You've spoken of your book, Alone Together, as a book of repentance. I'm
wondering if you could reflect on that statement, in particular as it
relates to your two previous books, Life on the Screen and The Second
Self.
The artificial intelligence that I had researched for The Second Self and Life on the Screen was an AI where researchers were trying to make the computer smart. In sociable robotics the intent was less to make the computer smart than to make a “creature” that pushed people’s buttons, to do what was necessary to convince people that this machine was sentient and cared about them. It was playing on what the AI scientists knew about people’s make-up. The point is not so much that the machine is smart but that we are vulnerable. So, for example, I began to see sociable robots that looked you in the eye, kept eye contact, said your name, tracked your motion.
And there was something else. It turns out that if an artificial being, no matter how primitive, asks us for nurturance, we attach to it. Think of the little Tamagotchis, the little virtual creatures on tiny little screens that kids carried around in the late 1990s. These Tamagotchis asked you to feed them, amuse them, and clean up after them. When they did this, we attached. People nurture what they love, but they also love what they nurture. And that whole direction in sociable robotics, to create artificial creatures that might some day become substitutes for human companionship, and the realization of how vulnerable we are to such creatures, was something I really didn’t encounter until 1995, as I was finishing Life on the Screen.
Research on this new research tradition and our vulnerability to sociable robotics became a major preoccupation of mine. Every year a new sociable robot would come out, and every year I would embark on a new study of kids and this new robot. I studied Furbies, Aibos, My Real Babies. And finally robots were designed for the elderly in nursing homes, and I began to track that story as well.
So the growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.
You tell the story of a graduate student who says she would prefer a robot over a human relationship.
Yes. And I studied people who are happy now to give these inanimate creatures to the elderly because, well, they say it’s better than nothing. They accept that there’s nobody else for these people. But how did we get to “there’s nobody else”? People have come to accept that we live in a society where there simply aren’t the resources to take care of our elderly. But this is a social decision that these resources are not available.
So Alone Together is a book of repentance in the sense that I did not see this coming, this moment of temptation that we will have machines that will care for us, listen to us, tend to us. That’s the first sense. A second thing that changed my mind has to do with where I see social networking and the internet going. My initial excitement about networked communication took place during a time when I saw the world of online play as an identity workshop: a place where people experimented with avatars, played out aspects of self that often were not fully expressed in their everyday lives. That still goes on, but now online life has become a life of continual performance. When I studied online life in the mid-1990s, I envisaged it as a place you went to experiment. But now, with our mobile devices “always on/always-on-us,” we are always “on camera.”
I didn’t see that coming, although it was right before me. And with it has come the culture of distraction, which isn’t even experienced as distraction because it’s just how we live. People feel they have the right to customize their lives, to put their attention where they want it to be. If they are at a meeting and want to text, they do. If they are at dinner and want to text, they do. Students in class tell me that that if they don’t check their texts, it makes them anxious. They can’t feel present if they are not also in some way absent. I didn’t see that coming. As in the case of sociable robotics, this new lack of attention to each other is something, again, where I feel that we are not doing our humanness justice.
The first part of your book is on robots, and the second is on social networking. A common theme in both is the way in which these new technologies both express and foster greater loneliness. Can you talk about this paradox, where you find people being more connected than ever, but also more lonely?
We’re moving from conversation to connection. In conversation we’re present to each other in very powerful ways. Conversation is a kind of communication in which we’re alive to each other, empathetic with each other, listening to each other. When we substitute Twitter or status updates on Facebook for this, we’re losing something important. Sometimes it’s not clear to me if it’s the volume, or velocity, or continualness of it. Some kids are up to 10,000, to 15,000 texts a month. That means they’re never not texting. In this cascade of communication, we move from conversation to mere connection. And so we’ve positioned ourselves in a way where we can end up feeling more alone, even as we’re taking actions that would suggest we’re more continually connected. In all of this there is another loss: I think we lose the capacity for solitude, the kind that refreshes and restores. The kind that allows us to reach out to another person.
by James Nolan, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
The artificial intelligence that I had researched for The Second Self and Life on the Screen was an AI where researchers were trying to make the computer smart. In sociable robotics the intent was less to make the computer smart than to make a “creature” that pushed people’s buttons, to do what was necessary to convince people that this machine was sentient and cared about them. It was playing on what the AI scientists knew about people’s make-up. The point is not so much that the machine is smart but that we are vulnerable. So, for example, I began to see sociable robots that looked you in the eye, kept eye contact, said your name, tracked your motion.
And there was something else. It turns out that if an artificial being, no matter how primitive, asks us for nurturance, we attach to it. Think of the little Tamagotchis, the little virtual creatures on tiny little screens that kids carried around in the late 1990s. These Tamagotchis asked you to feed them, amuse them, and clean up after them. When they did this, we attached. People nurture what they love, but they also love what they nurture. And that whole direction in sociable robotics, to create artificial creatures that might some day become substitutes for human companionship, and the realization of how vulnerable we are to such creatures, was something I really didn’t encounter until 1995, as I was finishing Life on the Screen.
Research on this new research tradition and our vulnerability to sociable robotics became a major preoccupation of mine. Every year a new sociable robot would come out, and every year I would embark on a new study of kids and this new robot. I studied Furbies, Aibos, My Real Babies. And finally robots were designed for the elderly in nursing homes, and I began to track that story as well.
So the growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.
You tell the story of a graduate student who says she would prefer a robot over a human relationship.
Yes. And I studied people who are happy now to give these inanimate creatures to the elderly because, well, they say it’s better than nothing. They accept that there’s nobody else for these people. But how did we get to “there’s nobody else”? People have come to accept that we live in a society where there simply aren’t the resources to take care of our elderly. But this is a social decision that these resources are not available.
So Alone Together is a book of repentance in the sense that I did not see this coming, this moment of temptation that we will have machines that will care for us, listen to us, tend to us. That’s the first sense. A second thing that changed my mind has to do with where I see social networking and the internet going. My initial excitement about networked communication took place during a time when I saw the world of online play as an identity workshop: a place where people experimented with avatars, played out aspects of self that often were not fully expressed in their everyday lives. That still goes on, but now online life has become a life of continual performance. When I studied online life in the mid-1990s, I envisaged it as a place you went to experiment. But now, with our mobile devices “always on/always-on-us,” we are always “on camera.”
I didn’t see that coming, although it was right before me. And with it has come the culture of distraction, which isn’t even experienced as distraction because it’s just how we live. People feel they have the right to customize their lives, to put their attention where they want it to be. If they are at a meeting and want to text, they do. If they are at dinner and want to text, they do. Students in class tell me that that if they don’t check their texts, it makes them anxious. They can’t feel present if they are not also in some way absent. I didn’t see that coming. As in the case of sociable robotics, this new lack of attention to each other is something, again, where I feel that we are not doing our humanness justice.
The first part of your book is on robots, and the second is on social networking. A common theme in both is the way in which these new technologies both express and foster greater loneliness. Can you talk about this paradox, where you find people being more connected than ever, but also more lonely?
We’re moving from conversation to connection. In conversation we’re present to each other in very powerful ways. Conversation is a kind of communication in which we’re alive to each other, empathetic with each other, listening to each other. When we substitute Twitter or status updates on Facebook for this, we’re losing something important. Sometimes it’s not clear to me if it’s the volume, or velocity, or continualness of it. Some kids are up to 10,000, to 15,000 texts a month. That means they’re never not texting. In this cascade of communication, we move from conversation to mere connection. And so we’ve positioned ourselves in a way where we can end up feeling more alone, even as we’re taking actions that would suggest we’re more continually connected. In all of this there is another loss: I think we lose the capacity for solitude, the kind that refreshes and restores. The kind that allows us to reach out to another person.
by James Nolan, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
