Human, Please

“If you are not even going to pay attention to me, then what’s the point of you being here?” demanded Nicole Richie in her half-namesake reality show, ‘Candidly Nicole’, after trying to elicit a response from her sister Sophia, to her recounting of the drama series ‘Beverly Hills 90210’.

“My charger is here,” responded Sophia flatly, still refusing to pry her eyes from the glowing pixels of her handheld device.

That is an excellent reason to be around.

But Nicole Richie needs a human being, and she is screaming out for it.

Human beings are becoming increasingly scarce. Just look around you – they are nowhere to be found. “People are addicted to their phones”, diagnosed Nicole later in the episode. And she is obviously right — certainly we are.

But wait, hold on Nicole, not so fast.

People are addicted to their phones, but Nicole was addicted to ‘Beverly Hills 90210’.

“Beverly Hills 90210 taught me everything.”

The common conception that people are more addicted to technology now is plain wrong.

People are not more addicted to technology now than before; simply, more form factors have made it easier for people to become addicted to more devices.

For a long time, before smartphones and gang came about, the humble television reduced the level of interactivity among family members slouching around a coffee table dipping chips in guacamole, putting on weight – watching ‘Beverly Hills 90210’.

These newer form factors – the smartphone and tablet, simply got smaller, and mobile. In other words, television simply became portable, and interactive.

Nothing fundamental changed on the human end of the deal – we have always been addicted to glowing pixels, and if the devices emitting them become smaller, lighter and cheaper, then it’s just as good as your favourite bag of chips going for half the price, and being allowed to munch them on the train.

You help yourselves, of course.

One could argue that this shift to portable devices is an improvement over televisions because the latter are not communication devices. At least with Smartphones, we are interacting if we are texting, playing games with friends, or broadcasting a message to the world, albeit digitally.

Televisions on the other hand, are asynchronous, closer in function to posters, billboards, print magazines and newspapers — they are one-way broadcasting devices. And this is true whether you watch television alone, or with your family. Much can be said of course that the family may not even be sitting together if not for the noble television.

But let’s help Nicole out a bit.

Nicole can perhaps pay for human interactions.

In the report ‘AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs’ by the Pew Research Center, Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society opined, “Live, human salespeople, nurses, doctors, actors will be symbols of luxury, the silk of human interaction as opposed to the polyester of simulated human contact.”

Right now, we pay for human services; in the future, for human interactions.

The postulate is plausible because handcrafted goods such as bags, shoes, apparel, are generally more expensive than mass market, machine-made ones from the Far East. So people are indeed willing to pay more for human-made goods as factory-produced ones permeate our lives.

Along the same line, it makes sense that as more interactions become automated, human interactions may in the future, become the preserve of the privileged.

But is this already happening?

Remember that one time you called the bank regarding a triviality, only to be put through a dozen levels of options. To end the frustration, you select ‘Press 6 to speak to our customer service officer.” And that made you feel like you just found an escape pod from the death star.

Sometimes, you give up altogether without that option. What if that option is available only to people who pay more? Would that be outrageous?

For this scenario however, your yearning to have a real human being tend to your needs may have more to do with the inadequacies in current technology, than your actual preferences.

All things equal, would you instead prefer a robot?

A recent experiment on college students and youths in the US found that they preferred instructions from a robot over a human being.

Prior to the experiment, the researchers thought perhaps being instructed by a robot would cause a worker to feel a reduced sense of autonomy and usefulness. But instead, the contrary was found – the efficiency gained from the robot’s optimised instructions led to greater feelings of satisfaction amongst the human subjects.

Not surprisingly, feelings of efficiency in the human subjects were maximised when the robot was given full autonomy.

So it seems that at least when it comes to certain things, we don’t really care as long as the job gets done efficiently.

But are there downsides to having less human interactions?

Isolation and solitude are already the hallmarks of certain groups of people.

Steve Wozniak once said that, “I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone…. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

And the organisational psychologist Adrian Furnham wrote, “…evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups, if you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

And there is a reason for it too – neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we are in a group, and we take a position different from the majority, we activate the amygdale, associated with the fear of rejection.

Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The pain of independence.

Groupthink has become the unfortunate by-product of hierarchies, bureaucracies, and meetings. And indeed, much research has shown that group performance decreases as group size increases.

But do digital interactions actually foster more effective collaboration than human ones.

Many companies think so.

Work collaboration tools such as Yammer, which sold to Microsoft for US$1.2 billion in 2012, allow employees to interact and collaborate. Many other digital collaboration tools do the same for client-designer workflows, events planning, documents sharing and syncing, group chats and so forth.

While these tools have not killed off groupthink, we are moving in the right direction.

But outside of work, we all need real human interactions to maintain healthy mental states, those which are not sullied by talk of ‘efficiency’, ‘optimisation’, and ‘cost-effectiveness’.

Human interactions should be pure, golden, and even innocent. Perhaps that’s a stretch, but there is nothing like basking in the moment, without a care for how much time is being wasted. It feels good that way, until we remember all the stuff we have to do.

Sure, we may be increasingly losing the warmth of human interaction, but wait till such interactions can be mimicked realistically, to the point where you can hardly tell the difference.

How does Nicole know if Sophia is not an automaton, if she weren’t her sister?

She wouldn’t.

And when the director yells “Cut!” nothing would matter anyway.