A Robot Baby Seal Thawed Our Cold Cynical Hearts

It's Monday, and, thus, stressful as hell. About now, I'm wishing I was back at CES, just for a second. Not to wade through the distracted, wearable tech-toting, perennially iPhone-browsing crowds, which is also stressful as hell. Not to weather the torrent of product buzz, either, or to listen to the bluster of Tech Titans—but just to give the friendly Paro bot another hug. As the fluorescent fog of CES clears, I'm realizing that one of the obvious highlights of my week was a simple, awkward embrace with an animatronic harp seal.

There's nothing new or incredibly innovative about Paro, a Japanese robo-baby seal designed to be a companion to the elderly and ailing, although a study completed by Australian scientists last year found that the robot had “a positive, clinically meaningful influence on quality of life, increased levels of pleasure and also reduced displays of anxiety” amongst dementia patients.

I can see that. Just look how happy grabbing that seal pup made Derek:

It surely soothed the hell out of me, against the avalanche of bleeps and whirs and sales pitches. See?

I needed that. Sure, it costs $6,000—it's got a lease-to-own program—but Paro "learns" its name and gets used to your personalized interactions. More than that, it was a reminder that technology can be more than an endless corporate arms race, a vessel for advancing new salable products, an interminable font of data we're always on the cusp of making sense of. That it also something that occasionally can inspire a new kind of visceral, powerful emotional connection. Something capable of eliciting a belly laugh, a primal grin.

Like a long-ago Saturday afternoon, happily squandered playing Super Mario. Or that first successful Skype video chat with your girlfriend, that time you were hundreds of miles away and hadn't seen her for weeks. Or hugging a responsive, gently wriggling furry robot that blinks up at you with big black eyes and forgetting for a moment about predator drones and NSA surveillance and data thieving hackers—it's something that can feel, at a fundamental level, thoroughly good. I forget that sometimes, so thanks, Paro.