Professor Sapolsky,

Thanks for the great piece. I’m always a fan of your writing.

How would you respond to the following spin: with modern technology, we’re developing a *different* sort of recognition and familiarity, rather than the *wrong* sort. Certainly, I don’t think it’s feasible to replace seeing someone’s face as the primary means of identifying them, nor spending quality in-person time as the primary means of establishing the warm familiarity that most of us crave deeply. But, I can speak from experience that it’s possible to recognize someone cognitively, and to develop an emotional familiarity with them, simply by reading their texts. For example, with one of my past significant others, I could intuit within one or two text messages what kind of mood she was in — evidence to the fact that, insofar as social interactions are concerned, digital/semantic signals can be substituted for natural biological ones. I’ve also built close friendships primarily through a digital medium, and those friendships enjoy the same in-person comfort as friendships developed face-to-face — direct evidence that digital signals can be substituted for natural ones when forming recognition & familiarity.

It’s important to ask 1) how does this neo-recognition and neo-familiarity stack up to the natural version (e.g. in terms of recognition accuracy or the mutuality of subjective feelings of familiarity), and 2) what are the personal and social consequences of substituting digital signals for biological ones?

Ultimately, I think this comes down to a matter of morals: should we view natural signals as “better”, or should we take the view that developing new signals is good and in the spirit of human advancement (which spirit is, itself, a moral). I don’t know where I fall on this.

Avery