A bit in the way of explanation...

So a friend gave me a very interesting essay to read about 'humanoid', 'sociable' robots and their development at MIT. There are a ton of things in here (sorry, it's on paper so I can't link it) that strike me as ridiculously stupid and equally ridiculously terrifying, so if no news stories pop up that strike my fancy for a little while, this may be fodder for a whole lot of posts. Here's one:

The essay describes the development of more human-like robots, their programming to learn like human beings, and the potential for them to experience their own form of very mechanistic emotion, and juxtaposes these developments with the idea that robots are intended to make our lives easier - to do the jobs we find boring or repugnant. And it eventually makes a statement that I found refreshing (and personal):

"To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction - the one between one human and another."

The author, Robin Marantz Henig, has hit the nail absolutely on the head. This idea that one day we may prefer and rely so much on robot interaction is absolutely terrifying to me in many ways, but here I'll try to explain the most practical.

In a word, it's the preservation of human interaction, which modern society seems to be trying to forget is probably the most important aspect to our survival as a species and to the planet entirely, that is at stake here. I fear and distrust robots and other high tech gadgets assimilation into the fabric of our lives for the very simple reason that reliance on them, rather than on other people, for meeting our daily needs, invites rampant individualism on a devastating scale. The more we learn to interact with computers and gadgets and robots, even if they are tools for interacting remotely with other people, the more we forget what it's like to actually interact with people. When we become accustomed to having our coffee ready and waiting for us in the morning because our coffee maker was programmed to do it, and when we're used to having conversations via texting or e-mail (giving the person on the other end ample time to carefully consider every word before sending the message), and when our entertainment options are movies so heavily computer-digitized that we hardly see a person's face on screen, etc etc etc ad infinitum, it's easy to forget that there are real people contributing to all these processes. The hands that picked the coffee beans, the mind that created the text message, the team of people that filmed and produced and labored to make that movie... all are easily lost behind the veneer of robotic precision and easy perfection we get on the receiving end.

We come to assume that all these things are easy to make because they are easy for us to get. We forget that there are people who have dedicated their lives to bringing us these things. We forget how to think about and interact with these people. We become, rather than self-supporting individuals, helpless isolationists who have no idea whose labor went into making the goods that we buy, or the real emotions behind someone's e-mail (much less how we'd deal with these emotions if confronted with them face-to-face with no time to plan out typed responses). We become a bunch of isolated freaks, sipping Mountain Dew in front of our sweatshop-produced computer screens at 3:00 am, making up characters to speak for us in chat rooms and avatars to be us in virtual worlds. Reality drops from our consciousness. We forget about other people.

And in so doing we do what we've seen the people at the top of Wall Street do. The heads of giant corporations with their private jets and gold-inlaid toilets who don't know about or understand or give a shit about what the people he stepped on to get there are doing or experiencing. And it's easy for us in America, using all our gadgets, to do the same exact thing, if on a less-grand scale. It's easy, when you're surrounded by gadgets that do everything for you, to forget that people made these gadgets and made the food they're preparing for you. To forgot that other people exist and have feelings and needs and wants and dreams just like you.

It's a slippery slope, and before you know it we've got people killing each other and dying of starvation in one part of the world, where there aren't computers to send e-mails from, or cameras to record the happenings. And we in places where we have computers and cameras and gadgets just... forget... about those people because they have no presence in our tech world. We forget that our actions affect these people. That our actions affect the world itself. We become so self-centered and self-obsessed that we develop neuroses and allergies and diseases the rest of the world has never heard of, just to keep ourselves busy, because our lives are so easy with all the gadgets we have to take care of our everyday tasks. We sit around and watch other people's neuroses on television.

Real, face-to-face, one-on-one interaction is a powerful antidote to allt hese terrors. Even remembering to make face time with a friend or call a relative on her birthday, remembering that other people are there and are real and legitimate entitites can remind us that our iPods are NOT entities, but the product of the hard work of other people, which is a slippery slope in a more positive direction. Reminders of other people. If we allow ourselves to continue making human connections, we arrive at a kind of globalization of consciousness rather than of wealth or materials goods. If, however, we allow ourselves to continue making and interacting with and relying more heavily on machines to run our lives, we are asking for problems and destruction...

That's enough for now.