Sherry Turkle will host a Symposium at MIT on March 5 to discuss “Evocative Objects.”

We become attached to sophisticated machines not for their smarts but their emotional reach, she says. “They seduce us by asking for human nurturance, not intelligence.”

The market for robotics in health care is about to explode, Turkle says. The question is: Do we want machines moving into these emotive areas? “We need a national conversation on this whole area of machines like the one we’re having on cloning,” Turkle says. “It shouldn’t be just at AI conventions and among AI developers selling to nursing homes.”