Viewed by many as “The Margaret Mead of digital culture”, Sherry Turkle stands at the forefront of the intersection of digital technology and human relationships. With more than 30 years of empirical evidence regarding human relations with machines, Turkle’s works provide unparalleled insight into the evolution of our relationships with these robots. Yet Turkle doesn’t simply analyze, but rather warns us of the coming danger of a society driven by technological gains. Her transition to a more vocal and opinionated stand is revealed in her work, and show the development of Turkle as a writer and especially as an activist.
A clear example of this is Turkle’s most recent essay, “There will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy”. Turkle initially describes her conversation with a “16-year old girl who was the considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future”. Rather than explaining why she wanted the companion, the girl instead described her disappointment with people. Almost in a melancholy manner, the girl claims how some people (perhaps including herself) have tried to make friends “but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up”. A robot could help people who suffer from social anxieties overcome their fears as they act as “empathy machines”, reinstalling a sense of intimacy among their users. Yet these robots cannot experience this intimacy and can only perform empathy in a conversation as “they feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe”. They act as an emotional void, absorbing all attempts of an “emotional tie” and leaving nothing in their wake.
A similar phenomena exists regarding our digital devices which Turkle explains in “Stop Googling, Let’s Talk”. Rather than criticizing the use of texting itself, Turkle shows that problem lies in the extent that texting dominates our conversations. Conversations are kept “relatively light”, ensuring that people can “drop in and out” to be “always available elsewhere”. Turkle explains that this repetitive small talk causes us to feel less invested in the other person and intuitively you would expect there to be less empathy. This was what precisely happened, with a study by the University of Michigan finding “a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000” which was unsurprisingly the beginning of the advent of smartphones. Yet what’s resulted from this drop, is it simply another insignificant statistic?
In reality, the greatest impact is illustrated by our youth, with children being unable to “put themselves in the place of other children”. Turkle explains that only through these empathetic conversations do we learn how to judge another person’s emotional mood and “to comfort one another and challenge one another”. Without, we adopt “an algorithmic way of looking at life” and “friendships become things to manage”, akin to viewing the world “as one giant app”. Moreso, the most “crucial conversations you will ever have are those with yourself” as self-reflection is essential to “reclaiming solitude”. By being In solitude we learn to “concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves”and establish a “sacred space” solely for our self-reflection. Only by being “secure in ourselves” are we able to “really hear what other people have to say” which not only improves our ability at inner dialogue but also dialogue that we share with others. Turkle reminds us that we “are creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships” and by neglecting empathetic conversation we abandon one of the most “humanizing things” that humans can do.
By allowing ourselves to fall into an electronically mediated life, we begin to intertwine illusion and truth. People no longer care about real experiences, and are fine with settling for digital representations. Yet they could never be farther apart. Listening to an MP3 recording is not a live orchestra performance. A snapchat of a famous painting is different from witnessing it in person. People love digital representations due to their convenience yet when these representations begin to replace the actual concept we lose sight of what define as real or authentic. Perhaps the notion of authenticity itself has begun to change.
Turtles investigates this complication in her essay “Authenticity in the Age of Digital Partners”. With the emergence of “relational artifacts, a computational object explicitly designed to engage a user in a relationship”, Turkle shows that the traditional notion of “relational authenticity” has begun to evolve to accommodate these relational artifacts. These artifacts “have no greater understanding of the situation of the situation of the human being in the relationship” and are simply designed to push our “Darwinian buttons”, basically our emotional sensors that identify “sentient creatures that care about their presence”. Modern versions of relation artifacts have been programmed to specifically trigger these sensors through behaviors that include “making eye contact, tracking an individual’s movement in a room, and gesturing benignly in acknowledgement of human presence”. Through this identification, we develop a “fantasy of reciprocation”, wanting these “objects to care about them” and more easily portraying them as “nascent minds”.
Despite this lack of “mutual relating”, Turkle shows that notions of authenticity have begun to focus more on the emotions these machines “evoke in us” rather than the importance of each entity understanding the conversation. AI robots such as Paro, known as a “therapeutic robot” for its apparently positive effects on the elderly, are being “aggresively marketed” in Japan and are “poised for introduction for introduction in American settings”. Robots such as Paro are “sensitive to touch, can make eye contact by sensing the direction of a voice, and has states of “mind” that are affected by how it is treated”. Turkle mentions a conversation with an elderly she refers to as “Ruth” who is depressed about her son’s abandonment. To deal with the loneliness, Ruth comforts her Paro, often stroking it which in turn provides her a therapeutic form of comfort”. Examples such as these allow families to feel morally better about leaving their elderly rather than have them “stare at a wall or television set”. Yet, despite this “illusion of understanding” being therapeutic, can we really view it as an authentic conversation? Despite robots lacking an “inner life and inner sense of purpose”, can we consider these relations to go beyond “the simulation of understanding”?
In “ Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”, Turkle alludes to the Turing test, which was “widely accepted as a model for thinking about the line between machines and people.” The Turing test basically sets up an “Imitation game”, in which a person “poses questions through a computer terminal” to a machine. The Turing test sets up a “curious criterion”: if the “computer program fools most ordinary people, then it is a real artificial intelligence”. Yet Turkle quotes philosopher John Searle to disprove this statement. Searle basically describes an experiment where he is “locked in a room with stacks and stacks of index cards containing instructions written in English”. He is then “handed a story in Chinese” and through a slot in the wall “is passed of slips contains questions about the story”. Searle basically concludes that he could simply use a process of deduction by following the instructions to answer the questions in Chinese without knowing any Chinese at all. Searle’s sets up this convoluted manipulation to basically ask the question: “Does the fact that he sends out the correct answers to the questions prove that he understands Chinese?” In the sense that people us this term, no he doesn’t. Computers and robots use an identical system, utilizing a parameter of rules and logic to accomplished a specific task or programmed goal. Turkle shows that there is only an illusion of understanding, and perhaps an illusion of life.
In regards to this illusion, or rather the “aliveness” of an object, Turkle conveys that without “an arc of a human life”, artificial intelligence will never overcome this illusion. Turkle explains that science has seemingly become preoccupied with the idea of “evolving toward our maximum potential”, to become “superior cognitive beings”. We fear death and crave “immortality”. We fear loneliness and desire accompaniment. Thus, science has produced “artificial intimacy” in robots to foreshadow the possibilities of the future in which we can overcome these fears. Yet our very fears of “death, loneliness, illness, and pain” are integral to our being as humans. Turkle claims that “being human today is about the struggle to remain genuinely empathetic ourselves”, and artificial intimacy lacks this empathy. In our attempts to “psychologize” the machine, we’ve overlooked their inner workings and autonomy. Yet as machines have increasingly “performed roles previously reserved for people”, the differences are becoming harder to discern. Akin to the protaganist of the film “Bladerunner”, Deckard, we have approached a turning point in viewing machines. We no longer ask if machines are “a benefit or a hazard”, bur rather “what rules of conduct to follow with them”. Though the extent of our dilemma has not approached that of Deckard’s, Turkle shows the time is not too far away either.
Yet is the human reliance on technology, regarding both digital devices and artificial intelligence, necessarily an ailment that need to be cured? Turkle portrays our use of digital technology as a poison while admonishing the possibility of sentience in artificial intelligence. But where does the antidote for this poison exist? Rafael Behr from the Observer comments on Turkle’s negative connotation regarding technology. He describes Turkle as a psychoanalyst, and thus it is “her instinct to describe unfamiliar social habits as pathologies”. Turkle focuses on the more neurotic cases and tends to “gloss over happier experiences of technology”. Her focus on psychology also excludes the much vaster social and economic forces that drive this technological advancement. Perhaps even before the development of these technologies, “Western civilization was probably on a trajectory of atomization, loneliness, and narcissism”. Yet this doesn’t invalidate her statement, and we can consider technological development as a catalyst that sped up America’s societal down spiral. Ultimately, the advent of artificial intelligence and the pressures of digital media on human conversation is a threshold in our morals and ethics. It’s up to us whether we put our faith in technology as the possible antidote to human fragility. Yet it is this acceptance of fragility that makes up human.