Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots

by Eve Herold

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts.

If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. Having relationships with others is a hard-wired need that literally shapes us and the lives we lead. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them. This book is about socially interactive robots and how they will transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. It is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it questions how will we remain the same, and how will human nature express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image?

Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Harold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold onto our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in artificial intelligence, robotics, and what they mean for our future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Technology, Artificial Intelligence

247 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2024

About the author

Eve Herold has had a lifelong fascination with issues at the intersection of science, ethics and society. She has written and spoken extensively about the transformative power of cutting-edge science and medicine. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about what lies ahead for the human race, Eve’s work crosses categories, exploring issues in biology and medicine, bioethics, social issues, end-of-life matters, aging and human-technology interaction. Always at the center of her writings are real men and women seeking to navigate a world that is changing at lightning speed.

Eve has had a long career in science communications. She is past director of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at the American Psychiatric Association and has served as Director of Pubic Policy Research and Education at the Genetics Policy Institute. Other positions include Public Education director at the Stem Cell Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization promoting biomedical research and education. She is also the former managing editor of The Gerontologist, a scholarly journal that explores the many facets of aging and its impact on society.

Eve has written and spoken extensively about the emerging field of stem cell research, publishing the book Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Front Lines in 2006. The book won a commendation in popular medicine from the British Medical Association. Her writings have appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. She has written several publications on Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related and degenerative diseases and their impact on patients, families, caregivers and society. Her book, Stem Cell Wars, has been included in the syllabus in a class on science communications at the University of California at Berkeley, and she is a contributor to the Springer International Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Her new book, Beyond Human: How Cutting-Edge Science is Extending Our Lives, has been nominated for a Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. The book will be released in August 2016.

Eve lives in the Washington, DC area, is married and has a cat named Cosmo.

Reviews

[Dunigan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel bad for how much I disliked this book. The author engages in such a shallow synthesis of existing research that her conclusions are vague, non-specific and border on being completely inane.

A lot of things annoyed me, but the biggest thing is that, despite its title, the book isn't really about "Robots and the people who love them." I (very reasonably) thought it was going to focus on people's relationships with social robots, but a lot of the book is just discussing the broader impact of AI on society. If you are mainly interested in the broad impacts of AI on society, there are many, many better books to read that are written by people with a stronger background in these areas. I picked up this book because it looked like it was about a topic that has been largely ignored by other AI writers—people's relationships with social robots. But, nope, instead it was a mishmash of chapters covering a wide variety of topics, most of which were only tangentially related to "robots and the people who love them." There was no overarching cohesive structure tying the chapters together. I was left with the impression that each chapter was originally its own individual article about some AI-related topic and the author just haphazardly through them together to sell a book.

I'd suggest skipping this one unless you have zero exposure to any discussions of AI, and for whatever reason you also have absolutely no access to any of the other popular books about AI and society. For example, The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman is a much better book about the same topic, so you should start there.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been by far the most interesting book I've read this year! Lots of interesting ethical and worldview implications that Christians will need to grapple with in the coming decades.

[Sam B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was mildly engaging, but could have used more attention paid to the organization within the individual chapters - I felt that it skipped around and followed a very circular, nonsensical sort of logic. A lot of the focus was on the psychology and philosophy of how humans and robots interact. Personally I did not feel like I walked away from the book having many of my questions or concerns about robots or AI having been answered or addressed.

My thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[LeeAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author begins with a nod to the Jetsons, and much like Disney's Tomorrowland, reminds readers that "science writing that attempts to envision often says much more about the time it was written than it says about the future world."

I've been a fan of science fiction for a long time, and I've been known to finish a whole scifi book in one sitting!

But the real world? And the future of science? That's something else entirely.

This book attempts to assist readers like me in examining the science now and looking forward into the science future.

The author's conversational and readable style make this book easier to follow. While imagining the future can be daunting, this book makes it plausible.

"Something about robots touches the inner child in us. We find them both intimately familiar and unfathomably strange."

The author asks this question: "[If] loneliness can kill you, could a robot save your life?"

And ultimately, this offers some good advice for humans in the future (which, let's be honest, is humans right now):

"The issues surrounding social robots aren't really about robots. They're about us."

Obviously. The author reasons, "The deciding factor in every context is how well we keep the relationship in perspective."

Let's do that.

[Suz Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

ROBOTS AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM explores the many ways robots have become a part of modern life from social robots to robots used by the military.

Topics include the design of robots to avoid slipping into the uncanny valley where their appearance is unsettlingly human, how their inputs can have far reaching effects such as when ChatGPT accesses the dark web, their capabilities and drawbacks in caring for children and the elderly, the problematic nature of robots created for intimate relationships, and the potential legal issues associated with robots.

With the pro and cons of various robotic technology, the book made for a thought provoking read. I liked how examples of actual robots were given for each of the sections such as Sophia, a social robot that was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia, the Roxxxy love doll, and the iPal child-friendly social robot that comes equipped with an “emotion management system.”

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thanks to St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, for providing an Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley.

[Carlee Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well researched and discussed, but dry at times. An interesting look into the choose-your-own-adventure that is the future of social robotics

[Dale Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robots and the People Who Love them explained various ways that robots are used by people to function better. It covered robots in combat, robots that help parents, robots that engage in relationships with people, therapy robots, and many other types of robots. The main point seemed to be that robots will change society. And it is not clear what that change will be. However, relationships with robots are not the same as relationships with people, although there are similarities. I didn't find this book added a lot to my understanding. It may be a good overview of the many ways that robots are being utilized and their impact on humanity.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and slightly terrifying. I enjoyed reading and imagining what the possibly near future will be like when we have social companion robots all around us. It also made me want to play Detroit: Become Human again. 😂

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robots and the People Who Love Them went to press at an inopportune moment, for which the author cannot be faulted. While LLMs have recently become foregrounded in the cultural conversation, given the book’s early 2024 publication date, Eve Herold’s treatment of them is necessarily incomplete, depicting them as a mere extension of earlier chatbots. In this sense, the book feels oriented toward a future that had already begun to recede by the time of its publication. While, again, this is not necessarily a shortcoming of Herold’s, it undermines the book’s utility out of the gate.

What can be held against Herold, though, is the book’s other temporal problem. Despite a 2024 publication date, entire chapters draw almost exclusively on sources from 2016 or earlier, with little indication that the author has revisited or updated claims in light of subsequent developments. For just one of many examples, Chapter One asserts that Softbank’s Pepper robot is "currently priced at $1,900” and selling out “each month” – despite the robot having been out of production since 2020. This makes the book feel more like a collection of essays cobbled together over a decade than a cohesive narrative – an approach that may work in some subjects, but certainly not this one.

More broadly, the book provides little temporal scaffolding at the chapter level. Empirical claims, industry examples, and speculative projections are rarely anchored to specific years or developmental phases, making it difficult for the reader to distinguish between historical context, contemporary practice, and forward-looking conjecture. This absence is especially problematic given the book’s repeated emphasis on inevitability – the suggestion that social robots are inexorably moving into the personal domain. By ignoring the stalled, uneven, or commercially unsuccessful realities of many social robotics projects, Herold is able to present a cleaner narrative, but it comes at the expense of reliability.

That aside, I really wanted to like this book. I think the subject matter is important, and it has the potential to be compelling to a wide audience. The work is in a similar vein to that of Sherry Turkle, arguing that "social robots" paradoxically foster emotional blunting and social withdrawal as a result of our “social promiscuity.” This framing is persuasive as far as it goes, but it feels a bit thin insofar as the text neglects to meaningfully contextualize it within the domain of political economy (despite hinting at this field’s relevance at various points throughout the book). I would have liked to see a bit more analysis on social robots as artifacts rather than exclusively treating them as ethical provocations to human psychology.

Robots and the People Who Love Them offers a readable and often thoughtful synthesis of research on anthropomorphism and social robotics, but its scholarly utility is significantly constrained by insufficient temporal transparency and a limited conceptual framework that eschews structural analyses in favor of a monofocus on a timeless human psychology.

[John Damaso · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I learned the term “uncanny valley” for the continuum of humanoid robots that look too human for human comfort, much of the book felt like a rehashing of the same points about the limits, liabilities, and potential of social robots.

Most successful were the chapters that took a narrow focus on use cases related to education, childcare, companionship, mental health, and serving those at the margins, such as the lonely, elderly or otherwise.

Herold seems to be a tech enthusiast and a bit of a tech fatalist…assimilation of social robots is but a matter of time.

I appreciated her view that we need to improve the human itself before we blame the robot trained on the horrifying content produced by the darker side of humanity. It’s the age-old garbage in / garbage out criticism of coding.

Probably deserves 3.5 stars for making me thoughtful about the issues related. Would have liked a chapter that situates her POV within a framework of competing philosophies.

[Julia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won a copy of this book through Goodreads, but never received it. This is not the fault of Goodreads, since they are not responsible for shipping the books. I did, however, contact Goodreads and try to get them to help me contact the publisher, so I could get the book, but it didn't work, I was still not sent the book. Again, this is not the fault of Goodreads, just to be clear.

So I tried all avenues possible to get the book, but could not. If you don't write a review of the book, your Goodreads account goes down in its standing. It's wrong that my account goes down in its standing, though no fault of my own, so I am writing this review. Plus, it's only fair to give a 1-star review, if they don't send out the book as they should

[Marissa F · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book ostensibly about robots but truly about the basic human need for connection. This book was published too early to capture the insane explosion of Chat GPT and other AI technologies in 2024, so it was pretty much due for a second edition as soon as it hit bookshelves. I feel like people interacting with (and feeling empathy for) AI platforms that claim to be sentient is probably enough for a volume two all by itself.

I appreciate NetGalley and the publisher for access to a digital ARC. My honest review is my own opinion.

[Shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received this as a giveaway... many thanks!

We've been promised robots most of my life and they never seem to come to fruition. At least not in a tangible sort of way that affects me directly. That was my perception when I started this book.

After reading this book, robots may still not be affecting me directly, but I gained an appreciation on how far they have come and the social applications that are beginning to help society.

[Ainslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Received from a GoodReads giveaway!

I was entertained with stories on how far robots have come to be. Even a little creeped out by one of the stories... no spoilers but if you read you know. I was hoping to read more on AI with working with the world of technology . I feel like what I mainly read about was the emotional impact.

I feel like I'm already a fan of technology and robots so this book didn't change my thoughts on much. But read some neat history on robots I didn't know.

[maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

i would describe this book as mediocre. she provides interesting points but never elaborates on them, which leaves the takeaways from each chapter very surface level. i would have liked to have taken more away from this book than just facts and some general ideas. i also would have liked to see more research from the current literature to strengthen arguments made.

[Sonia Richman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks for the free book through the giveaway! I never would have thought to pick up a book about robots, but I learned so much. All the chapters were significantly relevant to my everyday life and had relatable content.

[RACHEL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herold offers reading a multifaceted look at societal matters relating to the growing use and functions of robots all written in a language that that does not require expertise to read.

My copy was a gift from Goodreads First Reads.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening and good to read.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you for my advance copy of your book. I found the deep dive into the social aspects of robots an interesting angle. She explored both pros and cons, as well as a cautionary look at the future.

[Susie Silvers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a different type of read for me. That being said, it was also an interesting read. I would recommend reading this book.

[Elmwoodblues · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the subject and expected to like some chapters over others, but I couldn't really say I enjoyed the overall read. Somewhat repetitive and dry.

[Sandhya · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too long for the point that the author wanted to make. Gist - Pros and cons of allowing social robots into human lives

[Rob Britt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this but it was a slow read. some of the information and insight? it contained made it worth the time though

[Victor Greaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was like Smash Ultimate for robots

[Laurie Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a background on robots and AI and what it might mean for our social lives and development.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read this intriguing book prior to its publication. I was immediately intrigued by the book’s title since I not only love robots, but also wonder about how much of our individuality and humanity we’ve given over to technology for the sake of convenience or ease. It’s an important question that we sometimes forget to ask, and Herold does a laudable job exploring the nuances and complexities of how we invite and accept technology in our lives. Building off of the work of researchers like Sherry Turkle, who examine how technology affects our social lives, relationships, and interactions with others, Herold works to expand Turkle’s focus beyond interpersonal connections and relationships and consider other aspects of technology and robots. Her book is comprehensive and explores various ways we have developed and incorporated robots in our lives—including for relationships and loneliness, potential child rearing and companionship, as well as in warfare. Within each of these sections, Herold explores the history and recent developments of these technologies as well as exploring the benefits and potential drawbacks and issues with robots in these fields. Many readers may have already formed opinions, and Herold doesn’t do much arguing for either side, but presents the facts and considerations in a more or less balanced manner. If anything, I think that this is one of the drawbacks of an otherwise strong book about technology. Her presentation of both sides kind of limits any potential dangers or drawbacks to consider. Nevertheless, I think that her book explores an important topic and asks some really intriguing questions, ultimately leaving it up to the reader to form their own opinions about the issues related to technology in our lives. This is a really important and worthwhile read that goes beyond the work of other researchers and does so with an interesting historical context that examines past attempts to incorporate robots in our lives while also examining the current state of technology and considering the future implications of robotics in our lives.

[Ella Droste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eve Herold's exploration of robots and their societal impact offers a compelling glimpse into the evolving landscape of AI. While the title suggests a focus on human-robot relationships, the book ambitiously spans a wide array of AI's broader implications, occasionally diluting its central theme. Herold's accessible writing style makes complex topics approachable, though the book at times lacks a cohesive narrative thread at times, reading more like a collection of diverse essays.

For readers new to AI discussions, Herold provides a thorough introduction, touching on robots' roles in caregiving, intimacy, and legal contexts. While the depth of analysis varies across chapters, the book excels in raising thought-provoking questions about our future alongside robots.

Overall, this book serves as a thought-provoking primer on the societal implications of AI. It prompts readers to reconsider their relationship with technology and its potential impact on humanity, making it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the intersection of robotics and society.

I'd like to express my gratitude for having received an online copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Mary C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating read on the impact of robots on society. As one reads all the different ways robots are being used, the pros and cons are clearly stated.
#RobotsandthePeopleWhoLoveThem #NetGalley