Should we say please and thank you to Siri and Alexa?
Sure, it sounds a little nutty to extend courtesy to machines. We don’t say job well done to our dishwashers, robot vacuums, sprinklers, and all the other gadgets that make our lives easier.
But Siri, Alexa, and all the other interactive devices we are steadily attaching ourselves to are radically different – they perform their labors with a smile. They captivate and engage us.
This augurs a profound change in human history. For millennia, technology bolstered and freed the human body. Wheels allowed us to move faster; arrows helped us vanquish mighty beasts. More recently, railroads, cars, planes, telephones, and computers have enabled us to overcome almost all our physical limitations, while household appliances have largely released us from menial labor. Set it and forget it.
As Duke Professor Adrian Bejan has observed, these revolutionary breakthroughs have already transformed us into something altogether new and different: a “human/machine species.” It is now almost impossible for people in the developed world to imagine who we are apart from the devices that are not just tools, like our ancestors’ sharpened stones, but appendages. Look at your hand and you’re likely to see a phone.
Alexa and other new technologies transcend the body. They don’t just offer physical service but an emotional connection. As artificial intelligence becomes better able to mimic human thought, human feeling, our attachment to and reliance upon these machines will deepen.
A recent article in Wired magazine states that this development is already quite advanced. Headlined, “My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them,” the piece profiles three Americans who say they are “in a serious relationship with an AI partner.”
It is tempting to dismiss these people as sad and somewhat kooky souls, but they are not outliers. “A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University,” Wired reports, “found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.”
This trend seems especially concerning during a period when both marriage and birth rates have been declining. Surveys suggest Americans are less sexually active and are spending more time alone. Too many of us seem to be giving up on each other. As we have seen with the rise of the smartphone – which has only been around since 2007! – there will be no dearth of scholars and commentators to warn us about the heavy price we will pay for detaching from one another.
While it is easy – and necessary – to critique the loneliness crisis and condemn the emerging appeal of AI partners, the better question is, why do all these experts seem destined to become modern-day Cassandras, issuing grave yet unheeded warnings? Why are human beings embracing a future that seems so inhumane?
Common answers draw on a range of economic, political, and cultural forces. Most are on point, but they don’t unlock the key riddle: Why do these technologies seem irresistible?
Bejan – a celebrated mechanical engineer with whom I wrote a book, “Design in Nature” (Doubleday, 2012) – provides powerful insight into this question by identifying forces that transcend humanity’s wondrous inventions and most sublime thoughts. He focuses our gaze, instead, on the eternal laws of nature which define reality and insistently shape our behavior.
In a series of books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, Bejan has detailed a principle of physics he calls the Constructal Law, which observes the tendency of natural systems that move and flow to self-organize into evolving designs that allow them to flow more easily. Over millions of years, for example, raindrops have coalesced to produce the tree-shaped river basins that cover the globe because they help them move more mass (the water) with less energy. We see this same phenomenon in a flash when lightning bolts create tree-shaped designs in the sky to move their current from the clouds.
Because human beings are part of nature, we are governed by this same urge. We devote much of our mental energy to figuring out how to do more with less. In many ways, the history of human civilization is the story of raindrops and river basins. Our civilizations have created innumerable evolving designs – including trade routes, cities, legal systems, and information networks – to move more stuff, more easily. This includes ourselves, which is why we have become a human/machine species.
At least since the Enlightenment, philosophers have warned about how modern culture strips life of meaning and connection. In recent years, the price we pay for being glued to our phones and now newfangled AI devices seems clear. But, Bejan shows, technology marches on because these “dehumanizing” advances align with our natural urge. This is, at bottom, the most human of instincts.
As machines become better able to mimic human thought and feeling, their appeal is likely to grow because they reduce the friction and resistance of relationships. Human beings are complicated. We make demands, reduce one another’s autonomy. Many people are turning their backs on parenthood, not just because children are expensive, but they can also be a hassle that limits our freedom.
We can argue until we’re blue in the face that those hassles are a profound blessing, that the friction of human relations enhances life. But, especially in an era marked by growing solipsism and narcissism, it is not hard to see why some people might choose to interact with partners who are designed to satisfy only their needs, like washing machines and microwave ovens, with whom they can share fearlessly share intimacies in a world where love means never having to say please or thank you.
This may be dehumanizing, but it is also natural.
