Keeping Up With The Robots

            I recently came across an American sociologist whose ideas parallel some of the ideas that have been discussed in this column.  William Fielding Ogburn propounded the theory of cultural lag.  Basically what he said is that in our time of rapid social change, some parts of our culture evolve faster than others, creating social adjustment problems.  In particular, he talks about the tension between the materials and products that humans use and the human adaptation to these products.  The assumption here seems to be that it would be better if humans could keep up with the changes, because then there would be less friction in the adjustment process.  Ogburn would ideally like to minimize the influence of the cultural lag between the material culture and the adaptive culture and create more cultural harmony.

            In my theory of sensory distortion which talks about the lag of human evolution in relation to technological change, I am much more skeptical of getting rid of the discomfort of humans in trying to adjust to modern technology.  Of course, I am writing in 2015, and the article I read of Ogburn appeared in a collection of articles on social thinking called The Making of Society that was published in 1937.  From the perspective of the super accelerated rate of technological change that occurs today, it can be more easily seen that humans are heading towards increasing robotization and losing many of their essential traits as human beings.  But because humans can’t change as fast as machines and because the change to humans is occurring to basic aspects of human nature, the process will not be comfortable.

            Nevertheless, it would be useful to apply some of the concepts that have appeared in this column to the notion of participating in a culture as distinct from living and interacting sensorily in a field of experience.  I want to focus on the cultural distortion that takes place when different parts of a culture evolve at different rates as opposed to the sensory distortion that occurs when our nervous system is not adequate for absorbing the new qualities of stimuli that occur in our modern technological field of experience.

            One tension that was very pronounced was the tension from the development of the automobile and its effect on family values in Western societies.  With an automobile, a young couple could take a relatively frictionless trip (compared to a horse and buggy) from point a (the house of the girl) to point b (some private place in a park or in the country) and feel totally separated from the implicit moral attitudes of the family.  A new private space in a separate realm was created by a vacuumized trip in the car, and in the private space, a couple could engage in sexual activity in the car itself or in the new private surroundings and nobody would know in the family, unless somehow they would later accidentally find out.  But there was the pull of traditional values even for the couple, and the tension continues to exist for some more conservative segments of society today.  The car and the birth control pill have contributed to separating the desire for sex from the desire for deep-bonded relationships.  People focus on making imprints with sex today without necessarily preserving those imprints with committed deep-bonded relationships.

            Another example relates to attitudes towards death.  Modern technology as well as modern pharmaceutical products can keep people alive, even when they are permanently unconscious in a coma.  To keep the body functioning when there is no consciousness is to turn the body into a kind of machine.  But traditional moral attitudes say that one should always fight to keep a person going as long as he is alive.  So modern technology has created gray areas where people are kept in a living death that comes not only from the understimulation of the ultimate numbness of long-term unconsciousness, but also from the overstimulation of unbearable pain.

            Still another example relates to attitudes towards work.  For most people in traditional societies, as long and as hard as they would sometimes work, there were usually defined hours for work.  One would work during those hours and the rest of the time would be used for family bonding, recreation, and sleep.  And most of the time one worked when the sun was out, and one stopped working when it went down.  But nowadays, with electricity, there are night shifts, when some people continue to work when most of the rest of the people are sleeping.  Furthermore, even when people have conventional jobs during the day, the smartphone and the computer break down the barrier that exists between work hours and non-work hours.  Workers are expected to answer text messages wherever they are and even take their work home with them to work on through the use of their computers.  The desire to be able to have time for bonding with family and friends is invaded by the obligation to be on call at all hours, to work at night, on weekends and during holidays.  But this goes totally against the cultural need to dedicate time to maintaining the integrity of family and community.

            We should not overlook the effect of technology on recreation.  When people sit down together to watch a television program, they are juxtaposed next to each other, but there is no interaction conducive to strong bonding.  Family television habits have weakened the values of family togetherness, as people live more and more in their direct encounters with technologically-created images.  Many times, each member of the family is in a separate room with a separate television watching a separate program.  And of course, nowadays, people can watch their programs on their computer and smartphone in an extremely accessible and private experience.  People can do this not only in their rooms but out in a coffee house, in a restaurant, in a park or even while waiting for a bus.  Television has taken people away from strong interactions with their family and friends, from strong bonding.

            In effect, what all these examples show is how rapid technological change fragments the organic unity of a culture, destroys its grounding, and breaks up the fields of experience of its members into different disconnected free-floating figures of unrelated events.  Organic traditional cultures, more strongly grounded in nature, are what have given unity and meaning to human life.  Just as when nature gets destroyed by technology, when traditional culture gets broken by technology, it creates experiential distortion.  People’s lives become filled with mechanical rhythms and mechanical patterns of life.

            There has definitely been a cultural lag between the evolution of technological change and the evolution of human family and community structures within different cultures.  Technology is changing so much faster than human society can evolve.  But maybe it is just as well.  If humans and their cultures evolved as fast as technological change, they would become robots living in mechanistic patterns of interaction.  I hesitate to use the term culture for robots, because as smart and sophisticated as robots are becoming, they still are not able to make and receive organic flowing blendable continual organic stimuli, still are not able to make and receive organic imprints, still are not capable of an independent organic sense of self, still are not capable of initiating and creating the kind of deep-bonded relationships on which families, communities and many other human social groups are built.

            I am increasingly beginning to feel that, under the circumstance in which people live in modern technological society, the sensory distortion that people experience, however uncomfortable or painful it may be, is at least a sign that the people are still human.  And cultural lag is at least a sign that people are still clinging to their cultural roots and don’t fully want to become robots.

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow 

The Need To Have Things Right Away

            It has already been mentioned in previous articles how, as a result of the accelerating pace of change in modern technological society, there has been an accelerating pace of human activity as well.  This accelerating pace of human activity is based on psychological changes in people.  In particular, what I have called in the past conative acceleration: the acceleration of the human will.  Conative acceleration is a strategy that has resulted from humans trying to block out the uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous side effects of the sensory distortion that has developed in modern living environments.  It is a posture that allows a person to block out the harmful effects of sensory distortion by creating so much stimulation as a result of intense activity, that the person has, in effect, created his own private field of experience over which he has total control.  A good example of this is in the business world today, where certain super-motivated people work tirelessly to build large profitable businesses and even what could be called business empires.

            But today, conative acceleration is manifesting itself not only in human production patterns, but in human consumption patterns as well.  Kathleen Kusik wrote an article for Forbes Magazine (10/20/2014) called “Retail’s New Battleground: The I Want What I Want When I Want It Generation”.  The article discusses her interview with Dr. Kit Yarrow who wrote a book called Decoding the New Consumer Mind.  It seems that meeting desires for immediate gratification is a fundamental requirement for retailers in today’s market.  Particularly young consumers are very concerned with how they are going to take possession of an item they bought: pick-up or delivery.  Big Box department stores like Walmart of Target now have online presences to deal with consumers who want to order something right away.

            What is important here is how particularly younger consumers want what they want when they want it.  There are different ways to explain this need for immediate gratification.  From a psychoanalytic point of view, the need for immediate gratification in terms of products and services becomes a substitute for the need for parental love when the latter is absent.  This is a classic explanation of the so-called spoiled child.  The parent buys a lot for his child, because he refuses to or is unable to give the child time, energy, and state of mind.  Such a situation is typical of certain affluent parents who have very extensive social lives, but don’t spend as much time with their children as they should.  Or of some parents who are just too busy working.   And in many cases, even when they do spend time with their children, the parents are not psychologically present.  They perform their parental roles in a perfunctory manner.

            Certainly being emotionally grounded is very important in order to give a child internal psychological grounding and to prevent the development of a sense of emptiness, an emotional vacuum, which the child then tries to fill with products and services that, when he wants them, he wants them right away.

            Maybe the parent is passing onto his child the same lack of emotional grounding that he experienced from his own parents.  But what if one of the reasons that the parent can’t give emotional grounding is because of his lack of experiential grounding in his physical living environment?  And what if one of the child’s reasons for his obsessive need for ongoing immediate gratification is his own direct lack of experiential grounding in the modern vacuum and tension pocket environment in which he lives?

            So it is not just parental love and grounding that is missing.  On a larger scale, it is the lack of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli in the child’s field of experience, as modern technology starts influencing more and more different areas of his field of experience.  Grounded unconditional love is important, but so is the feeling of grounded unconditional connection to one’s total living environment.

            This lack of unconditional connection leads to anxiety as a result of the sense of detachment that comes from numbness, the loss of feeling that comes from a chronic experience of an experiential vacuum.  The constant frictionlessness created by modern machines like the smooth ride within a car, the sensors that turn lights on and off and activate faucets, toilets and garage doors.  The smooth lack of texture of sidewalks and streets, the lack of moldings, beams and ornament in modern architecture and the flavorless empty spaces created inside modern lobbies, offices, and apartments.  The feeling of sensory oversimplification with the relative lack of vegetation and sensorily interesting natural landmarks inside most modern urban environments.

            But this is not the whole picture.  There are also abrasive static stimuli: bundles of defined discrete stimuli floating in a vacuum.  Examples of this are noise pollution, air pollution, speeding cars passing on streets and highways, crowded urban neighborhoods, particularly those with high-rises, big shopping malls and construction sites.  All these sources of abrasive static stimuli, of tension pockets, make a person jaded or tough in order to withstand the overstimulation.  And jadedness like numbness leads to a loss of capacity for organic connection, a loss of capacity for grounded connection, even when the connection should be available in small amounts.

            I do not want to imply that a traditional more nature-oriented environment with organic grounding is always a positive thing.  Such an environment contains incipient figures, partly differentiated figures that struggle to define themselves.  Examples are wild animals and wild storms that lash out with strong winds and torrential rains.  Even the strongly grounded components of environments have dangerous aspects.  So, on the one hand, nature and more traditional living environments can provide the security of grounding.  On the other hand, nature and more traditional living environments can swallow up the individual as a result of the sources of organic perishability within its terrains.  The floods, the whirlpools, the quicksand, the avalanches, the sandstorms, the blizzards, the rot, the diseases.

            At any rate, this is not the problem for modern technological humans today.  The problem today is the sensory distortion created by vacuum and tension pocket living environments.  And as these environments increasingly displace traditional more organic living environments, they create a whole series of new problems.  And one major problem is this accelerating need for immediate gratification.  It leaves people very vulnerable psychologically.  What does it mean to not get something when one wants it?  Does the person have an anxiety attack?  Does the person withdraw from the world into depression?  Does the person self-destruct and maybe kill himself, because he can’t tolerate not having things just right?  Does he explode in anger and hurt others?   All these behavioral manifestations are occurring today among people who can’t get what they want in life when they want it, even when it doesn’t involve commercial products and services.  These behaviors are not indications of emotionally stable people.

            And yet according to the article by Kathleen Kusik, the commercial establishment simply accepts the needs and desires of the I want what I want when I want it generation as givens that are to be pandered to rather than treated as causes for concern.  This tendency towards immediate gratification among today’s youth is but one more manifestation of the pathological effects of sensory distortion in modern technological society.  And it indicates a dangerous emotional fragility that could have far-reaching effects not just for the youth of today, but for the future of modern humanity for years to come.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Will Machines Become Smarter Than Humans?

            With technological change occurring so rapidly today, there is a lot of speculation about what human life is going to be like in the future.  A major line of speculation revolves around something called the singularity, a moment in time when machine intelligence becomes superior to human intelligence.  There is considerable variation in the prediction of when this moment will actually happen, although many people say it will occur by 2045.  And although the idea is that the singularity will have a dramatic change on human life, no one can say for sure what that change will be.

            One very dramatic theory is that propounded by Louis Del Monte, a physicist and an author who has written a book called The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.  In an article written by Dylan Love for Business Insider on July 5, Del Monte paints a picture of a future world where machines become independent and self-sufficient and displace humans as the top species on the planet.  Meantime, most humans will become cyborgs – part-human and part-machine -  in order to attain what they experience as immortality.  Nevertheless, machines may turn on humans as “an unpredictable and dangerous species”.  Future machines, with their supposedly increased self-awareness, will find humans too violent and too disposed to developing computer viruses.

            There are two topics I want to discuss with regard to the singularity: the alternate future described by Del Monte, and a reiteration of why machines can never truly replace humans.  With regard to Del Monte’s vision, I would like to first start by reviewing some of my ideas regarding human change during the years of the modern technological revolution.  One of my major themes has been that humans have not been able to evolve as fast as their machines, and this has resulted in a situation where the human nervous system is not able to comfortably absorb the configurations of stimuli created by modern technological living environments.  People today are understimulated by the frictionless vacuum environments created, environments like high rise apartments that are lifted above the movement of life on earth, frictionless transit within cars on smooth streets, and isolated suburban homes.  People are overstimulated by static-filled tension-pocket environments like noisy crowded downtowns, all kinds of noisy speeding vehicles, the noise and dust of building and highway construction, air pollution, and soil pollution.  People today are never able to feel fully grounded in their living environment as a result of sensory distortion.  They experience sensory distortion as something that is damaging to their psychological health.

            People try to deal with this sensory distortion through two distinct postures.  One of them is conative acceleration where a person speeds up his life in order to create his own manageable static-filled, tension-pocket, friction-filled life experiences that can block out the sensory distortion of technology-based activities in the field of experience that surrounds him.  Blocking overstimulation or understimulation in the external sensory world with one’s own internal overstimulation.  The other posture is conative anesthesia, where a person slows down his life activity and withdraws from the external sensory world into a state of understimulation.  A lot of this posture is handled through activities like yoga and meditation and through drugs.  It can also be handled by falling into depression.  Conative anesthesia blocks sensory distortion by basically causing a person to numb himself.

            But still another posture to take in order to deal with sensory distortion would be to become part-machine, to become a cyborg.  A machine is built to be only receptive to defined discrete stimuli and does not suffer as a result of a lack of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli, the kind of stimuli that give a person the experience of grounding.  The latter kind of stimuli are only important for the life of an organism.  A machine does not consider a configuration of stimuli that is unusually high in defined discrete stimuli to be an experiential imbalance.

            So becoming part-machine means minimizing the sensory distortion that tends to make a person feel uncomfortable.  But as a side-effect, it also tends to lead to the fragmenting of the human sense of self.  The cyborg is composed of two very different components that do not really merge together.  The machine part of the cyborg is not susceptible to the organic perishability to which the animal part is susceptible.  So the cyborg can never really experience himself as a cohesive whole.  On the other hand, becoming a cyborg does mean that a person is making a serious attempt to reach a real immortality by becoming in effect a machine whose defective parts can always be replaced.

            But what would happen if a person eventually trying to replace his whole body, maybe including his brain, with machine parts?  To the extent that he no longer has any of the physical presence to which his sense of self had been previously attached, is there any way that we can say this person is still a human?  Even if the person was somehow able to transfer the content of his animal brain to his machine brain, can one also transfer the content of the human mind (assuming we continue to think in terms of the mind/body dichotomy)?

            Returning now to Del Monte’s vision of the future, perhaps, unlike what Del Monte proposes, humans will become so much like machines, that they will no longer represent a threat to them.  Humans will approach the machine essence by becoming increasingly machine-like cyborgs, and machines, particularly as robots, will approach the human essence by becoming increasingly human-like androids.  The increasingly complex interaction between humans and machines will lead to more and more mirroring and modeling among themselves, until they resemble one another to a great extent.

            To me, this is an even more frightening scenario than having machines neatly displacing humans.  At least, in the latter case, humans are still to some extent conscious of their nature as organisms and are capable of fighting back against a machine takeover.  However, if humans become increasingly immersed in their cyborg evolution, then they are giving up their human essence from within.  Then there is little left to save of their humanity, little left to fight for.

            It is important to remember that all the increasing complexity of machines can only imitate but never re-create the basic core of human nature.  Even androids will always be machines undergoing certain discrete defined mechanical processes that are triggered by discrete defined stimuli.  No matter how independent certain robotic machines may appear, they are not stimulated by the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the foundation of being alive as an organism.  And these robotic machines are never stimulated to develop a cohesive organic sense of self capable of making, preserving and receiving organic imprints.  It is not necessary for these machines to create organic imprints as vehicles for surrogate immortalities.  And by continually replacing worn-out parts – both machine and animal – people who become cyborgs don’t need to think in terms of surrogate immortalities.

            Without a cohesive sense of self, machines can never develop the conscious awareness capable of sensing organic imprints in such a way that the imprints are converted into rich vibrant life experiences.  No matter how complex they get, the main focus of machines is going to be functionality, getting from point a to point b, rather than simply feeling alive.

            Machines are, of course, capable of understanding code connections (a representing b, etc.).  But they are not capable of more ambiguous symbolic connections, the connections between phenomena based on blurry flowing blendable continual overlapping resemblances. These connections provide deep resonating meaning and a deep mental grounding for people and their cohesive senses of self.  These symbolic connections provide the foundation for emotional bonding based on overlapping resemblances and deep connective meaning, with other people, with other organisms, with the world and with the cosmos.  They are the foundation for all kinds and all levels of creativity.  Without symbolic connections, life activity is simply going through the motions, which is basically what even the most complex machines do.

            These are thoughts to keep in mind when we are tempted by what seems to be immortality, as we very gradually move towards becoming cyborgs.  Again, I feel that the real danger to humanity may not be robots turning on human beings, but human beings turning against their own human nature.  We have to constantly remind ourselves that there are values in being organically human, a state of being that no machine, however sophisticated it may be, can ever replicate.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Creating A World Out Of Thin Air

            There’s no longer a need to touch many things these days.  With the Internet of Things, many daily processes in our lives are activated by remote control.  Some processes are activated by a timer.  Other processes like the lights, water faucets and toilets in many public washrooms are activated by our proximity to sensors.  Yet, in spite of the fact that so much goes on around us these days without our tactile participation, it is reassuring to know that some things in our everyday lives still require contact from our fingers.  For example, touch screens in our cell phones.  Touch screens are not organic surfaces and do not allow for physically making and receiving organic imprints.  But at least there is some touch involved, an experiential reminder that we still live in a physical world.  At least there are some physical anchors we can count on to cling to as floating figures in the experiential vacuum of modern technological society.  Right?

            Wrong.  Yasuaki Monnai, the head of a research group at the University of Tokyo has created a touch screen that one doesn’t actually touch.  It is a holographic touch screen.  Now actually this has been done before.  Others had been able to project a holographic touch screen onto any surface.  What makes Monnai’s invention so different is that, through the creation of ultrasonic vibrations, one can actually feel the touch screen.  In effect, one is given the tactile illusion that one is actually using a material touch screen.  This definitely makes the holographic touch screen more user-friendly.

            But what benefits, according to Monnai, can accrue from using a holographic touch screen in the first place?  One advantage is that it can be used even when a person’s hands are wet or greasy.  Furthermore, the user does not have to worry about coming into contact with germs.

            Now I have never seen anyone who had an urgent need to use his smartphone whose hands were wet and/or greasy.  If you get a call and your hands are wet or greasy, you can dry your hands or wash your hands and call the person right back.  As to germs, are we all going to end up living in a perfectly antiseptic world?  What Monnai seems to be implying is that the only surface that we can touch without getting infected is air.

            This Haptic holographic display, as it is called, is simply creating one more layer of vacuumization for modern human life.  Imagine if we found a way of transforming all the phenomena with which humans have to deal, so that they would exist just in thin air without any substance, without any material essence.  We would never again have to worry about what was on our hands.  We would never again have to worry about contagion from germs through touch.  And at the same time, through Monnai’s invention, we could create the sensation of touching, while we were making contact with thin air.  Would this constitute actually being alive in the external world?  Although we would experience the sensation of touching, it wouldn’t really be touching some phenomenon with mass and matter.  We wouldn’t be making, preserving or receiving organic imprints on the experiential surfaces that we were supposedly touching.  And sustained contact with air surfaces could lead us to becoming overstimulated by physical contact with material surfaces.  It could, by extension, contribute to overstimulation with regard to real social connections with the material entities  that we call other people.  We would be living in our own very private sensory bubble, our own very private world.

            So the question arises as to whether it is really necessary to create and deal with these interactive holograms.  For those who would make them a part of everyday life, there is a deeper reason for using them than concerns about wet hands, greasy hands or germs.  Interactive holograms allow humans one more degree of separation from and transcendence above the perishability of more natural material living environments.  The more we become separated by technology from the organic perishability of more natural material living environments, the more we become afraid of and intolerant of what little organic perishability remains in our modern technological living environments and of the organic perishability within ourselves.  And the more we feel a need to separate ourselves from these small remnants of natural material living environments and from our own organic selves.

            Of course, it is one thing to separate from the organic stimuli of nature through surrounding oneself with the modern technological environments we have had up until now.  Yes, we have had an experiential vacuum as the base of our typical field of experience in modern technological society, but we have also had clusters of free-floating material figures.  In the material world, this means solid substantive figures, phenomena which we can actually touch without having to artificially supply the sensation of touch.  What if we decide that to avoid catching illnesses through germs, we would be better off turning more and more of the phenomena with which we interact into holograms, into vacuumized figures, and then find a way of artificially supplying the sense of touch to our contact with these other holographic phenomena.  In such a field of experience, we would be making only the most tenuous contact with the external world.  To the extent that we were only artificially supplied with the experiences of sensation, we would really mostly be living from inside of ourselves.  Our inner world and our outer world would blur together, and after a while, we could never be sure if we were dreaming what we were living.  Life would become a living death which we could never escape.  In such a purified holographic world, where all the figure phenomena with which we came into contact would lack solidity and substance, not only would we have decreasing opportunities for making, preserving and receiving organic imprints, for having rich vibrant life experiences and for preparing for death with a surrogate immortality, but gradually we would lose our full human consciousness which gives us our awareness of the potential richness of life and our awareness of our mortality.  In a perpetual dream mentality, there are no firm boundaries of life.  It is a flowing mental grounding that doesn’t correspond to the realities of our finite limitations in the external world.  It doesn’t stimulate us to participate in those experiences and those events that act as highlights of a meaningful purposeful life.

            Yes, the need for a holographic touch screen represents something deeper than simply concerns about the condition of one’s hands or one’s hygiene.  Creating a purified vacuum state of experience puts us in an experiential state with no boundaries, an experiential state without beginning or end.  It is an experiential state that seduces us into thinking we are living free of organic perishability, free from rot, decay and death, in a state of immortality.  Except that like the hologram, it is a kind of illusion.  We may not be directly experiencing organic perishability around us, but it is still going on inside of us.  We are still organisms that are going to perish one day.  But by deluding ourselves into thinking we are living in a kind of eternity in a world filled with interactive holograms, we will not be motivated to create a surrogate immortality of preserved organic imprints that can help us to prepare for death in a more realistic way.

            Interactive holograms will only prevent humans from properly confronting their finite existential realities in life.  They will prevent people from having a rich vibrant life filled with organic imprints and a death that has been prepared for with preserved organic imprints.  Interactive holograms are a potentially dangerous aspect of the new technological realities of our time.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Take A Robot To Lunch This Week

            In today’s world, robots are being inserted in more and more different human activities.  They have been programmed to do many distinct kinds of work in factories and warehouses.  Robots perform surgeries and handle radioactive wastes.  Although sometimes robots do work that is difficult or impossible for humans to do, in many cases, robots replace humans in jobs that the latter need in order to survive.  However, the result of being put out of work is not only the loss of economic support for the worker.  The unemployed person goes into an experiential vacuum as a result of lack of interaction with a workplace and with other workers.  And in today’s world, a person who loses his job, frequently has an extended period of time being unemployed, of time being in an experiential vacuum.

            But robots are also being programmed to create positive experiences for humans.  Robots are going to increasingly become companions to humans in all kinds of situations.  A relatively popular form of robotic companion is the robotic pet.  These pets supposedly give you all the advantages of real pets without the annoyance of having to actually take care of them.  No need to feed them, take them for a walk, replace kitty litter, take them to the groomer or take them to the veterinarian.  These machines can walk around, respond to commands, and learn enough from their masters that they can develop an identity.

            Then there are robots that focus on interacting with children.  Some of these robots serve the purpose of pleasure for children through playing games and dancing.  Others that are being developed involve more serious functions – teaching children how to read as well as acting as a trainer for physical exercise.  Supposedly some of these robots will be able to help children with cognitive disabilities.

            There are robots being developed just to be human-like companions.  They can “read” speech inflection, facial expression and body gestures and can somehow provide affection for people who are lonely.

            One particular kind of isolation or loneliness that a person can experience is that related to sexual intimacy.  There are anatomically correct female robots.  I have not yet heard of any anatomically correct male robots on the market.

            There are robots that specialize in taking care of the elderly.  These robots perform tasks as diverse as laundry, cleaning and reminding elderly people to take their medicine at appropriate times.  This includes actually handing the medicine to the person.  Other possible tasks include serving the elderly beverages, assessing their general state of health and being able to contact emergency personnel, should a health crisis arise.  These robots also “socialize” with the elderly, so they won’t feel so lonely.

            There are even plans to include certain robots on long distance flights to other planets, to moons and to asteroids.  Supposedly, the robots can help space travelers to feel less lonely.

            We can see that robots can be built to satisfy a lot of different companionship needs.  The question is what is it that causes some people to enjoy relating to robots similar to the way they relate to humans and pets?

            One obvious reason relates to the whole issue of taking care of another organism.  In today’s modern technological world, which lacks a lot of organic grounding and is filled with sensory distortion, individual humans have to spend a lot of time and energy just taking care of themselves psychologically.  Most parents today lack the patience to spend long hours interacting with their children, playing with them and teaching them new things.  Without much organic grounding in the modern technological living environment, there is no template for creating the deep-bonded relationships that lead to sustained nurturance and care.  It used to be that children in modern society were placed down in front of the television to avoid allowing them to bother their parents or caregivers too much.  Then along came the video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets, and these became even more impelling ways to capture children’s attentions and occupy their minds.  It is now a logical progression to move from these forms of consumer technology to robots.  And robots can become involved not only in terms of playing with children, but also educating them and even giving them a kind of nurturance.

            This sloughing off of care responsibilities also explains the development of robots for taking care of the elderly.  As people live longer and sink into chronic health conditions that require ongoing care, there is seldom a strong large family unit available to divide up the tasks of care.  In small nuclear families, overwhelmed children of elderly parents will grab at robots to care for their parents.  Particularly because the children, with all of their own narcissistic needs, feel resentful having to spend so much time away from just being themselves.

            Robots are basically a perfect vehicle for deflecting any meaningful confrontation with the nurturance gap that is growing in modern technological society.  Robots are machines that, however complicated they may be, are not going to be able to provide organic nurturance to modern humans who, because of their lack of organic grounding, are incapable of really dealing with this most fundamental mammalian need.  The creators of these robots will say that the robots are not meant to replace human caretakers, but rather to complement them.  However, the borders for what is the appropriate use of such robots are rather blurry, and for busy adults with full professional and social lives, the temptation to slide into using caretaking robots in more and more situations is very great.  For the dependent children, it means less time spent in the presence of the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli from other humans and more time with the digital defined discrete stimuli from what are basically machines.  Do we really want our children to be molded into robots?  For elderly people, it means being in encounters with entities with bland behavior, robots that provide no meaningful organic friction, no meaningful interactions as those that would come from an organism that is truly distinct from oneself.  Is a relationship with a robot truly a living relationship?  The kind of relationship that would pull an elderly person out of passivity, out of depression, out of himself?

            Another reason that people are drawn to the use of robot companions is to overcome a basic sense of loneliness.  More and more people in modern technological society live alone.  This column has discussed that it is much more difficult to form or maintain deep-bonded relationships with other people in a living environment that does not provide a template for such a relationship.  Modern technological societies do not have the organic grounding to provide such a template.  In addition, as people interact more and more with complex behavioral entities like video games, computers, smartphones and tablets, it becomes more and more difficult to directly experience affection and love, to experience flowing blendable continual emotional stimuli and to exchange organic imprints with other people.

            Robots provide the opportunity for creating a kind of emotional connection, at least a connection flowing from the human to the robot.  Whether the robot is to provide general companionship or sexual intimacy, the human has at his disposal a complex behavioral entity that supposedly can pull him out of himself and give him the impression that he is not alone.  Because a robot is initially somewhat of a blank slate and has to be programmed, it can eventually be trained to have a kind of a personality that is similar to or that complements its owner.  In effect, the robot is an extension of its owner.  And to the extent that the robot is part of the owner, the owner never really does get pulled out of himself.  He is not drawn into the external world.  It is like the person is living in a dream rather than in real life.  In such a situation, a person is expending a lot of energy and not making, preserving or receiving organic imprints, not having rich vibrant life experiences, and not preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.  Interacting with a robot lacks the kind of organic friction that leads to organic imprints and rich vibrant life experiences.

            Is a robot truly the kind of companion a person would want on a long space flight, let’s say to Mars?  Can a robot ever be a substitute for another human or for a pet?  Only if the human has become primed for the encounter by becoming somewhat robotic himself.  A robot is never going to be a replacement for an animal when it comes to humans who still have a significant organic grounding in themselves.  For such people, robots are never going to be a true substitute for real humans or pets.  And that is a good thing for the human race.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

What We Are Losing By Becoming Robots

            One of the central points that has been made in this column is that humans cannot biologically evolve as fast as technology can change.  In particular, the human nervous system cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with the changes in the configurations of stimuli created in the human field of experience by technology.  Modern technological environments tend to eliminate the organic stimuli found in nature – the flowing blendable continual stimuli that come from natural phenomena, the kind of stimuli that are relatively easier for humans to absorb.  Instead, a typical modern human alternates between experiencing, on the one hand, the overstimulation of abrasive bundles of defined discrete stimuli – tension pockets created directly and indirectly by many modern machines and their waste products –and, on the other hand, the understimulation that comes from experiencing the vacuum spaces filled with infinite continuous emptiness stimuli, the spaces that humans use to rise above the organic perishability found in natural environments.

            This being said, it does not mean that humans aren’t evolving at all, as a result of their interface with modern technology.  However, many of the changes are behavioral rather than physical.  It has been discussed many times in this column how complex modern machines have acted both as mirrors and models, particularly for young people.  And people are becoming gradually more robotic as a result.  What hasn’t been discussed is what humans are losing as a result of becoming more robotic.

            A very useful concept for discussing what has been lost is the notion of vestigial structures and functions.  I became very interested in this notion after reading J. Howard Moore’s book Savage Survivals.  Some of his ideas I find very intriguing; others I don’t agree with.  It seems that during evolution, some parts of the bodies of organisms evolve, while others go into disuse and then either degenerate or remain underdeveloped.  Examples of parts of humans in disuse are the appendix, the ear muscles, the tail and tail muscles, wisdom teeth, and the hairy covering of human bodies.  All of these were body parts that had a very important function at some stage of human development.  Now they don’t, but they continue to exist in a diminished form anyway.

            Humans also have behaviors that are vestigial.  An example of involuntary vestigial behavior is when people get goose bumps when they are cold or afraid.  This form of behavior goes back to when human ancestors were covered with fur.  Ruffling out the fur could keep one of our ancestors warm.  It was also the way a mammal could make himself look bigger than he actually was in order to frighten away an enemy.  Porcupines ruffle out their spines to scare away potential predators. 

            Then there are forms of more voluntary vestigial behavior. Hunting has become a vestigial behavior in modern technological society.  It is done only by a certain group of enthusiasts.  However, I don’t think that one of the behaviors Moore talked about as vestigial is in fact quite as vestigial as he said it was in his book published in 1934.  Fighting is a very common form of behavior today, whether among school kids, martial arts enthusiasts, isolated criminals, urban gangs, soldiers, revolutionaries, or terrorists.  I think that in modern technological society, fighting is, underneath the more surface reasons, a defense against sensory distortion.  It represents an expression of conative acceleration, of the speeding up of the human will, so that a person can create his own world of abrasive tension-pocket stimulation to block out the abrasive tension-pocket stimulation and the vacuum stimulation that surround him.  When he creates his own field of experience through fighting, he gains control over his field of experience.  He is no longer buffeted around by sensory distortion over which he has no control.

            This is distinct from fighting in more traditional natural living environments, where fighting has been used particularly for men as a form of self-differentiation, as a way of developing strong figure boundaries to protect oneself from being swallowed up by the strong enveloping grounding of the organic habitat.  Men fighting men, figures knocking against figures, becomes a way of separating from organic natural fields of experience.  Fighting in more traditional natural environments is an instinctive way not only of defending oneself but of defining oneself.

            Anyway, for many people, certain televised sports such as soccer, American football and hockey do take on the role of vicarious vestigial forms of fighting.  This is a way that modern technology has contributed to making physical fighting a vestigial component of the personal lives of many of us.  Many people from modern technological society with their modern values of cooperation and peace would look on this spectator violence favorably.  Yes, these sports lead to concussions and a lot of other injuries, but that does not directly affect the people watching these sports.  So television viewers can watch violence without getting involved themselves.

            The main counterargument to making physical conflict vicarious and vestigial is that unless this transformation occurs with everybody, the peace loving people leave themselves vulnerable to other people whether bullies, criminals or people in gangs, warlike countries, or terrorist groups.  The peace loving people lose their capacity and their desire to stand up to those people who threaten them.

            There are many people in civilized industrial societies who do not have a visceral feel for how dangerous the threats are from many of the groups in the Middle East.  Unfortunately, trying to reason with members of these groups, trying to negotiate with them, just doesn’t seem to work.  They want victory and not compromise, not peace treaties.

            The vacuumized conflict of sporting matches on television, or even movies and television programs about war, crime and adventure, blurs into real life, so that, on one level, we don’t experience the full sensory impact of real life threats.  Real life threats become vacuumized, become unreal.  While stories on the screen show us the effects of violence, they make us numb to it at the same time.  That is unless or until something might happen to us.

            I have recently been considering that modern technology not only makes human behavior vestigial, but it even makes human emotions vestigial.  Machines are made of defined discrete parts that are frequently screwed into place or fitted into place.  The parts are relatively easily disconnected from one another, easily interchangeable, easily replaced.  We can say that most of the parts are shallow-bonded to one another, and this is what allows mechanics and computer specialists to repair machines.

            To the extent that humans allow modern technology to mirror them and model for them, they pick up the modalities of connectedness that they use with each other from these machines.  Our relationships with each other become more shallow-bonded, more contingent, more transient.  For many of us, deep-bonded connectedness, real intimacy, exists in an undeveloped vestigial state.  This is one explanation for why people live together today rather than get married.  They want a more contingent relationship that allows for an easier escape.  The high divorce rate in most modern technological societies is also one indication that for a lot of people, intimacy exists in a much diminished vestigial form.

            To the extent that we still have some control over the future evolution of our behavior and our emotions, we may ask ourselves if we really want to move in the directions that have been established regarding our behavior and our emotions.  Becoming robotic means not only evolving towards a new way of being, it means diminishing the importance of certain traits that are important as foundations for our traditional concept of what it means to be human.  It means diminishing the mental attitudes that allow us to truly defend ourselves against the people who would hurt us, on the one hand, and to truly bond with the people that we love and care about, on the other.  We, as humans, may have to try and find a way of activating again many of the behaviors and emotions that are becoming vestigial as a result of modern technology.  Becoming robotic means becoming numb in both our positive and negative connections to other people.  It means becoming numb to ourselves.  We maintain these connections to others and to ourselves on a vestigial basis.  For now.  In the future, as is the case with many vestigial organs, even the vestiges may disappear.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

Reading The Mind Of A Robot

            In Mexico, there is a saying which translates into English “Every mind is a world”.  The implication is that every mind is a separate psychological entity that has a coherent self-contained consciousness that can be impacted by other minds but that always remains protected from total penetration and control.  To the extent that machines can be controlled by commands, it is because they have the electrical potential for different activities, but lack a coherent sense of self to direct that potential.  At least up until now.  People are working on creating computers and robots that can approximate as much as possible the cerebral activity of humans.  And through this, there is the hope of somehow creating an equivalent of a mind and a sense of self in robots.

            And while one group of scientists and engineers is trying to create the possibility of robots becoming like humans, another group of scientists and engineers is creating the conditions for humans becoming like robots.  In the case of the latter, I am thinking of the successful experiment that just occurred that allowed for the direct transmission of a message from the brain of someone in India to the brain of someone in France using the Internet as an intermediary.  Brain activity of the person in India was obtained via an electroencephalogram.  This activity was converted into the letters of the two word message using binary code.  Then the message was passed to a computer and then to the Internet where it was transmitted to the person receiving the message in France.  Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to activate a part of the brain of the receiver, letting him know that the message was arriving.

            There is the hope that this technology could be useful to help those who have severe communication difficulties.  Unfortunately, the potential for misusing this form of “communication” once the technology evolves is enormous.  What is important here is the fact that the stimulation used here is the kind of focused defined discrete stimulation that is also used to activate modern machines.  The implications of this are vast.  Eventually we could get to the point where certain people could control other people’s movements and activities through thoughts.  Individual humans would no longer have the effective mental barriers created by protected coherent senses of self.  Gradually trained to respond primarily to these focused defined discrete thought stimuli, humans would lose the capacity to respond to the less focused organic flowing blendable continual stimuli found in nature.  Without the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli, there is no possibility for a person as an individual organic entity to make, preserve or receive organic imprints, to have rich vibrant life experiences as an individual organism, and to calm the anxiety in his coherent consciousness by preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.

            Brain to brain communication can all too easily lead to the abuse of thought control.  The experiment just performed in India and France was still very primitive and very limited in its scope.  But modern technologies have a way of evolving very quickly, and they frequently move into applications for which they were not initially intended.  This technology-based brain-to-brain communication is qualitatively very different from telepathy, one of the major forms, along with clairvoyance, precognition and telekinesis, of so-called extra sensory perception (ESP).  ESP is something that is still being studied, and while many people believe in its existence, many others do not.  While some students of ESP believe that we all have the natural capacity for ESP, in reality, it is only a relatively small number of people who actually profess to have it.  I am not aware of any of these people using their ESP abilities to try and control and manipulate other people on a sustained basis.  On the contrary, particularly with telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition, there is the sense that many of these people do not have control over when they are going to have their supposed ESP experiences.  Instead, these experiences seem to happen at unexpected times.  It is almost like the ESP controls them, rather than vice versa.  Yes, there are clairvoyants who are used to find property or lost people, but most clairvoyants do not seem to have such control over their skills.

            The distinction between technology-based brain-to-brain communication and traditional mental telepathy has to do with the kind of stimuli involved.  In the technology-based brain-to-brain communication, the stimuli for most of the communication journey are digitally-based  defined discrete stimuli.  Because they are defined discrete stimuli, they are easily controllable, and therefore potentially enable the senders of these stimuli to control the people receiving them through the content of the message.  In most cases, the receivers of telepathic messages do not appear to be controlled in any way by the messages they receive.  The receivers are not usually being told to respond in a certain way.  Sometimes the receivers might pick up thoughts from people in danger, which might lead the receivers to try to help the senders, but frequently, such thoughts are translated into physical reactions.  The receiver does not receive a specific message, but instead a global sense of dread or uneasiness or some other vague sensation.  In other words, the message is not a focused, defined, discrete message in such cases.  It is received as organic, flowing, blendable continual stimuli.

            And frequently even the verbal thoughts that are supposedly received through telepathy are not specific, but instead ambiguous.  Such thoughts when received are a mixture of defined discrete stimuli from the verbiage and flowing blendable continual stimuli from the ambiguity of the thoughts being conveyed.  So telepathy functions very differently from the brain-to-brain communication under consideration here.  It does not lend itself to the kind of control of one person by another, because basically it is such an uncontrollable mental function.  It does not tend to be discrete and focused.  It tends to be flowing and blurry.  It cannot be used to enslave people the way that modern computer-based brain-to-brain communication could very possibly be used in the future.

            The question presents itself as to why people felt a need to develop a technology like this?  Was it simply to help certain people with communication disorders, people who are unable to speak?  I tend to think that there is a much deeper reason involved, a reason connected to one of the major reasons that people have felt a need to develop the whole modern technological infrastructure.  Developing a technology that potentially allows a person to control another person by potentially turning him into a puppet or a robot puts the controller into the role of God.  Being omnipotent is one of the traits we ascribe to our monotheistic God in the Western tradition.  Having potentially endless control over another person’s mind certainly puts the controller well on the path to a kind of omnipotence at least over people.  It certainly gives the brain-to-brain communicators a more effective temporary experience of feeling immortal than would be gotten by traditional pathways  of creating a surrogate immortality like having a baby, planting a tree, writing a book, breaking a sports record, painting a picture, building a business, or leaving a fond memory.  Playing God through brain-to-brain communication and potential thought control allows a person to temporarily deny the existence of death.

            The problem is that while one person is playing God, another person, in losing his free will, loses his capacity to live a rich vibrant independent life and to leave his own individual surrogate immortality and thus to prepare for death.  In truth, thought control over a person causes the person to lose his individual coherent sense of self, the very essence of his humanity.  This is why the experiment that just occurred in India and France should be the cause of great concern for anyone who is interested in maintaining the freedom and the dignity of the human race.

 

© 2014 Laurence Mesirow