 Technology or the market might provide a way for us to “have our cake and eat it too”, as they might offer us the means to navigate simultaneously the often painful, boring, frustrating and demanding labor of carrying out our associative duties and maximizing our associative freedoms. For example, in a situation where robots could be programmed to simulate, approximate or perhaps even surpass in some ways, the kinds of reactions and behaviors typical of human beings, we can ask whether this could effectively replace the need for humans to take on such work. In Japan, for instance, some care homes have robots that can mimic human responses—tilting heads to express sympathy, blinking to indicate receptiveness—which are being used to comfort lonely people, in lieu of their absent children or partners. In Japan again, busy adult children can hire actors to visit their aging parents, instructing the actors to pretend to be them. By doing so, both sides—children and parents—can perceive this as an effective means of negotiating filial duties. Can such practices—technological or market-based—meet our basic associative needs while also maximizing our associative choices, meaning that we get to spend time only with those people with whom we really want to spend time? Or will such replacements inevitably fall short and, worse, eventually change the meanings of what it means to care, such that we, in the words of Sherry Turkle, come to expect more and more of technology and less and less of each other (Turkle 2011)? These thorny questions may become easier to answer as the relevant technologies and market initiatives come into their own.