One
of the cores ideas consistently discussed in this column has been
mirroring. A baby reaches out to his
mother to satisfy his needs and his mother’s response to him is based on how
she perceives him and what she feels for him.
The baby picks up on his mother’s attitudes as the mother mirror’s her
child by the nature of her response to him.
Primarily positive mirroring leads to the baby’s development of a
positive attitude towards himself. Primarily
negative mirroring leads to a negative attitude towards himself. Such mirroring actually occurs, on some
level, throughout a person’s youth and even later on, not only with parents but
with other authority figures and even contemporaries, and has an enormous
influence on how he evolves.
In my
own ruminations, I have concluded that a kind of mirroring occurs with the
interaction between humans and another class of complex behavioral entity:
namely modern complex machines. Modern
machines don’t have a coherent sense of self or a coherent consciousness, but
they do have complex defined discrete responses to human attempts to control
them and operate them. To the extent
that machines operate primarily with defined discrete processes, they operate
best with instigation from defined discrete actions on the part of humans. To the extent that humans get sloppy with
their actions and start interacting with machines through more flowing,
blendable continual behavior, through accidentally hitting the wrong keys on a
computer or pressing the wrong buttons or hitting things too hard or for too
long, they get poor responses from the machines. This then reflects fully on the humans’
capacity to properly control and operate the machines and, by extension, on the
humans’ effectiveness and potency in the
modern world. Machines are not built to
respond properly with the imprecision evinced in improperly targeted or managed
flowing blendable continual actions on the part of humans. To get optimum responses from a machine,
humans receive the implicit mirroring that comes from poor performances as a
result of sloppy operating of the machine and then start molding themselves
after the machine in order to demonstrate the behavior that gets the machine to
operate properly.
It is
this combination of mirroring and modeling involving modern machines that is
leading to the gradual robotizing of humans in modern technological
society. But now comes voice control as
the vehicle by which more and more modern machines will be controlled and
operated. Talking to modern machines
could become as commonplace as talking to other humans and to domesticated
animals. Talking to machines to do
things will replace using touch to manoeuver machines in order to complete our
tasks.
One
more category of nuisance taken away from the human condition. Right?
Voice control is one more step in the modern journey to remove friction
from our lives. Get rid of friction and
you can get rid of stress. Get rid of
stress and you can be a happy person. At
least, one can say, that this is what is implied in our modern philosophy of
life.
But
actually people need a certain amount of friction in the real world in order to
feel fully alive. Get rid of too much
organic friction, and a person sinks into a sensory vacuum, an experiential
void. Because touch involves direct
sensory rubbing or grating with tactile phenomena in the external world, there
is a lot more immediate organic friction involved in doing things with one’s
hands than with one’s voice. Speech is a
much more mediated interaction with phenomena in the external world than manual
manipulation. Speech was not created for
direct manipulation of the external world, but rather for communication with
other humans and with domesticated animals.
One might say that speech traditionally has acted sometimes as a
complement to manual manipulation as when riders of animals like horses or of
chariots, carriages or stagecoaches driven by animals have talked to their
animals in conjunction with their actions to either spur them on or to make
them stop. Speech has also been used by
slaveholders to order around their slaves, by generals to order around their
soldiers, and by bosses to order around their workers. But this is not the same as what is happening
today where speech is replacing manual manipulation not only for control of
other organisms, but for all sorts of direct control of different tasks in the
external world.
So
what will a transition from manual manipulation to voice control do to how
people experience not only the technology and other physical phenomena in their
world but also themselves?
The
use of voice control means that the form of sensory engagement that was once
used for communicating with humans and animals in order to fine-tune
relationships or to coordinate group projects that involved some manual
manipulation is now being used for the direct manipulation by individual people
of the things around them. But because
of the sophistication of many of these things, namely complex machines like
computers, smartphones and robots, some of the vocal engagements with these
complex things involve interactions that approximate dialogues with
humans. Obviously, the technology is
still evolving and efforts are being made to increase both voice recognition
and vocabulary on the part of these machines.
To the extent that these dialogues between humans and machines start to
increase, the line that separates other humans from machines in the mind of a
communicating human begins to blur.
Machines are increasingly being endowed with many of the qualities of
humans (and humans are being endowed with many of the qualities of
machines). We increasingly are acting
with machines as if they had a coherent sense of self and a coherent consciousness.
And
to the extent that we implicitly endow machines with human attributes because
of their response to human vocalizing or their capacity to vocalize themselves,
we become susceptible to mirroring from the machine (the way the machine
appears to respond to our strengths and limitations) as well as modeling on our
part with respect to an implicitly idealized crisp well-defined discrete relatively
smooth frictionless performance on the part of the machine. When we vocalize to a machine, we are treating
it like a human being.
By
the same token, we start to view people from the perspective of their
functional instrumental machine-like qualities.
How good are they at performing the narrow functional tasks that are
required of them? Just pay people for
their services at a given time and don’t worry about their needs as whole human
beings. In the modern U.S., companies
try to get workers on a part-time basis, as independent contractors for
particular jobs or projects in order to avoid having to pay for benefits like
health care, time off for child birth and pensions. During those times when a worker is not
actually functioning for his company or companies, he is on his own. For young men and increasingly young women,
there is a growing tendency to focus on sexual performance in their partners
and to be less interested in emotional bonds that can create grounded
relationships. As a matter of fact,
increasingly all relationships become contingent on performance rather than
providing the foundation for a more unconditional connection.
These
are some of the developing deleterious effects that are at least partly due to
relating to modern complex machines through voice as if the machines were
human. I have talked about the blurring
of the lines between humans and machines as manifested in androids and
cyborgs. But voice control represents a
more subtle functional blurring of lines between humans and machines. It is nevertheless a blurring that is every
bit as pernicious and one that threatens the very essence of our human
identity.
(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment