TED – Sherry Turkle – Connected, but alone?

• Use what we learn in virtual world to live better lives in the real world
• We’re letting technology take us to places that we don’t want to go
• Studied mobile technologies for over 20 years
• Mobile technology doesn’t only change what we do, but who we are
• Texting, emailing at breakfast, whilst their children complain
• Texting at funerals
• Escaping from grief through technology
• Trouble in how we relate to each other, but also how we relate to ourselves
• Capacity for self-reflection
• People want to be together, but elsewhere
• Customise their lives
• Can end up hiding from each other, even though we seem to be connected more than ever
• The goldilocks effect. Not too close, not too far, just right. Technology keeps people at a distance.
• “Someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation”
• Edit, delete, portray the ‘self’ that we want to be.
• Self-reflection is the bed-rock of development for children/young people
• No one is listening.
• People experience pretend empathy as if it were the real thing.
• We expect more from technology and less from each other.
• Technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.
• We’re lonely, but afraid of intimacy.
• Designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.
• ‘We will never have to be alone’
• Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.
• Changing the way we think of ourselves, a new way of being.
• “I share, therefore I am”
• “I have a feeling, I want to make a call”
• “I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text”
• If we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves.
• End up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude.
• Solitude is where you find yourself, so you can reach out to people and form attachments.
• Using other people and things as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.
• If we don’t teach our children to be alone, all they’ll know is being lonely.
• It’s time to talk.
• Plenty of time for us to consider how we use it, how we build it.
• Develop a more self-aware relationship with our technology.
• Create sacred spaces at home and reclaim them for conversation.

TEDxBrussels – Jeremy Howard – The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn

• Self-Driving cars
• Websites that learn about your behaviour as you interact with them such as Amazon that might suggest a book or film, or Facebook which shows relevant advertisements
• Watson beat contestants on a TV show
• Social structures
• Economic structures

• Deep Learning – a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything.
• Learnt to see – recognising traffic signs. Better than people.
• Deep learning is now at near-human performance with understanding what sentences/language means
• Computers can now write for themselves, creating captions for images and such
• What would take a team of people 7 years, now takes one person 15 minutes. The computer is not replacing the human, but they are working together.
• Computer capabilities are increasing exponential, whereas human capabilities are more steady/gradual, we’re almost at the threshold where computing capability exceeds human capability.

• Websites that can find and search for similar images

• Technology can be used in medicine to recognise cancer and make predictions as to survival rates and life expectancy, also helping to find new ways to deal with and treat it 

COP3 Subject Matter

I am going to be looking at how technology is changing our perception and transforming human consciousness. I will be looking at both the positive and negative effects that technology and the internet are having on us as individuals and as a collective. Technology is evolving at a pace that is becoming difficult to keep up with. Every week, if not every day, we are hearing about new inventions, software and apps. These terms are used so frequently that they are now widely recognised and accepted as “normal”.

The sudden, accelerated evolution of technology and the birth of the internet in the 1980’s has vastly altered the way in which we interact with each other on a minute-by-minute basis. We now have limitless amounts of information quite literally at our fingertips, that can be downloaded, uploaded and shared with people on the other side of the world. Within seconds.

How is technology affecting our relationships? Both with ourself, and with others. Are we dependent on technology to find a sense of self? What would we do in a world without it? How far can technology take us? Is technology turning us into a bunch of dribbling idiots?

As fast as technology is evolving, rates of diabetes, cancer and many other diseases are skyrocketing. As soon as we come up with a solution, another five problems present themselves. We expect that technology can solve most if not all of our problems. From getting shopping delivered to our door, to planning a journey across the world, there is almost nothing that we cannot do with it. Do we believe in technology as we would in a ‘God’?

Will technology ever feel, the way we do as human beings? Will it ever understand what a relationship is, or what it means? Robots are now being presented as solutions for looking after the elderly and children. We first saw this in the 90’s with the introduction of Furby’s, Tamagotchi’s and the robot dog AIBO. Where do we draw the line between what is real and what is not real. Are we at risk of losing our humanity to machines?

Sherry Tuckle states in her book, Alone Together:

The idea of a robot companion serves as both symptom and dream. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by “solving” it without addressing it. The robot will provide companionship and mask our fears of too-risky intimacies. As dream, robots reveal our wish for relationships we can control.

Rather than confront issues directly, we now propose technological solutions that can solve them for us. Such as in the case of robot companions. From the perspective of a hard-working parent who is constantly occupied with a high pressure job, a robot companion may appear to be an ideal alternative to looking after their children who need constant attention.

The companion may take the pressure off the parent, but what damage is it causing to the child? How is it going to affect their ability to learn and create real relationships with other human beings? We often hear the phrase that “ignorance is bliss”, and in many cases it can be. Until the house burns down.

We get on the bus or train in a morning to find the majority of people on it staring at some form of screen. We go to the cafe at lunch and find the same there. We walk down the street to the shopping centre and find the same there. Everywhere we go, we’re surrounded by signals, screens, devices and a variety of other gizmos.

Hordes of security cameras track our every movement. Google and Facebook map and monitor us through a constant connection to our mobile devices. Electronic doors slide open before our eyes. Distance sensors on cars bleep incessantly as they are parked. Self-checkouts dish out instructions as if we were brain-dead. People tap away on laptops in cafes. Other’s float along the streets with headphones on connected to iPods. The person behind the till puts through our purchase on a touch-sensitive screen that works out how much change we’re due.

I’m not criticising technology, in many ways I’m applauding it. The ways in which it can enhance our lives and save us time that we could of otherwise spent with our family, friends or doing something that we enjoy.

In “You Are Not A Gadget” by Jaron Lanier he explains:

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.

My interpretation of this, is that technology has otherwise demeaned the value of human interaction. It’s so much ‘easier’ to text someone, or reply online with an anonymous comment or behind some kind of alter-ego with which the real ‘you’ is never truly presented.

We are becoming a part of this ‘hive mind’, in which we move and act as a singular unit. Ideas and concepts are presented, which then spread through the forms of ‘memes’.

It’s gone viral, have you seen it?

Trolls run rampant. People argue, insult and barrage one another with useless comments, each one trying to dominate the other. There are seemingly no rules on the internet. This doesn’t go to say that the entire web acts this way, there are places where you can have an intelligent conversation or debate and there are huge amounts of resources that we can use to educate ourselves and expand our perception.

Jaron Lanier writes:

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to standardise tests so a student will look good to an algorithm.

Which comes back to the idea of us believing in technology as if it is a ‘God’, or some kind of superior force that is beyond what we can comprehend of perceive. We buy into technology, we invest ourselves quite literally into it, trusting in the machine as if it were some flawless, perfect ‘thing’. We’ve bought into it so much, that we’re beginning to become moulded by it – as with teachers standardising tests so that they can then feed those results into a computer which will process, analyse them and feed back some kind of result.

Those who got result A, please line up here. Those who got result B, please line up here.  This is not necessarily a negative thing, but I think that it’s highly important that we question the validity of these processes. We are human beings, not machines. How can we be defined by something so simple.

So, after touching on a few different concepts, I need to really narrow down my question and pick something more specific..