Tech-Enhanced Humanity?

More Human Than Human

At the end of Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner”, Harrison Ford flies off into the dystopian LA sunset with the surviving android-woman. The very “woman” he was originally sent out to kill. And in Spike Jones’ 2013 movie “Her”, we were treated to a vision of the future, where a lonely, sensitive, geeky guy (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with an operating system “OS1”, played by Scarlett Johansson.“Her” presents a world that eerily reflects our tech-infused contemporary reality.

In both movies, it’s like Adam and Eve all over again, but this time there’s a machine in the family tree.

Could New Technologies Be Better Than Us?

These movies may leave you reflecting on an ironic truth, that while our technologies may be improving, our humanity is not. We are ingrained with a host of repetitive bad habits that are making a mess of the world. But the idea of replica human beings are simply the stuff of fevered Hollywood imaginations, right?  

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that Bill Gates had joined Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in warning that the march of Artificial Intelligence (AI) could pose an existential threat to humans. It may be several decades out, but the threat appears to be real and requires careful monitoring.

At a more familiar level, what is our love affair with technology and our addiction to digital devices actually doing to us? We have already changed the way we work, shop and play. But what effect is it having on us as a species?

Our Digital Devices

There is increasing concern among many commentators that human nature might be in the process of being irrevocably changed by the onslaught of technological change. While we sleepwalk into the future, our lives are being radically transformed and our very essence as human beings is being threatened. And some say it’s time to wake-up.

Is The Digital Age Rewiring Us?

In “Mind Change”, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield takes the stern view that digital technology is destroying our minds and does present a serious existential threat to the human race, akin to climate change. She believes that the digital revolution exploits our natural propensity for “mindlessness”. That instant access to information is shrinking our attention spans, our ability to focus, think deeply and be empathetic. Worse still, it is undermining our inter-personal relationships.

Younger, digital natives are particularly vulnerable, since their “impressionable plastic brains” were born into a world order at odds with thousands of years of biological evolution.

It’s Complicated

Elsewhere, Danah Boyd (a Microsoft researcher) takes a more pragmatic view in “It’s Complicated”, examining the digital lives of teenagers. She offers some real insight into technology and the human condition. In her research, Danah discovered that “screenagers” would much rather hang out with their friends in person. But they can’t for a variety or reasons. “Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation,” she says. They attend schools outside their neighborhoods, and are advised to fear strangers by hovering parents. And curfew and loitering laws further keep kids in their bedrooms. They go online “to take control of their lives and their relationship to society,” she writes. “Social media is a release valve, allowing youth to reclaim meaningful sociality as a tool for managing the pressures and limitations around them.”

Constant Change

Of-course people are worried about invasive technology; in particular, anything that appears to transform the human experience and threaten “civilization”. This has been a pervasive criticism of technology over the centuries.

We can individually and collectively adapt to gradual technological changes. From the earliest technologies (fire and tools in the Stone Age), through the great upheavals of the agrarian revolution to the massive shock of industrialization (when laborers migrated from fields to factories), people appear to have coped remarkably well, as they benefited from rising standards of living. The real toll in psychological trauma is another story.

That said, we have always been wary about new advances in technology. In Victorian times, it was anticipated that going through a dark tunnel in a train at high speed (30mph) would be such a shock to the body, that people would come out the other side irreversibly damaged. Few, if any, of the dire effects predicted by technological change in the past have taken place.

The Digitization Of Everyday Life

It could be argued that the dynamic changes that have taken place over the last 20 years have not fundamentally altered the way we relate to each other. Love, kindness, jealousy, anxiety, hatred, ambition, joy, bitterness…the whole sweep of human emotional experience, seem remarkably similar to the spectrum of feelings evident in our pre-digital world.

The low-grade maliciousness of office politics may be carried out far more efficiently by email, but its essential character hasn’t changed. My daughter, curled-up on her bed texting, face-timing and watching movies still seems more like a teenager than a node in a vast digital network.

The Pace of Change

The gradualness of change is important because as individuals we have a strong track record of embracing and coping with technological change without falling apart or losing our sense of self-identity.

Unlike the animal kingdom, we are unique in developing a strong, coherent sense of self. We take our “pre-personal” young bodies and make them our own. The ground floor of our personal identity. Looked at objectively, our bodies beneath the skin (meat, blood, muscle, guts) are not hugely human. It’s all very organic. They are perhaps less human than our most human technologies. Or at least as alien to us as the inner workings of the most advanced computers.

As we grow-up, we increasingly inhabit our bodies. We participate in life and our collective culture. We develop continuity in our memories, an understanding of the world around us, and our place within it. Throughout all the "radical changes" of simply growing up, we all feel that individually we are the same person. We’ve assimilated the changes into an evolving and continuous sense of our own identity.

Rapid Technological Change

Gradual change is one thing. When Steve Jobs announced the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 with the exclamation “this will change everything!” it was no exaggeration. Since then, smartphones have transformed our world and dramatically shaped our behavior. It is estimated that by 2020, 80% of all adults on earth will have a pocket supercomputer. More than have access to clean running water.

The impact of all this accelerated change has been well documented. It’s becoming harder to concentrate, our memory is deteriorating, we are becoming less practical, procrastinate more and the types of friends we make are changing. And we are all suffering from “text neck” and “iPad shoulder”!

We Will Change

The essence of human identity lies in continuing self-definition. Our identity and freedom lie in our individual identity, our memories and shared cultural experiences and, maybe, we shouldn’t worry about the erosion of either our identity or freedom by technological advances. Self-transformation is the essence of humanity and it has always been that way.

Love It Or Hate It

Western culture has cut its ties with the past. We can no more return to our pre-tech ways of thinking than we can return to our hunter-gatherer way of life. This era dominated by technology can be expected to produce a tech-consciousness. A new mindset that is both fascinating and fearsome.

“Every new technology asks us to confront human values”, wrote Sherry Turkle recently in The New York Times. “This is a good thing because it causes us to reaffirm what they are”.

And if technology is derailing us, it’s time to debate a course correction and create social policies to drag us back from the brink.