Technology, more and more, becomes such an ingrained part of our lives that most people rarely give it a second thought. Especially those who are under 50 years old. Technology, it seems is always there and always ready to talk and intrude. As homes become wired and, of course, the web, social media and cell phones continue to dominate people’s lives, many researchers have seriously begun to wonder if it is all re-configuring our brains. If it is all getting us use to a new way of interacting and socializing.
One researcher, psychologist Larry Rosen, warns that cell phones are making most people incapable of coherent social interaction when he said that, “Our real and virtual worlds certainly overlap as many of our virtual friends are also our real friends. But the time and effort we put into our virtual worlds limit the time to connect and especially to communicate on a deeper level in our real world. With smartphone in hand, we face a constant barrage of alerts, notifications, vibrations and beeps warning us that something seemingly important has happened and we must pay attention.”
A MIT professor, and author, Sherry Turkle, has discovered in her work and research that people’s online worlds give them a false sense of belonging. They believe themselves to be connected to people but, in reality, they are more disconnected and estranged from them.
“That’s what technology does,” said Turkle. “It makes us forget what we know about life. When it comes to certain things, we really need people. What has been most striking is how difficult it is to give each other full attention when we have our devices and we’re losing out.”
Professor of Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon, Illah Nourbakhsh, sees a huge shift in human behavior with regard to talking and relying on technology as if each technological trigger were of do-or-die importance. He says that, “There use to be a disconnect between with how we interacted with, say, our desktop computers and our families. We interacted with that computer only when we wanted to. Now, technology is pervading the home environment. Your machines can interrupt and interact with you day or night should they choose to.”
One of the true dangers, which lead to dangers even more ominous, says Nourbakhsh, is that people are beginning to interact with other people, when they interact at all, in a more simple and shallow manner like they do when they are engaged online. For him, we are adapting our behavior to the machines. It is the machines who dictate how we will behave and what we will be told is important.
He also believes that soon there will be intelligent advertisements to deal with and it will be possible, with all of this chat bot technology floating around, to actually talk with a company and be talking to a machine rather than a person. It’s all ready happening in some places. Technology such as home devices like Amazon’s Echo continue to become more sophisticated with the way they talk to us and with us. They are introducing humans to a new way to interact. A new way to socialize.
“You have to understand,” Nourbakhsh said, “that these are essentially alien creatures. When you talk to Echo, you’re not talking to a human being. You’re talking to a tentacle on a massive octopus that pervades knowledge. When I talk to my Echo, I’m talking to a machine that’s thinking of possible monetizations. We are getting rewired to interact with aliens.
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