Oh Have You Seen My Dear Companion?

Fantastic song. The Trio album, the first collaborative album between Dolly, Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt, has got to be one of the best albums ever made. I wore this out on LP and cassette. I have the CD and I've now got it on itunes. Great stuff.
In the chapter True Companions, Turkle talks about AIBO pets and two college students who have them. She is dismayed at the relationships these young men have with their robots and goes on to talk about the fact that "The first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another." (page 55)
She talks about Heinz Kohut who said that people with narcissistic personalities turn their companions into selfobjects- just another part of themselves, in tune with their own self-centered world. Turkle says that is what we are in danger of doing if we take on these robot pets that can be trained to mirror our personalities.
I totally agree with her. That is just ridiculous and awful and thank goodness I could never be tempted to get one of those things.
Here is my point to ponder though. Have you ever been made into someone's selfobject? I have. Granted it isn't a devastating when you break up with them because you are glad to be out of that toxic relationship, but still, it can hurt anyway. I bet a lot of people have had that experience, sadly. Ask yourself, have you ever had a friend or boyfriend or girlfriend who was a total narcissist? I bet you have!
So why not just let the narcissists have the AIBOs! Why not? It would save a lot of people- the folks they would make into selfobjects- a lot of trouble! Why not let the people with the, as Kohut says, "fragile inner states" have their little toys and get out of the dating and relationship pool altogether? Would this not avoid the whole Fatal Attraction thing? Then the rest of us could just get on with meeting people with less "fragile inner states" and no need to make selfobjects out of people!
Mostly Turkle talks about the way in which children relate to robotic pets. I think it is kind of unethical that researchers even gave AIBOs to children to begin with, but they did. With the robotic pets some children come to see that a robotic pet might be better than a real pet. You can love the pet when you want to. Ignore it when you want to. It is "easier" and you don't have to worry about it dying, as you would a real pet.
Not all of the children draw these conclusions I guess, because she just quotes a few. This raises another question for me. Is it the child's experience with the robot pet that makes the child prefer an "easy" robopet with no strings? Or are the children who feel that way, would they be the kind of folks who would grow up like the people kohut talks about with the "fragile inner self" even if they never had a robot pet?
Are children with more empathy, more alterity, less likely to be enamoured with the robot pet?
Who knows, but it is worth thinking about. In any case, no way should kids be given AIBOs if they develop those kinds of ideas about relationships from the use of them.