Alone Together (28 page)
Authors: Sherry Turkle
Tony is aware that he has talked himself into a contradiction: the robot is a specialized helper that can expertly diagnose a level of impairment
and
the robot is like a wire-and-terry-cloth monkey. He tries to reconcile his ideas:
and
the robot is like a wire-and-terry-cloth monkey. He tries to reconcile his ideas:
I suppose the robot assistant is okay when a person still has some lucidity. You can still interact with it and know that it is a robot. But you don’t want a robot at the end. Then, you deserve a person. Everybody deserves a person. But I do have mixed feelings. Looking at robots and children, really, there is a part of raising children . . . I think Marilyn French called it the “shit-and-string-beans” part of raising children. This would be good for a robot to do. You are a robot when you do it.So, I’m happy to give over the shit-and-string-beans part of child raising and for that aspect of taking care of Natasha. Of course, the children are the harder call. But I would do it if it were the conventional thing that everyone did. Most people would do it if it were the conventional thing that everyone did. We didn’t deny our children television, and we didn’t think it was a good thing for them.
Tony is not happy to be caught in a contradiction. But many people share his dilemma. It is hard to hold on to a stable point of view. Plagued with problems, we are told that machines might address them. How are we to resist? Tony says, “I’m okay with the lack of authenticity [if you replace people with robots]. Lack of authenticity is an acceptable trade-off for services needed. I would say that my need right now trumps the luxury of authenticity. I would see a robot cleaning up after Natasha as labor saving, just like a vacuum cleaner. So the eldercare robot, I’m okay with it.”
Betty has been quietly listening to this conversation about her mother. She would like her mother to live in her own home for as long as possible. Maybe a robot companion could help with that. She says,
The robot would make her life more interesting. Maybe it would mean that she could stay in her own home longer. But provide some reassurance and peace of mind for me. More than a helper who might abuse her or ignore her or steal from her. I imagine she would prefer the robot. The robot wouldn’t be critical. It would always be positive toward her. She would be familiar with it. At ease with it. Like Tony says, there is a down side to TV for children and there is a down side to this. There is always a down side. But it would be so worth it.
Then Betty speaks about other “robotic things” in her life. She thinks of automatic tellers as robotic. And she is happy that in her suburban neighborhood, she has a local bank where there are still human tellers, coffee, and a plate of donuts on Saturday. “I love our little bank. It would bother me if I went in there one day and the teller was a well-trained robot. At self-service gas stations, at ATM machines, you lose the intimacy.”
For her husband, however, that neighborhood bank is only an exercise in nostalgia.
The teller is not from the neighborhood. He doesn’t know you or care. There’s no point in talking to him because he has become a robot. If you do talk to the teller, you have become like the ‘old guy,’ the retired guy who wants to talk to everyone on line and then talk to the teller. Because that is the old guy’s social life—the bank, the grocery store, the barber. When you’re young, you’re okay with the ATM, but then, if that’s all we have, when we’re ready to talk to people, when we’re old, there won’t be anyone there. There will just be things.
Tony’s review of the banal and the profound—of being young and wanting an ATM, of being old and bereft in a world of things—captures the essence of the robotic moment. We feel, as we stand before our ATM machines (or interact with bank tellers who behave like ATM machines), that they and we stand robotic among robots, “trained to talk to things.” So, it seems less shocking to put robots in where people used to be. Tony expands on a familiar progression: when we make a job rote, we are more open to having machines do it. But even when people do it, they
and the people they serve
feel like machines.
and the people they serve
feel like machines.
Gradually, more of life, even parts of life that involve our children and parents, seem machine ready. Tony tries to focus on the bright side. Alzheimer’s patients can be served by a finely tuned robot.
28
Children will have the attention of machines that will not resent the “shit and string beans” of their daily care. And yet, he feels the tug of something else: the robotic makes sense until it makes him think of monkeys deprived of a mother, clinging to wire and terry cloth.
28
Children will have the attention of machines that will not resent the “shit and string beans” of their daily care. And yet, he feels the tug of something else: the robotic makes sense until it makes him think of monkeys deprived of a mother, clinging to wire and terry cloth.
This last reaction may end up seeming peculiarly American. In Japan, enthusiasm for robots is uninhibited.
29
Philosophically, the ground has been prepared. Japanese roboticists are fond of pointing out that in their country, even worn-out sewing needles are buried with ceremony. At some shrines in Japan, dolls, including sex dolls, are given proper burials. It is commonplace to think of the inanimate as having a life force. If a needle has a soul, why shouldn’t a robot? At their robotic moment, a Japanese national publicity campaign portrays a future in which robots will babysit and do housework and women will be freed up to have more babies—preserving the traditional values of the Japanese home, but also restoring sociability to a population increasingly isolated through the networked life.
29
Philosophically, the ground has been prepared. Japanese roboticists are fond of pointing out that in their country, even worn-out sewing needles are buried with ceremony. At some shrines in Japan, dolls, including sex dolls, are given proper burials. It is commonplace to think of the inanimate as having a life force. If a needle has a soul, why shouldn’t a robot? At their robotic moment, a Japanese national publicity campaign portrays a future in which robots will babysit and do housework and women will be freed up to have more babies—preserving the traditional values of the Japanese home, but also restoring sociability to a population increasingly isolated through the networked life.
The Japanese take as a given that cell phones, texting, instant messaging, e-mail, and online gaming have created social isolation. They see people turning away from family to focus attention on their screens. People do not meet face to face; they do not join organizations. In Japan, robots are presented as facilitators of the human contact that the network has taken away. Technology has corrupted us; robots will heal our wounds.
We come full circle. Robots, which enchant us into increasingly intense relationships with the inanimate, are here proposed as a cure for our too intense immersion in digital connectivity. Robots, the Japanese hope, will pull us back toward the physical real and thus each other.
One wonders.
PART TWO
Networked
In Intimacy, New Solitudes
CHAPTER 8
Always on
P
ia Lindman walked the halls of MIT with cyborg dreams. She was not the first. In the summer of 1996, I met with seven young researchers at the MIT Media Lab who carried computers and radio transmitters in their back-packs and keyboards in their pockets. Digital displays were clipped onto eyeglass frames.
1
Thus provisioned, they called themselves “cyborgs” and were always wirelessly connected to the Internet, always online, free from desks and cables. The group was about to release three new ’borgs into the world, three more who would live simultaneously in the physical and virtual. I felt moved by the cyborgs as I had been by Lindman: I saw a bravery, a willingness to sacrifice for a vision of being one with technology. When their burdensome technology cut into their skin, causing lesions and then scars, the cyborgs learned to be indifferent. When their encumbrances caused them to be taken as physically disabled, they learned to be patient and provide explanations.
ia Lindman walked the halls of MIT with cyborg dreams. She was not the first. In the summer of 1996, I met with seven young researchers at the MIT Media Lab who carried computers and radio transmitters in their back-packs and keyboards in their pockets. Digital displays were clipped onto eyeglass frames.
1
Thus provisioned, they called themselves “cyborgs” and were always wirelessly connected to the Internet, always online, free from desks and cables. The group was about to release three new ’borgs into the world, three more who would live simultaneously in the physical and virtual. I felt moved by the cyborgs as I had been by Lindman: I saw a bravery, a willingness to sacrifice for a vision of being one with technology. When their burdensome technology cut into their skin, causing lesions and then scars, the cyborgs learned to be indifferent. When their encumbrances caused them to be taken as physically disabled, they learned to be patient and provide explanations.
At MIT, there was much talk about what the cyborgs were trying to accomplish. Faculty supporters stressed how continual connectivity could increase productivity and memory. The cyborgs, it was said, might seem exotic, but this technology should inspire no fear. It was “just a tool” for being better prepared and organized in an increasingly complex information environment. The brain needed help.
From the cyborgs, however, I heard another story. They felt like new selves. One, in his mid-twenties, said he had “become” his device. Shy, with a memory that seemed limited by anxiety, he felt better able to function when he could literally be “looking up” previous encounters with someone as he began a new conversation. “With it,” he said, referring to his collection of connectivity devices, “it’s not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I’m a better person.” But with a sense of enhancement came feelings of diffusion. The cyborgs were a new kind of nomad, wandering in and out of the physical real. For the physical real was only one of the many things in their field of vision. Even in the mid-1990s, as they walked around Kendall Square in Cambridge, the cyborgs could not only search the Web but had mobile e-mail, instant messaging, and remote access to desktop computing. The multiplicity of worlds before them set them apart: they could be with you, but they were always somewhere else as well.
Within a decade, what had seemed alien was close to becoming everyone’s way of life, as compact smartphones replaced the cyborgs’ more elaborate accoutrements. This is the experience of living full-time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now.
People love their new technologies of connection. They have made parents and children feel more secure and have revolutionized business, education, scholarship, and medicine. It is no accident that corporate America has chosen to name cell phones after candies and ice cream flavors: chocolate, strawberry, vanilla. There is a sweetness to them. They have changed how we date and how we travel. The global reach of connectivity can make the most isolated outpost into a center of learning and economic activity. The word “apps” summons the pleasure of tasks accomplished on mobile devices, some of which, only recently, we would not have dreamed possible (for me, personally, it is an iPhone app that can “listen” to a song, identify it, and cue it up for purchase).
Beyond all of this, connectivity offers new possibilities for experimenting with identity and, particularly in adolescence, the sense of a free space, what Erik Erikson called the
moratorium
. This is a time, relatively consequence free, for doing what adolescents need to do: fall in and out of love with people and ideas. Real life does not always provide this kind of space, but the Internet does.
moratorium
. This is a time, relatively consequence free, for doing what adolescents need to do: fall in and out of love with people and ideas. Real life does not always provide this kind of space, but the Internet does.
No handle cranks, no gear turns to move us from one stage of life to another. We don’t get all developmental tasks done at age-appropriate times—or even necessarily get them done at all. We move on and use the materials we have to do the best we can at each point in our lives. We rework unresolved issues and seek out missed experiences. The Internet provides new spaces in which we can do this, no matter how imperfectly, throughout our lives. So, adults as well as adolescents use it to explore identity.
When part of your life is lived in virtual places—it can be Second Life, a computer game, a social networking site—a vexed relationship develops between what is true and what is “true here,” true in simulation. In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be. Distinctions blur. Virtual places offer connection with uncertain claims to commitment. We don’t count on cyberfriends to come by if we are ill, to celebrate our children’s successes, or help us mourn the death of our parents.
2
People know this, and yet the emotional charge on cyberspace is high. People talk about digital life as the “place for hope,” the place where something new will come to them. In the past, one waited for the sound of the post—by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our e-mail, texts, and messages.
2
People know this, and yet the emotional charge on cyberspace is high. People talk about digital life as the “place for hope,” the place where something new will come to them. In the past, one waited for the sound of the post—by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our e-mail, texts, and messages.
The story of my own hesitant steps toward a cyborg life is banal, an example of the near universality of what was so recently exotic. I carry a mobile device with me at all times. I held out for years. I don’t like attempting to speak to people who are moving in and out of contact as they pass through tunnels, come to dangerous intersections, or otherwise approach dead zones. I worry about them. The clarity and fidelity of sound on my landline telephone seems to me a technical advance over what I can hear on my mobile. And I don’t like the feeling of always being on call. But now, with a daughter studying abroad who expects to reach me when she wants to reach me, I am grateful to be tethered to her through the Net. In deference to a generation that sees my phone calls as constraining because they take place in real time and are not suitable for multitasking, I text. Awkwardly.
But even these small things allow me to identify with the cyborgs’ claims of an enhanced experience. Tethered to the Internet, the cyborgs felt like more than they could be without it. Like most people, I experience a pint-sized version of such pleasures. I like to look at the list of “favorites” on my iPhone contact list and see everyone I cherish. Each is just a tap away. If someone doesn’t have time to talk to me, I can text a greeting, and they will know I am thinking of them, caring about them. Looking over recent text exchanges with my friends and family reliably puts me in a good mood. I keep all the texts my daughter sent me during her last year of high school. They always warm me: “Forgot my green sweater, bring please.” “Can you pick me up at boathouse, 6?” “Please tell nurse I’m sick. Class boring. Want to come home.” And of course, there are the photos, so many photos on my phone, more photos than I would ever take with a camera, always with me.
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