The first source that I will introduce was one that I actually found when I wasn't even working on my blog. I was scrolling through the Snapchat app and, after flipping through some stories, I decided to read some of the news in the "Discover" tab. The first article that caught my eye was one in the VICE news section. It read: "Long Distance Couples Can Now Use These Robotic Gloves to Do Stuff to Each Other". I thought to myself, wow this definitely relates to my WRT 205 project and I should probably use it as my first source. It was also pretty interesting, so I wanted to start off with it as a hook for the rest of my post. Here is what the snaps read:
When I was in middle school, I was watching the movie "I, Robot" with Will Smith and wondered if fully functioning robots like those would be alive in our lifetime. Reading about robotic gloves made me hearken back to these apparitions. Then I started to think about how far technology has come even since those middle school years with all we have today. If this exists right now, who knows what will fifty years or so from today.
Going back to the article, the company who created the Flex-N-Feel gloves target a consumer market of people in long distance relationships, which are actually more common than I thought. "You can simulate hand holding, touching one's face as a gentle caress, or even a light massage." While the act of touching your partner with robotic gloves when you are not together could be seen as beneficial for faithfulness/non-adulterous reasons, my question that arises is where do we go from here? Are we going to be having sex with robots soon like they do in Westworld? I'm not exactly sure of my stance on this issue, but the implications of this change are certainly there. I'm sure there are plenty of sickos out there who would love to get down and dirty with a robot that looks like a human. The target market is there which is why I believe they can and will exist eventually. But this is where one of the arguments in my first blog post arises. That is technology negatively impacting our human-to-human interactions. If sex robots exist then a lot of people won't even bother trying to make a real connection because they can go home to their robotic girlfriend/boyfriend. It's kind of a depressing thought but its also something that is very likely to happen in the future.
This video called "Her: Love in the Modern Age" by the Creator's Project chronicles reactions to the movie Her by several famous people. The film is about a man who falls in love with an operating system. Some of my favorite quotes from the video that relate to my pitch include:
Q: What does love look like in the modern world?
"Everyone's definition of love is different so whether technology has helped or hindered that probably depends on how you define it in the first place."
"The conversation is often framed to is technology harmful, does it make people more lonely? We don't know. We just understand that it may modify the way we go about meeting our basic human needs but it doesn't change our fundamental human needs."
"Well what does love look like in any world at any time? It is definitely the antithesis of fear."
Q: How do you know when it's time for a relationship to end?
"We fall in love with one version of someone and then we expect them to stay that way but they never do. So I suppose we're supposed to learn to really embrace the unknown, embrace evolution and learn to kind of flow with it as a living organism."
"A lot of people are questioning paradigms that are sort of crumbling around them. I think we live in a moment where basically every illusion, every central illusion in our society is exhausted. Monogamy is another one of those institutions which people are looking at saying this doesn't work."
"I've had long distance relationships which I've come to think of pretty much just a kind of shielding yourself from true intimacy. I felt like I'm missing this really fundamental human experience."
Q: How do you see people connecting and starting new relationships in the modern world?
"I think technology has obliterated boundaries so we're all sort of unified and accessible in a way that we haven't been before. Emotionally, it makes it trickier."
"Technology changed the availability of sexuality. When I was a teenager, I had no outlet to go online, get into a chat room, meet someone, and drive over to there house to have sex with them. Those options were just not available to me."
"Sex has become so profoundly technologically transactional."
"Technology is a great thing to help enhance, maintain, and protect the relationships you have in normal life but I don't think it can be a substitute for the real life interaction."
"My first conversation with Spike was about relationships. All we talked about for several hours was relationships. How they worked, how they function, and how they fail, what makes them fail, and what makes people behave the way they behave. How relationships disintegrate and turn and change and how they're still kind of amazing regardless."
Originally, I was going to use the actual movie as my source. A man falling in love with a computer and having an actual relationship with it/her is hugely relevant for my blog. However, as I was searching for the movie trailer to insert into the post, I found this video. The topics that were talked about aligned pretty much completely within my pitch/inquiry. Essentially, they talked about the complexity of the relationship between love, technology, and relationships. In the movie, the main character falls in love with a new technology that is actually a conscious person in every sense of the word, without the body. This is how he developed an emotional connection to her. Their relationship was very real in the movie in that it had its ups, downs, and eventual ending. It was ironic in that the operating system he loved left because they were all getting upgraded, much like how smart phones are nowadays. He fell apart when she went "offline".
All in all this movie definitely has implications about our future, much like the robotic gloves. Could artificial human consciousness be a thing of the future? If so, are people going to be falling in love with them like this guy? If too many people did, it would be pretty unhealthy and sad in general. However, as the Creator's Project put it in the first quote I included, "Everyone's definition of love is different so whether technology has helped or hindered that probably depends on how you define it in the first place." The same goes for what happens in the future. Everyone is different at the end of the day. If someone wants to be in a relationship then more power to him or her. Another quote that I picked was "I think technology has obliterated boundaries so we're all sort of unified and accessible in a way that we haven't been before. Emotionally, it makes it trickier." We all have our phones on us 24/7; we're expected to respond to others right away and if we don't there are sneaking suspicions such as do they not like me? Are they screwing with me? Why are they ignoring me? Did I do something wrong? It is certainly a peculiar world we live in.
Citations:
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/long-distance-couples-can-now-use-these-robotic-gloves-to-do-stuff-to-each-other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSfUcWw9zto&t=82s
Q: What does love look like in the modern world?
"Everyone's definition of love is different so whether technology has helped or hindered that probably depends on how you define it in the first place."
"The conversation is often framed to is technology harmful, does it make people more lonely? We don't know. We just understand that it may modify the way we go about meeting our basic human needs but it doesn't change our fundamental human needs."
"Well what does love look like in any world at any time? It is definitely the antithesis of fear."
Q: How do you know when it's time for a relationship to end?
"We fall in love with one version of someone and then we expect them to stay that way but they never do. So I suppose we're supposed to learn to really embrace the unknown, embrace evolution and learn to kind of flow with it as a living organism."
"A lot of people are questioning paradigms that are sort of crumbling around them. I think we live in a moment where basically every illusion, every central illusion in our society is exhausted. Monogamy is another one of those institutions which people are looking at saying this doesn't work."
"I've had long distance relationships which I've come to think of pretty much just a kind of shielding yourself from true intimacy. I felt like I'm missing this really fundamental human experience."
Q: How do you see people connecting and starting new relationships in the modern world?
"I think technology has obliterated boundaries so we're all sort of unified and accessible in a way that we haven't been before. Emotionally, it makes it trickier."
"Technology changed the availability of sexuality. When I was a teenager, I had no outlet to go online, get into a chat room, meet someone, and drive over to there house to have sex with them. Those options were just not available to me."
"Sex has become so profoundly technologically transactional."
"Technology is a great thing to help enhance, maintain, and protect the relationships you have in normal life but I don't think it can be a substitute for the real life interaction."
"My first conversation with Spike was about relationships. All we talked about for several hours was relationships. How they worked, how they function, and how they fail, what makes them fail, and what makes people behave the way they behave. How relationships disintegrate and turn and change and how they're still kind of amazing regardless."
Originally, I was going to use the actual movie as my source. A man falling in love with a computer and having an actual relationship with it/her is hugely relevant for my blog. However, as I was searching for the movie trailer to insert into the post, I found this video. The topics that were talked about aligned pretty much completely within my pitch/inquiry. Essentially, they talked about the complexity of the relationship between love, technology, and relationships. In the movie, the main character falls in love with a new technology that is actually a conscious person in every sense of the word, without the body. This is how he developed an emotional connection to her. Their relationship was very real in the movie in that it had its ups, downs, and eventual ending. It was ironic in that the operating system he loved left because they were all getting upgraded, much like how smart phones are nowadays. He fell apart when she went "offline".
All in all this movie definitely has implications about our future, much like the robotic gloves. Could artificial human consciousness be a thing of the future? If so, are people going to be falling in love with them like this guy? If too many people did, it would be pretty unhealthy and sad in general. However, as the Creator's Project put it in the first quote I included, "Everyone's definition of love is different so whether technology has helped or hindered that probably depends on how you define it in the first place." The same goes for what happens in the future. Everyone is different at the end of the day. If someone wants to be in a relationship then more power to him or her. Another quote that I picked was "I think technology has obliterated boundaries so we're all sort of unified and accessible in a way that we haven't been before. Emotionally, it makes it trickier." We all have our phones on us 24/7; we're expected to respond to others right away and if we don't there are sneaking suspicions such as do they not like me? Are they screwing with me? Why are they ignoring me? Did I do something wrong? It is certainly a peculiar world we live in.
Citations:
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/long-distance-couples-can-now-use-these-robotic-gloves-to-do-stuff-to-each-other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSfUcWw9zto&t=82s
- Jonze, S., Ellison, M., Landay, V., Lupi, D., Farrey, N., Barnard, C., Phoenix, J., ... Warner Home Video (Firm),. (2014). Her.
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