Blurring the Boundaries Between Human and Machine
It’s difficult to know whether technology is advancing our humanity, blurring it or tearing us from it. Or maybe it’s all three at once. Andy Clark, a professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote in The Times that we have reached “a moment to be savored, even as we sound new notes of care and caution about the speed, nature and range of these changes.”
Those changes, he said, include artificial intelligence that outperforms humans, devices that help overcome injuries, and robots that provide companionship and sex.
“All this blurs the boundaries between body and machine,” he wrote, “between mind and world, between standard, augmented and virtual realities, and between human and post-human.” To inhabit this new world, he added, is to live in one “marked more by possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability than by outdated images of fixed natures and capacities.”
However, that technology is forcing us to examine our human values, Sherry Turkle wrote in The Times. She is skeptical of A.I. — not artificial intelligence but rather artificial intimacy. She said that there are consequences to teaching people to interact emotionally with machines that cannot authentically reciprocate.
“These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships,” wrote Ms. Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them.”
As machines are programmed to appear more empathetic, she said, children will lose their ability to empathize if they interact with them too often because they are an “empathic dead end.”
“We diminish as the seeming empathy of the machine increases,” she wrote. “It is technology forcing us to forget what we know about life.” Being human today, she added, “is about the struggle to remain genuinely empathic ourselves.”
That’s a struggle worth having, according to Dan Ariely, an author and professor of psychology at Duke University in North Carolina. Empathy is one of our defining traits. But there’s a dark side to it, too.
“Because our ability to care shows up when we are exposed to suffering, and because we have an instinct to try and avoid pain,” Mr. Ariely wrote in The Times, “we are often tempted to evade the very thing that makes us human: caring.”
Abandoning empathy to avoid agony is a common enough reaction that some people seek it from nonhumans, a clear contradiction. Ms. Turkle told the story of a 16-year- old girl who found other people to be so disappointing that she thought a robot might be a better alternative.
“There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up,” she said the girl told her. “So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that.”
The girl’s story speaks to the consequence of forsaking empathy, which Mr. Ariely calls our “amazing superpower.”
“Which version of humanity will we, individually and collectively, choose?” he wrote. “Will we open our eyes to the pain of others, and with it feel the need to do something to help? Or will we just get better at looking away?”