The crash of a single wave upon the shores of an ocean is caused not by a solitary drop of water flying in solo from a haunted location out in the middle of the sea, but by the combined force of millions of droplets joining together, writhing and swelling and growing ever larger as they rush furiously inland to spend themselves upon a surface which is both indifferent and unforgiving—one which will send them remorselessly back to the obscure watery world from whence they came.
At times, the contents of the mind are something akin to the waters of an ocean, and ideas may be birthed not from a single thought, but from a succession of thoughts which come from entirely different perspectives, all converging upon a single central point at which they comingle and thereafter continue boiling along furiously in the same direction…
Something of that sort occurred Saturday: there were a number of separate events which—like individual water droplets—seemed completely unrelated at the time they came to be, and yet all of which fit together somehow in the theoretical realm to form an idea—a wave, metaphorically speaking—and one which continues to churn the metaphorical krill in my own private ocean.
To begin, as I was driving to town Saturday morning, I overheard a fascinating conversation between a radio talk-show host and his guest as they discussed the evolution of the modern robot—how recent technology allows robots to sense and respond to emotion, to meet and hold a human gaze, to remember an individual’s name, to carry on basic conversation, and to care for the needs and wants of an assigned master, or series of masters. Incredible! In an eerie sort of way.
Do we need to care? I thought, scratching my head as I tried to determine whether there were any significant long-term implications to this bit of information. Turns out, there are.
According to the radio’s guest speaker, one of the reasons that people form relationships with pets or other humans is that they recognize and respond to the presence of a unique personality or “personhood” present in the other party. However, recent advances in technology have given us the ability to create an aura of “personhood” in an inanimate object—in short, to create a robot endowed with quasi-human emotional intelligence.
The implications of
this are frightening. Why? Because it is a miniscule step from the point where we stand today to the point where we are creating inanimate objects to meet emotional needs—we want to produce technology that is capable of reaching out, touching us, responding to our feelings—in short, we want to produce a mechanical companion that is capable of taking the place of another human being: a machine which could give us a sense of being loved without the reality, a mechanism which creates the idea of companionship and camaraderie without requiring the sacrifice and selflessness necessary to build true community and maintain genuine fellowship, a contraption which has no true personality, but gives a convincing enough performance to lead people into forming emotional attachments to the “person” inside the robot—the one who doesn’t actually exist.
Would raising a robot family be easier than dealing with the human version of the family that God originally gave us? Probably. But the end result would be a generation of individuals devoid of Godly character and plagued by a devastating epidemic of isolation and loneliness on a scale never before experienced—and that is a horrific thought. We are called to be in relationships with people—not robots, not cell phones, not computers, Ipods, or television sets.
That was my visceral reaction to the story at the time, after which the thought dropped into the back corner of my mind to rest there with the dust bunnies until it had had time to ripen a little further.
Several hours later, as I walking through the woods with three fantastic young men whom I’m privileged to claim as my brothers, the comments of the talk show host and his guest came back to me again. As I listened to the animated conversation of three bright young masculine minds engaged in a verbal sparring match, I smiled.
“You can’t replace this. Ever. No matter how good the technology gets,” I thought, looking around at my brothers,
“because relationships are made of what goes into them—blood, sweat, tears, shared memories, sacrificial love—these are the foundation of every solid friendship, of every healthy family tie.” Somehow, the next thing that popped into my head was Facebook, and its accompanying rash of quasi-friendships: the kind where the school loser has 800 virtual “friends” and not a single person who will actually speak to him when they meet face-to-face.
“Is there such a big gap separating virtual friends from robotic friends?” I wondered quietly, watching as the boys pelted the nearest white birch with snowballs and then broke into cheers of “Hooray! I can hit the broad side of a barn!!”
When we got back from the woods, everyone dispersed, apparently drawn to separate parts of the house by some sort of undetectable osmotic pressure gradient. I settled on the couch to flip through the latest WORLD magazine in an attempt to acquaint myself with some of the foremost global news stories of the day.
One particularly thought-provoking article caught my attention—a well-written piece by Janie B. Cheaney entitled “Boastful Dunces: Post-literate college students reveal a ‘resentful incapacity.” It described modern college students’ shift to “post-literacy,” and painted a picture of students who, in the words of Cheaney, “display some characteristics of oral culture,” but “lack the mental disciplines of an oral culture,” leaving us with men and women “[whose] test-taking training in high school taught them to take note of dates, but not to make sense of how to use them.”
Cheaney says, “Though saturated with movies and TV, [such students] lack a basic notion of cause-and-effect and logical consequences basic to stories.
And they are impervious to correction, as if it never occurred to them that some of their ideas are wrong…a study conducted by researchers at UC-Irvine reveals a growing conviction among young adults that simply showing up in class and reading the assigned texts should earn a B at least, no matter what they actually remembered and learned…this may seem like too much self-confidence, but it’s just the opposite: Their confidence is not in self, but in outward criteria. A lower-than-expected grade is not a wake-up call for diligence but an alarm that their fragile self-esteem has been breached.
Another characteristic of oral cultures is an incomplete sense of self. At the dawn of the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo pioneered a new type of literature…his Confessions is the anatomy of a human soul that lost, then found, its way. Perhaps for that very reason, it is incomprehensible to [students]. Subject to an education system—and a parental style—that flatters their esteem but neglects their souls, they don’t have the capacity for honest soul-searching. Encouraged to be self-absorbed, they are anything but self-aware.
The task of the intellect…is to sharpen the ‘perceptual blur of reality.’ Blurry selves can only reflect a blurry world, and [some professors fear] that the future of most…students will be driven by gimmicks, devices, and fads rather than enduring principles.”
I finished reading, and thought,
“Oh, this is great. We’re headed towards a generation of illiterate, indifferent individuals who think they’re entitled to everything they could possibly want just by virtue of the fact that they have graced the earth with their presence—a nation of individuals who may or may not be in love with robots, have no clue how to relate to each other, and frankly, don’t really give a rip, because they’re just waiting for the next Beanie Babies craze or worried about getting in on the latest fashion trends…sounds like something straight out of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’”Hours later, I was sorting through paperwork up in my room while watching Kingdom of Heaven, a relatively recent (i.e. last seven years) film release which is set in the 12th century A.D. and portrays one man’s role in the Crusades which ravaged the Holy Lands. I don’t agree with all of the values and ideas put forth by the film, certainly, but one thing that very clearly stood out to me as I watched was the concept of purpose. Here were masses of men who had no clear-cut, individual plan or purpose, marching blindly into a war which they did not understand, willing to follow orders of any kind, free from any notion of conscience or moral principles that might have required them to think critically and act with conscientious deliberation. These men served as the foils for those who chose to act according to a higher law, regardless of the consequences.
As I watched this playing out on the screen, the idea that persistently came to me was that it was this—this visionary, purposeful, principled pursuit of what is Godly, of what is righteous, of what is truly good—it was this that we lack today. It is impossible to live for the moment and be swept away by every passing fad if we are choosing to purposefully view ourselves as part of a Divinely choreographed future in which we are destined to play a meaningful part.
However, from the little that I have seen of culture, and fashion, and trends, I would be inclined to say that the vast majority of people today have a severely limited or nonexistent concept of what it is to live with purpose, what it is to have vision for the future, and what it is to be so set on a single, God-ordained life goal that you become impervious to the shifting winds of societal change.
Somehow, then, each of these issues—the creation and possible societal integration of automated machines with human-like emotional intelligence, the production of an entire generation of self-absorbed, willfully-incompetent, belligerent young people, and an over-arching lack of vision, purpose, and principles—come together to form different sides of the same theoretical puzzle. It seems to me that perhaps the third problem lies at the root of the first and the second.
The harsh reality that we face, then, is that at some point in the not-so-distant future, key positions of leadership will be handed over to members of what today is the younger generation. God forbid that when that transition takes place, we be found incapable of reasoning intelligently, indifferent to and unaware of our own flaws and weaknesses, unable to maintain genuine community with our fellow human beings, and unwilling to step past our own selfish desires and passions enough to forego instant gratification of our whims in order to invest in the future of the next generation.
Now more than ever, Christian young people of this generation—and that means me, my friends, and our peers on a global scale—must bear living testimony to the fact that life
has purpose beyond chasing the latest fad or finding new ways to gratify our desires: that we are here to serve an incredible, all-powerful living God wholeheartedly for the purpose of bringing Him greater glory. May we be found faithful!
