Pre-Relationships with Toys

I recently watched a TED talk by Caleb Chung, the inventor of the Furby. If you don't know or remember, the Furby was a cute, fluffy critter that was a toy craze in 1998, a "must-have" item for the holiday season. Chung speaks about his career trajectory, the making of Pleo (a life-like dinosaur plushie/robot) and his passion for toys, which is summed up quite nicely by his closing statement:

We are designing our children's best friends. There's a lot of social responsiblity in that.  I hope we all dream well.

A child's best friend. I never thought about it, but before I watched this, I had the notion that toymakers were as fun and free-spirited as their toys; maybe they're still fun and free-spirited, but Chung definitely his a deeper level of psychological and philosophical tinkering.  I also think he's absolutely right.  Some people may express resentment at using an object to teach a child emotion such as empathy or caring. While I agree that these things should (and are) learned through family and real human interaction, I think levels of animacy--dolls, robots, pets--facilitate that expression.

It makes me wonder...if you give a little boy a doll, will he grow up to become a less emotionally awkward boyfriend?

However, my friend brought up a good point:

It's also interesting to think how strongly people can bond with an object, though, one that can't actually feel or truly reciprocate.  But then, I guess people do that all the time--non-reciprocal emotion, right?  Unrequited love and all that?

Maybe people prone to unrequited love are the same children who bonded with objects rather than friends. Do you think toys are teaching people a bastardized version of relationships?