At Microsoft, computer scientist Eric Horvitz is in charge of a project—Life Browser—designed to make MyLifeBits data more user-friendly by giving it shape and pattern. Installed on your computer, Life Browser observes what you attend to—the files you open, the e-mails you answer, the Web searches you return to. It shows who you are based on what you do. You can intervene: for example, you can manually tag as most important, things you do less often. You can say that infrequent calls are to the most important people. But Life Browser will keep coming back at you with what your actual behavior says about your priorities. To demonstrate the program Horvitz tells it, “Go to July Fourth.” Life Browser complies with photographs of parades and cookouts. Horvitz says of the program, “It comes to understand your mind, how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.”
14
I think of my mother’s photograph drawer, intentionally kept messy. Her Life Browser would have reflected disorder and contradiction, for every time she chose a photograph, she told a different story. Some were true, and some only bore the truth of wishes. Understanding these wishes made my time at the photograph drawer precious to me. In contrast, Gemmell imagines how Life Browser and its artificially intelligent descendants will relieve him of the burden of personal narration: “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”
15
Don, twenty-one, a civil engineering student at a West Coast university, wants a life archive. He shoots photographs with his iPhone and uploads them to the Web every night, often a hundred a day. He says that his friends want to see everything he does, so “I put my life on Facebook. I don’t like to make choices [among the photographs]. My friends can choose. I just like to have it all up there.” There is nothing deliberate in Don’s behavior except for its first premise: shoot as much of your life as possible and put it on the Web. Don is confident that “a picture of my life will emerge from, well, all the pictures of my life.”
Don hasn’t heard of Life Browser but has confidence that it is only a matter of time before he will have access to an artificial intelligence that will be able to see his life “objectively.” He welcomes the idea of the documented life, organized by algorithm. The imperfect Facebook archive is only a first step. Rhonda, twenty-six, also uses Facebook to record her life. Her experience is more labored. “Taking and uploading photographs,” she says, “feels like a requirement.” Rhonda wants to save things on the computer because of a desire to remember (“I’ll know exactly what I did”) and to forget (“It’s all there if I ever need to remember something. If I put it on the computer, I don’t have to think about it anymore”). This is what Gordon Bell calls “clean living”—but with a difference. In Bell’s utopian picture, after the saving comes the sifting and savoring. For Rhonda, the practice of saving is an end in itself. Don and Rhonda suggest a world in which technology determines what we remember of the story of our lives. Observing software “learns” our “favorites” to customize what it is important to remember. Swaddled in our favorites, we miss out on what was in our peripheral vision.
The memex and MyLifeBits both grew out of the idea that technology has developed capacities that should be put to use. There is an implied compact with technology in which we agree not to waste its potential. Kevin Kelly re-frames this understanding in language that gives technology even greater volition: as technology develops, it shows us what it “wants.” To live peacefully with technology, we must do our best to accommodate these wants. By this logic, it would seem that right now, one of the things technology “wants” to do is ponder our memories.
A LETTER HOME
I begin drafting this chapter in the late summer of 2009. After a few weeks, my work is interrupted by the Jewish high holy days. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there is a special service of mourning for the dead. This is Yiskor. Different synagogues have different practices. In mine, the rabbi delivers a sermon just before the service. This year, his comments bring me up short. Things that had seemed complicated now seem clear. The rabbi addresses the importance of talking to the dead. His premise is that we want to, need to, talk to the dead. It is an important, not a maudlin, thing to do. The rabbi suggests that we have four things to say to them: I’m sorry. Thank you. I forgive you. I love you. This is what makes us human, over time, over distance.
When my daughter and I have our first conversation on Skype (Dublin/Boston), I’m in the midst of reviewing my materials on Gordon Bell and the MyLifeBits program. I tell Rebecca I’m writing about the possibility of being able to archive everything we do. I ask her if she would like to have a record of all of her communications during her time in Dublin: e-mails, texts, instant messages, Facebook communications, calls, conversations, searches, pictures of everyone she has met and all the travelling she has done. She thinks about it. After a silence, she finally says, “Well, that’s a little pack ratty, creepy.” When people are pack rats, the volume of things tends to mean that equal weight is given to every person, conversation, and change of venue. More appealing to her are human acts of remembrance that filter and exclude, that put events into shifting camps of meaning—a scrapbook, a journal. And perhaps, at eighteen, she senses that, for her, archiving might get in the way of living. To live most fully, perhaps we need at least the fiction that we are not archiving. For surely, in the archived life, we begin to live for the record, for how we shall be seen.
As Rebecca and I talk about what has weight for her in her year abroad, I tell her that, prompted by her absence, I have been looking over my freshman-year correspondence with my mother. I ask my daughter if she would like to write me a letter. Since she already sends me regular text messages and we’re now on Skype talking about what shoes she should wear to the “Back to the Future” Ball at her Dublin College, she has a genuine moment of puzzlement and says, “I don’t know what my subject could be.” I appreciate that with the amount of communication we have, it could well seem that all topics have been exhausted. Nevertheless, I say something like, “You could write about your thoughts about being in Ireland, how you feel about it. Things that would mean special things to me.” Over time, over distance, through the fishbowl of Skype, Rebecca stares at me from her dorm room and repeats, “Maybe if I could find a subject.”
As I talk to Rebecca about the pleasures of my correspondence with my mother, she comments sensibly, “So send me a letter.” And so I have.
NOTES
AUTHOR’S NOTE: TURNING POINTS
1
Sherry Turkle, “Inner History,” in Sherry Turkle, ed.,
The Inner History of Devices
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 2-29.
2
Sherry Turkle,
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
(1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2.
3
Sherry Turkle,
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 13.
INTRODUCTION: ALONE TOGETHER
2
Benedict Carey and John Markoff, “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot,”
New York Times
, July 10, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robots.html
(accessed July 10, 2010); Anne Tergeson and Miho Inada, “It’s Not a Stuffed Animal, It’s a $6,000 Medical Device,”
Wall Street Journal,
June 21, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704463504575301051844937276.html
(accessed August 10, 2010); Jonathan Fildes, “‘Virtual Human’ Milo Comes Out to Play at TED in Oxford,”
BBC News,
July 13, 2010,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/10623423
(accessed July 13, 2010); Amy Harmon, “A Soft Spot for Circuitry: Robot Machines as Companions,”
New York Times
, July 4, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/science/05robot.html?pagewanted=all
(accessed July 4, 2010); Emily Veach, “A Robot That Helps You Diet,”
Wall Street Journal
, July 20, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369981478383568.html
(accessed July 20, 2010).
4
David L. Levy,
Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
(New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
5
The book review is Robin Marantz Henig, “Robo Love,”
New York Times
, December 2, 2007,
www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Henig-t.html
(accessed July 21, 2009). The original article about the MIT robot scene is Robin Marantz Henig, “The Real Transformers,”
New York Times
, July 29, 2007,
www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29robots-t.html
(accessed July 21, 2009).
7
On “alterity,” the ability to put oneself in the place of another, see Emmanuel Lévinas,
Alterity and Transcendence
, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999).
8
Sherry Turkle,
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit
(1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 183-218.
9
The way here is paved by erotic images of female robots used to sell refrigerators, washing machines, shaving cream, and vodka. See, for example, the campaign for Svedka Vodka (Steve Hall, “Svedka Launches Futuristic, Un-PC Campaign,”
Andrants.com
, September 20, 2005,
www.adrants.com/2005/09/svedka-launches-futuristic-unpc.php
[accessed September 1, 2009]) and Phillip’s shaving system (“Feel the Erotic Union of Man and Shavebot,”
AdFreak.com
, August 21, 2007,
http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2007/08/feel-the-erotic.html
[accessed September 1, 2009]).
10
Sharon Moshavi, “Putting on the Dog in Japan,”
Boston Globe
, June 17, 1999, A1.
11
As preteens, the young women of the first Google generation (born roughly from 1987 to 1993) wore clothing widely referred to as “baby harlot”; they listened to songs about explicit sex well before puberty. Their boomer parents had few ideas about where to draw lines, having spent their own adolescences declaring the lines irrelevant. Boomer parents grew up rejecting parental rules, but knowing that there were rules. One might say it is the job of teenagers to complain about constraints and the job of parents to insist on them, even if the rules are not obeyed. Rules, even unheeded, suggest that twelve to fifteen are not good ages to be emotionally and sexually enmeshed.
Today’s teenagers cannot easily articulate any rules about sexual conduct except for those that will keep them “safe.” Safety refers to not getting venereal diseases or AIDS. Safety refers to not getting pregnant. And on these matters teenagers are eloquent, unembarrassed, and startlingly well informed. But teenagers are overwhelmed with how unsafe they feel in relationships. A robot to talk to is appealing—even if currently unavailable—as are situations that provide feelings of closeness without emotional demands. I have said that rampant fantasies of vampire lovers (closeness with constraints on sexuality) bear a family resemblance to ideas about robot lovers (sex without intimacy, perfect). And closeness without the possibility of physical intimacy and eroticized encounters that can be switched off in an instant—these are the affordances of online encounters. Online romance expresses the aesthetic of the robotic moment. From a certain perspective, they are a way of preparing for it. On the psychology of adolescents’ desire for relationships with constraint, I am indebted to conversations with child and adolescent psychoanalyst Monica Horovitz in August 2009.
12
Commenting on the insatiable desire for robot pets during the 2009 holiday season, a researcher on social trends comments, “A toy trend would be something that reflects the broader society, that tells you where society is going, something society needs.” Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute, cited in Brad Tuttle, “Toy Craze Explained: A Zhu Zhu Pet Hamster Is Like a ‘Viral Infection,’”
Time
, December 9, 2009,
http://money.blogs.time.com/2009/12/07/toy-craze-explained-a-zhuzhu-pet-hamster-is-like-a-viral-infection
(accessed December 9, 2009).
13
For classic psychodynamic formulations of the meaning of symptoms, see Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in
The Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud
, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 14:159-204; “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” in
The Standard Edition
, vols. 15 and 16; “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in
The Standard Edition
, 17:1-122; “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” in
The Standard Edition
, 20:75-172; and Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, “Studies on Hysteria,” in
The Standard Edition
, 2:48-106. For Freud on dreams as wishes, see “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in
The Standard Edition
, vol. IV.