August 2017

Confronting The March Towards Cyborgization

Science fiction cyborgs are scary. They make me wonder if we would ever co-exist with such beings in real life. Well, if you are looking for cyborgs you might as well start looking at the mirror. Our race to adopt the latest technologies is slowly but surely turning all of us into these fearsome creatures. Cyborgization is upon us whether we like it or not.

It this good, bad? Well, let me describe the trends and then we can discuss it. We’ll never wrestle with a reality that we do not name it first. As the adage goes: “the first step to healing is admitting we have a problem.”

Don’t believe me. Consider the following:

Last week Apple just announced that is making the iWatch less dependent on the iPhone. That means soon you’ll get most of the iPhone functionality in the iWatch. Elon Musk is talking about sending nano transmitters into our blood flow. In Wisconsin, a company is experimenting with just that, paying employees to implant chips in their hands. These are just a few examples of “body hacking”, where people are pushing further the envelope of fusing technology with our bodies. If technology conglomerates have their way, we are moving from buying devices we use to adding them to our bodies. The trend can be depicted as such:

desktop>>laptop>>tablet>>smart phone>>wearable device>>implant

Certainly, not everybody will sign up for implants. Yet, the fact that we now already have people willing to experiment with implants shows how far we have progressed in the spectrum above. Thirty years ago only a few of us owned desktop computers in our homes. Last year, the number of smart phones in the world surpassed 2 billion, just shy of 30% of the world population. The march towards cyborgization is in full-speed.

Cyborgs in Action: Sousveillance

So what would a world with cyborgs look like? What would we do with our extended bodies?

The events of Charlottesville this weekend reminded us of the evil undercurrents of racism that still purveys our culture.

[Here I must stop to make a few comments. Racism is goes against everything Christianity stands for. To say otherwise or to pretend there is equivalency on both sides betrays who we are. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. I also pray that we are able to come together to confront this evil in our midst.]

Curiously, the march and its aftermath also became a notable experiment in Sousveillance. Don’t know what that means, no worries. I just learned about it this week. Sousveillance is the fancy name for the growing phenomenon where people use their phones to record real-life events.

While this has been happening for a while, the novelty was the crowdsourced attempts to identify members of the march through social media. Basically, somebody recorded the faces of white supremacists marchers and posted their faces in twitter asking users to recognize and identify the individuals. As a result, one of the marchers lost his job after being outed in this social media driven act of sousveillance. Such development would not have been possible without the advent of devices that allow us to film and share images at ease.

This is an example of things to come. Ordinary individuals, leveraging their body extension tools to do things that were not possible otherwise. On the one hand this could lead to quicker apprehension of criminals in both identifying as well as providing physical evidence of their crimes. On the other hand this could quickly lead to an augmented version of mob mentality, where people are quickly branded guilty and made to pay for crimes they did not commit.While many are weary of government surveillance, citizen sousveillance can offer a welcome check. This is just one application of how cyborgization can change our world.

Framing the Conversation

So maybe becoming cyborgs is not such a bad thing. However, before dismissing or embracing this trend, it is important to ask a few questions. Here are some that come to mind.

Who is driving the march and who benefits most from it?

How does it help the most vulnerable?

How does it affect human relationships?

How do these devices enhance or diminish our humanity?

My biggest concern is not how fast these technological extensions are being adopted but how is it done. At this point, most of it is driven through marketing by large technology conglomerates telling us that we must adopt the latest gadget or else become irrelevant. The subtle message is not just that our current gadgets are outdated but that we ourselves are becoming useless.

Certainly marketing of artificial needs should not be the main driver for adopting these technologies. Instead, their adoption should undergo a deliberate process in which the questions listed above are at the forefront. Technology should never be an end to itself but a means to life enriching goals. We need to evolve from technology consumers to thoughtful agents that leverage technology for human flourishing.

At a personal level, a simple question would be: does this device improve my quality of life or not? If it does not, then it may be time to re-think its usage.

Wake Up Call: Helping the I-generation Discern Reality from Illusion

While Millennials continue to capture most of the headlines, we are just now starting to understand the next generation. Early reports are worrisome. The Atlantic just published an article about an extensive study on what is now called the Igeneration and how it compares to previous generations. They found that teenagers of this generation (born between 1996 and 2010) are delaying independence and therefore avoiding many of the risks that other generations fell prey to such as alcohol and drug abuse. Yet, they are also experiencing an increase in depression and suicide rates. In short, adolescents are both safer and lonelier. This is a paradigm we will have to grapple with for years to come.

According to the article, the single defining trait of this generation is technology. They are the first ones to grow up with smart phones. Many spend hours on their phone and fifty percent say they are addicted to it. This trend has had devastating effects most of which is amplifying the sense of being left. In fact, according to the study, phone usage had an inverse relationship with happiness. That is, the less you use your phone, the happier the teenagers reported they felt.

Leaving the pernicious effects of social media aside, I want to focus on the smart phone itself. Its very existence has fundamentally changed how teenagers perceive the world around them.

The Gap Between Generations

Children are like sponges. They have a unique capacity to absorb the world around them in ways adults no longer can. Their minds are malleable by all the stimuli around them. The biggest tragedy of children growing up in front of a screen is that they start losing the ability to differentiate the virtual world from the real one. Even if they cognitively understand the difference, they may still consider the virtual world as essential to their life. The snapchat profile is no longer an avatar but becomes an integral part of their identify. Their day-to-day experience, good and bad, gets amplified. If now teenagers can attain instant fame, they can also experience the devastating effects of cyber bullying. It is one thing to be teased before a small group of peers in school. It is a whole other matter when the teasing happens at millions of screen worldwide.

Now, it would be unfair to say that only teenagers are struggling to limit their smart phone usage. Many adults, including the one typing, have a tendency to check the phone many times throughout the day. However, adults like myself had the advantage of growing up in an offline world. Call me old-school but there is no online experience that can match the satisfaction I get from reading a book. Because of this perspective, I wonder if we adults are underestimating the effects of introducing these devices so early in our children’s development.

As a parent of 7 and a 5 year-old, controlling their screen time is a constant source of worry if not obsession to both me and my wife. I can’t even imagine how the struggle will be as they get older and their peers start coming to school with smart phones. While I can delay it for a few years, I have to accept that our kids simply live in a different world than the one we grew up in. While limiting screen time is a good step, I think the bigger challenge is teaching them to make good choices when we are not present. Essentially, we need to impress on our children that the analog world is vastly richer than the digital representation they see on screens.

Real Versus Virtual

How do we teach a new generation to discern what is real from what is not? In past blogs, I have talked about preparing the next generation through education. Nevertheless, this is not enough. At the heart of this crisis is changing how we and our children approach technology altogether. If we are to help them discern reality outside of their phone screens we must first help them approach the technology they use wisely. That means helping them understand when it is time to put the screen down on their own.

I am encouraged when I see that my kids drop everything at the invitation to go to the pool. This tells me that while they enjoy their screens, they are still no match to the real experience of chlorine-full water splashing through their bodies. In the same way, my prayer for the Igeneration is that they learn that seeing someone face-to-face will always beat a video-conference interaction and that running in the woods will always be superior to any VR game they play.

The best way to help with that is being conduits of analog experiences that will blow away the digital ones. The gift of undivided attention, the warmth of a hug, the encouragement from words of affirmation are just a few examples of experiences that are best delivered in person than digitally.

If you see someone from the igen today, ask them to put down their phone and give them a hug.

Update on 04/10/2021

Subsequent studies have questioned the findings from the research above. The reality is that it is simply too early to make any conclusions. This does not mean we need to throw caution off the window but it does show that the causes to this worrisome trends are more complex than previously thought. The overall conclusion of this blog remains the same, let’s continue to love on our igen children and walk with them as they grow up in a digital world.

Artificial Immortality: Honoring or Replacing our Parents?

Is there a way to achieve (artificial) immortality? What would that look like?

This month’s Wired featured an article where journalist James Vlahos sought to immortalize his dying father by creating a chatbot that would mimic his dad’s knowledge, expressions and speech mannerisms. His moving account provided rich material for reflection.

For a good portion of the article, the journalist recounts in detail the process of deciding and executing his idea. It took months of preparations, interviews and countless hours of programming. While some machine learning was used, the bulk of the work laid on his own knowledge of his father. He wanted to ensure the bot would respond in a way that would make the user feel like he was talking to the father. He even ensured the grammatical construction of sentences would reflect his father’s speech.

Even more interesting than the process itself were the questions that emerged as his project progressed. How would he and other family members feel about the bot after his father was gone? Would they feel like talking to the bot or would it creep them out? His personal project is a powerful anecdote of this new era where machines are increasingly acquiring human traits.

It is not just about how the machines are changing but even more importantly, how we respond to them. There are those who will interact the bot and be able to compare with the human person the bot was made to emulate. Yet, what about the grandkids who will have a greater exposure to the bot than to their actual grandfather? What type of relationship will they develop with the chatbot? Could the chatbot become its own entity, somewhat independent from the human it was built to emulate?

Honoring Our Fathers Through Technology

Last week, I received my cousin’s first book in the mail. In it, he recounts his journey to uncover details about the torture his parents suffered by the repressive Brazilian dictatorship in the early 1970’s. Besides having national significance as the country seeks to come to grips with that dark period of their history, the story is very personal to our family. Yet, what impressed me the most was his desire to make his parents story known so his children would not forget. In some ways, it was a book to honor his parents’ story, ensuring their memory would outlive them.

This desire to memorialize our parents is not new. In the Hebrew Scriptures, it is codified in the fifth commandment: “Thou shall honor thy father and thy mother.” Could this honoring now be done through these new technologies? As the Wired article demonstrated, it certainly can. In some ways, it is the next step in our current ways of memorializing our ancestors with pictures, books and videos. What makes this new stage unique is how these objects can now interact with us. When we look at videos and pictures, they are fixed snapshots of a past. Our feelings toward them may change but they themselves are static. Yet, as machine learning advances and AI takes on voice and possibly a physical appearance we now have the possibility to not just recall memories but actually create new ones. In fact, a well trained AI could create new content never spoken by the original human. It is, in one sense, the closest we have to bringing the dead back to life.

Memorializing or Idolizing?

It is at this point that I wonder whether our memorializing can quickly descend into idolizing. Let me explain. I wonder at what point the creation meant to resemble our ancestor becomes an independent entity that we relate to and revere. The warning in Scriptures about idolizing is always about replacing the real for the fake. Venerating the fake god instead of the real God. In the same way, could these artificial creations meant to resemble our real ancestors come to replace them in our memory and in our experience? How ironic that in an effort to memorialize somebody we could actually speed up the process to forget and replace them.

Thankfully, these technologies are still in their rudimentary stage so we can start asking these questions now. As the technology improves, it will become increasingly difficult to separate the real person from their artificial creation. So the question becomes, to what extent do we want to use this technology to honor our parents without fully replacing their memory with an artificial image of their real selves? What do you think?

Month: August 2017