MIT professor Dr. Sherry Turkle tells the following story:

Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It's not that the robot she'd imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It's that she'd already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained to me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.

"There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they've given up," she said. "So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well … it's not like a robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that."

Turkle admits that robots may not break your heart, but they are also incapable of real love. She adds, "These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child, or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships. Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them."