Not everyone sees it this way. Some people consider the development of caring machines as simple common sense. Porter, sixty, recently lost his wife after a long illness. He thinks that if robotic helpers “had been able to do the grunt work, there might have been more time for human nurses to take care of the more personal and emotional things.” But often, relationships hinge on these investments of time. We know that the time we spend caring for children, doing the most basic things for them, lays down a crucial substrate.
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On this ground, children become confident that they are loved no matter what. And we who care for them become confirmed in our capacity to love and care. The ill and the elderly also deserve to be confirmed in this same sense of basic trust. As we provide it, we become more fully human.
The most common justification for the delegation of care to robots focuses on things being “equal” for the person receiving care. This argument is most often used by those who feel that robots are appropriate for people with dementia, who will not “know the difference” between a person and a robot. But we do not really know how impaired people receive the human voice, face, and touch. Providing substitutes for human care may not be “equal” in the least. And again, delegating what was once love’s labor changes the person who delegates. When we lose the “burden” of care, we begin to give up on our compact that human beings will care for other human beings. The daughter who wishes for hydraulic arms to lift her bedridden mother wants to keep her close. For the daughter, this last time of caring is among the most important she and her mother will share. If we divest ourselves of such things, we risk being coarsened, reduced. And once you have elder bots and nurse bots, why not nanny bots?
Why would we want a robot as a companion for a child? The relationship of a child to a sociable robot is, as I’ve said, very different from that of a child to a doll. Children do not try to model themselves on their dolls’ expressions. A child projects human expression onto a doll. But a robot babysitter, already envisaged, might seem close enough to human that a child might use it as a model. This raises grave questions. Human beings are capable of infinite combinations of vocal inflection and facial expression. It is from other people that we learn how to listen and bend to each other in conversation. Our eyes “light up” with interest and “darken” with passion or anxiety. We recognize, and are most comfortable with, other people who exhibit this fluidity. We recognize, and are less comfortable with, people—with autism or Asperger’s syndrome—who do not exhibit it. The developmental implications of children taking robots as models are unknown, potentially disastrous. Humans need to be surrounded by human touch, faces, and voices. Humans need to be brought up by humans.
Sometimes when I make this point, others counter that even so, robots might do the “simpler” jobs for children, such as feeding them and changing their diapers. But children fed their string beans by a robot will not associate food with human companionship, talk, and relaxation. Eating will become dissociated from emotional nurturance. Children whose diapers are changed by robots will not feel that their bodies are dear to other human beings. Why are we willing to consider such risks?
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Some would say that we have already completed a forbidden experiment, using ourselves as subjects with no controls, and the unhappy findings are in: we are connected as we’ve never been connected before, and we seem to have damaged ourselves in the process. A 2010 analysis of data from over fourteen thousand college students over the past thirty years shows that since the year 2000, young people have reported a dramatic decline in interest in other people. Today’s college students are, for example, far less likely to say that it is valuable to try to put oneself in the place of others or to try to understand their feelings.
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The authors of this study associate students’ lack of empathy with the availability of online games and social networking. An online connection can be deeply felt, but you only need to deal with the part of the person you see in your game world or social network. Young people don’t seem to feel they need to deal with more, and over time they lose the inclination. One might say that absorbed in those they have “friended,” children lose interest in friendship.
These findings confirm the impressions of those psychotherapists—psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers—who talk to me about the increasing numbers of patients who present in the consulting room as detached from their bodies and seem close to unaware of the most basic courtesies. Purpose-driven, plugged into their media, these patients pay little attention to those around them. In others, they seek what is of use, an echo of that primitive world of “parts.” Their detachment is not aggressive. It is as though they just don’t see the point.
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EARLY DAYS
It is, of course, tempting to talk about all of this in terms of addiction. Adam, who started out playing computer games with people and ends up feeling compelled by a world of bots, certainly uses this language. The addiction metaphor fits a common experience: the more time spent online, the more one wants to spend time online. But however apt the metaphor, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. Talking about addiction subverts our best thinking because it suggests that if there are problems, there is only one solution. To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance. But we are not going to “get rid” of the Internet. We will not go “cold turkey” or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to television as the family hearth.
I believe we will find new paths toward each other, but considering ourselves victims of a bad substance is not a good first step. The idea of addiction, with its one solution that we know we won’t take, makes us feel hopeless. We have to find a way to live with seductive technology and make it work to our purposes. This is hard and will take work. Simple love of technology is not going to help. Nor is a Luddite impulse.
What I call
realtechnik
suggests that we step back and reassess when we hear triumphalist or apocalyptic narratives about how to live with technology.
Realtechnik
is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate. I have said that this way of envisaging our lives with technology is close to the ethic of psychoanalysis. Old-fashioned perhaps, but our times have brought us back to such homilies.
Because we grew up with the Net, we assume that the Net is grown-up. We tend to see it as a technology in its maturity. But in fact, we are in early days. There is time to make the corrections. It is, above all, the young who need to be convinced that when it comes to our networked life, we are still at the beginning of things. I am cautiously optimistic. We have seen young people try to reclaim personal privacy and each other’s attention. They crave things as simple as telephone calls made, as one eighteen-year-old puts it, “sitting down and giving each other full attention.” Today’s young people have a special vulnerability: although always connected, they feel deprived of attention. Some, as children, were pushed on swings while their parents spoke on cell phones.
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Now, these same parents do their e-mail at the dinner table. Some teenagers coolly compare a dedicated robot with a parent talking to them while doing e-mail, and parents do not always come out ahead. One seventeen-year-old boy says, “A robot would remember everything I said. It might not understand everything, but remembering is a first step. My father, talking to me while on his BlackBerry, he doesn’t know what I said, so it is not much use that if he did know, he might understand.”
The networked culture is very young. Attendants at its birth, we threw ourselves into its adventure. This is human. But these days, our problems with the Net are becoming too distracting to ignore. At the extreme, we are so enmeshed in our connections that we neglect each other. We don’t need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place. The generation that has grown up with the Net is in a good position to do this, but these young people need help. So as they begin to fight for their right to privacy, we must be their partners. We know how easily information can be politically abused; we have the perspective of history. We have, perhaps, not shared enough about that history with our children. And as we, ourselves enchanted, turned away from them to lose ourselves in our e-mail, we did not sufficiently teach the importance of empathy and attention to what is real.
The narrative of
Alone Together
describes an arc: we expect more from technology and less from each other. This puts us at the still center of a perfect storm. Overwhelmed, we have been drawn to connections that seem low risk and always at hand: Facebook friends, avatars, IRC chat partners. If convenience and control continue to be our priorities, we shall be tempted by sociable robots, where, like gamblers at their slot machines, we are promised excitement programmed in, just enough to keep us in the game. At the robotic moment, we have to be concerned that the simplification and reduction of relationship is no longer something we complain about. It may become what we expect, even desire.
In this book I have referred to our vulnerabilities rather than our needs. Needs imply that we must have something. The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less vulnerable, more evolved. We are not stuck. To move forward together—as generations together—we are called upon to embrace the complexity of our situation. We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to diminish us. The prospect of loving, or being loved by, a machine changes what love can be. We know that the young are tempted. They have been brought up to be. Those who have known lifetimes of love can surely offer them more.
When we are at our best, thinking about technology brings us back to questions about what really matters. When I recently travelled to a memorial service for a close friend, the program, on heavy cream-colored card stock, listed the afternoon’s speakers, told who would play what music, and displayed photographs of my friend as a young woman and in her prime. Several around me used the program’s stiff, protective wings to hide their cell phones as they sent text messages during the service. One of the texting mourners, a woman in her late sixties, came over to chat with me after the service. Matter-of-factly, she offered, “I couldn’t stand to sit that long without getting on my phone.” The point of the service was to take a moment. This woman had been schooled by a technology she’d had for less than a decade to find this close to impossible.
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Later, I discussed the texting with some close friends. Several shrugged. One said, “What are you going to do?”
A shrug is appropriate for a stalemate. That’s not where we are. It is too early to have reached such an impasse. Rather, I believe we have reached a point of inflection, where we can see the costs and start to take action. We will begin with very simple things. Some will seem like just reclaiming good manners. Talk to colleagues down the hall, no cell phones at dinner, on the playground, in the car, or in company. There will be more complicated things: to name only one, nascent efforts to reclaim privacy would be supported across the generations. And compassion is due to those of us—and there are many of us—who are so dependent on our devices that we cannot sit still for a funeral service or a lecture or a play. We now know that our brains are rewired every time we use a phone to search or surf or multitask.
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As we try to reclaim our concentration, we are literally at war with ourselves. Yet, no matter how difficult, it is time to look again toward the virtues of solitude, deliberateness, and living fully in the moment. We have agreed to an experiment in which we are the human subjects. Actually, we have agreed to a series of experiments: robots for children and the elderly, technologies that denigrate and deny privacy, seductive simulations that propose themselves as places to live.
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We deserve better. When we remind ourselves that it is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we shall have better.
EPILOGUE
The letter
I
return from Dublin to Boston in September 2009. I have brought my daughter Rebecca to Ireland and helped her to set up her dorm room for a gap year before starting college in New England. I’m one day back from Dublin, and I have already had a lot of contact with Rebecca, all of it very sweet. There are text messages: she forgot a favorite red coat; she wants her green down “puff” jacket and a pink scarf she would like to drape over her bed as a canopy. Could I please mail them to her? I assemble her parcel and send a text: “On the way to the Post Office.” I have downloaded Skype and am ready for its unforgiving stare. Yet, even on my first day home, I feel nostalgic. I sit in my basement surrounded by musty boxes, looking for the letters that my mother and I exchanged during my first year in college, the first time I lived away from home. The telephone was expensive. She wrote twice a week. I wrote once a week. I remember our letters as long, emotional, and filled with conflict. We were separating, finding our way toward something new. Forty years later, I find the letters and feel as though I hold her heart in my hands.
As the days pass, I am in regular contact with my daughter on Skype and by text. As though under some generational tutelage, I feel constrained to be charming and brief in our breezy, information-filled encounters. Once, while texting, I am overtaken by a predictable moment in which I experience my mortality. In forty years, what will Rebecca know of her mother’s heart as she found her way toward something new?