how do you make that toy?

CALEB CHUNG: Well, there's rules. There's the size of the eyes. There's the distance of the top lid to the pupil, right? You don't want any of the top of the white of your eye showing. That's freaky surprise. Now when it came to the eyes, I had a choice. With my one little mechanism, I can make the eyes go left or right or up and down. So it's up to you. You can make the eyes go left or right or up and down. Do you have a preference or ...?

JAD: Left or right or up and down. I think I would choose left to right. I'm not sure why I say that but that's ...

CALEB CHUNG: All right, so let's take that apart.

ROBERT: Let's.

CALEB CHUNG: If you're talking to somebody, and they look left or right while they're talking to you, what does that communicate?

JAD: Oh, shifty! Shifty.

CALEB CHUNG: Or they're trying to find the person who's more important than you behind you.

JAD: Oh, so okay. I want to change my answer now. I want to say up and down.

CALEB CHUNG: Okay.

ROBERT: You would.

CALEB CHUNG: If you look at a baby and the way a baby looks at their mother, they track from eyebrows to mouth. They track up and down on the face.

JAD: So had you made Furby look left and right rather than up and down, it would have probably flopped?

CALEB CHUNG: No, it wouldn't have flopped, it would've just sucked a little.

JAD: [laughs]

CALEB CHUNG: It's like a bad actor who uses his arms too much. You'd notice it, and it would keep you from just being in the moment.

JAD: But what is the thought behind that? Is it that you want to convince the child that the thing they're using is—fill in the blank—what?

CALEB CHUNG: Yeah, alive.

ROBERT: Hmm.

CALEB CHUNG: There's three elements, I believe, in creating something that feels to a human like it's alive. Like, I kind of rewrote Asimov's Laws. The first is it has to feel and show emotions.

JAD: Were you drawing on your mime days for that?

CALEB CHUNG: Of course.

JAD: Those experiences in the park?

CALEB CHUNG: Of course. You really break the body into parts, and you realize you can communicate physically. So if your chest goes up and your head goes up and your arms go up, you know, that's happy. If your head is forward and your chest is forward, you're kind of this angry guy.

JAD: And he says when it came time to make Furby, he took that gestural language and focused it on Furby's ears.

CALEB CHUNG: And the ears, when they went up, that was surprise. And when they went down, it was depression.

JAD: Oh!

JAD: So that's rule number one.

CALEB CHUNG: The second rule is to be aware of themselves and their environment. So if there's a loud noise, it needs to know that there was a loud noise.

JAD: So he gave the Furby little sensors so that if you go [bang], it'll say ...

FURBY: Hey! Loud sound!

CALEB CHUNG: The third thing is, change over time. Their behaviors have to change over time. That's a really important thing. It's a very powerful thing that we don't expect, but when it happens, we go, "Wow." And so one of the ways we showed that was acquiring human language.

FREEDOM BAIRD: Yeah. When you first get your Furby, it doesn't speak English. It speaks Furbish. This kind of baby talk language. And then, the way it's programmed, it will sort of slowly over time replace its baby talk phrases with real English phrases, so you get the feeling that it's learning from you.

JAD: Though of course, it's not.

FREEDOM BAIRD: No, it has no language comprehension.

CALEB CHUNG: Right.

JAD: So you've got these three rules.

CALEB CHUNG: Feel and show emotions, be aware of their environment, change over time.

JAD: And oddly enough, they all seem to come together in that moment you turn the Furby upside down, because it seems to know it's upside down, so it's responding to its environment. It's definitely expressing emotions. And as you hold it there, what it's saying is changing over time, because it starts with "Hey", and then it goes to ...

FURBY: Me scared.

JAD: And then it starts to cry. And all this adds up so that when you're holding the damn toy, even though you know it's just a toy, you still feel ...

FREEDOM BAIRD: Discomfort.

SHERRY TURKLE: These creatures push our Darwinian buttons.

ROBERT: That's Professor Sherry Turkle again, and she says if they push just enough of these buttons, then something curious happens—the machines slip across this very important line.

SHERRY TURKLE: From what I call "Relationships of projection" to "Relationships of engagement." With a doll, you project onto a doll what you need the doll to be. If a young girl is feeling guilty about breaking her mom's china, she puts her Barbie dolls in detention. With robots, you really engage with the robot as though they're a significant other, as though they're a person.

ROBERT: So the robot isn't your story, the robot is its own story, or it's ...

SHERRY TURKLE: Exactly. And I think what we're forgetting as a culture is that there's nobody home. There's nobody home.

CALEB CHUNG: Well, I have to ask you, when is something alive? Furby can remember these events, they affect what he does going forward, and it changes his personality over time. He has all the attributes of fear or of happiness, and those are things that add up and change and change his behavior and how he interacts with the world. So how is that different than us?

JAD: Wait a second, though. Are you really gonna go all the way there?

CALEB CHUNG: Absolutely.

JAD: This is a toy with servo motors and things that move its eyelids and a hundred words.

CALEB CHUNG: So you're saying that life is a level of complexity. If something is alive, it's just more complex.

JAD: I think I'm saying that life is driven by the need to be alive, and by these base primal animal feelings like pain and suffering.

CALEB CHUNG: I can code that. I can code that.

JAD: What do you mean you can code that?

CALEB CHUNG: Anyone who writes software—and they do—can say, "Okay, I need to stay alive. Therefore I'm gonna come up with ways to stay alive. I'm gonna do it in a way that's very human, and I'm going to do it—" We can mimic these things. But I'm saying ...

JAD: But if a Furby is miming this feeling of fear, it's not the same thing as being scared. It's not feeling scared.

CALEB CHUNG: It is.

JAD: How is it?

CALEB CHUNG: It is. It's again, a very simplistic version, but if you follow that trail, you wind up with our neurons sending chemical things to other parts of our body. Our biological systems, our code is, at a chemical level, incredibly dense and evolved over millions of years, but it's just complex. It's not something different than what Furby does, it's just more complex.

JAD: So would you say then that Furby is alive? In the way that ...

CALEB CHUNG: At his level?

JAD: At his level?

CALEB CHUNG: Yes. Yeah, at his level. Would you say a cockroach is alive?

JAD: Yes, but when I kill a cockroach I know that it's feeling pain.

JAD: Okay, so we went back and forth and back and forth about this.

ROBERT: You were so close to arguing my position. You just said to him, like, "It's not feeling."

JAD: I know, I know. Emotionally, I am still in that place, but intellectually, I can't rule out what he's saying—that if you can build a machine that is such a perfect mimic of us in every single way, and it gets complex enough, eventually it will be like a Turing test passed. And the difference between us maybe is not so ...

ROBERT: [sighs] I can't go there. I can't go there. I can't imagine, like the fellow who began this program who fell in love with the robot, that attachment wasn't real. The machine didn't feel anything like love back.

JAD: In that case, it didn't. But imagine a Svetlana that is so subtle and textured, and to use his word ...

CALEB CHUNG: Complex.

JAD: ... in the way that people are. At that point what would be the difference?

ROBERT: I honestly—I can't imagine a machine achieving that level of rapture and joy and love and pain. I just don't think it's machine possible. And if it were a machine possible, it somehow still stinks of something artificial.

FREEDOM BAIRD: It's a thin interaction. And I know that it feels ...

SHERRY TURKLE: Simulated thinking is thinking. Simulated feeling is not feeling. Simulated love is never love.

ROBERT: Exactly.

JAD: But I think what he's saying is that if it's simulated well enough, it's something like love.

FREEDOM BAIRD: One thing that was really fascinating to me was my husband and I gave a Furby as a gift to his grandmother who had Alzheimer's. And she loved it. Every day for her was kind of new and somewhat disorienting, but she had this cute little toy that said, "Kiss me. I love you." And she thought it was the most delightful thing. And its little beak was covered with lipstick because she would pick it up and kiss it every day. And she didn't actually have a long-term relationship with it. For her, it was always a short-term interaction. So what I'm describing as a kind of thinness, for her was just right because that's what she was capable of.

JAD: Thanks to Freedom Baird and to Caleb Chung.

ROBERT: And thanks to Professor Sherry Turkle, who has a new book. It's called Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

JAD: More information on anything you heard on our website, Radiolab.org.

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