- Jon Freeman

Yet on the heels of a study that just came out last week saying that teenagers spend up to 7.5 hours per day on digital devices — up an hour from the previous year — one wonders what is happening to our individual relationships to the natural world as a result of technology.  My previous post explored some of the broad ethical relationships between technology, human behavior, and the environment; today, I’m featuring an article which raises an important and related question: Is nature important to our happiness?  And if so, then why do we spend so much time attached to our technologies, and detached from nature?

In his article “Natural Happiness,” for The New York Times Magazine’s Green Issue, Paul Bloom, a psychologist from Yale University, asks us to ask ourselves these questions.  Read Bloom’s article, ahead.

Paul Bloom is a psychology professor at Yale University.  His article, “Natural Happiness” originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine Green Issue and is reprinted here with his permission. His book, “How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like” comes out in June.

Natural Happiness

Why should we care about nature? Should we care about it for its own sake — or for our sake, because it happens to make us happy or healthy? These might not seem like the brightest questions. Few people need convincing that the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinction of species and the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland would all be very bad things. Do we really need to list the reasons?

We do. After all, in many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it. Technology has come to be more diverse than the biosphere. In 1867, Karl Marx observed that there were 500 types of hammer made in Birmingham, England. In 1988, Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, suggested that the average American encounters 20,000 different kinds of artifacts in everyday life, which would be more than the number of animals and plants that we can distinguish. And right now, there are about 1.5 million identified species on Earth — impressive, but nothing compared to the more than 7 million United States patents.

This is mostly good news. No sane person would give up antibi­otics and anesthesia, farming and the written word. Our constructed environments shield us from heat and cold and protect us from predators. We have access to food and drink and drugs that have been devised to stimulate our nervous systems in magnificent ways. We sleep in soft beds and have immediate access to virtual experiences from pornography to classical symphonies. If a family of hunter-gatherers were dropped into this life, they would think of it as a literal heaven.

Or maybe not. There is a considerable mismatch between the world in which our minds evolved and our current existence. Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna. While there is debate over the details, we know for sure that our minds were not adapted to cope with a world of billions of people. The life of a modern city dweller, surrounded by strangers, is an evolutionary novelty. Thousands of years ago, there was no television or Internet, no McDonald’s, birth-control pills, Viagra, plastic surgery, alarm clocks, artificial lighting or paternity tests. Instead, there was plenty of nature. We lived surrounded by trees and water and animals and sky.

E. O. Wilson popularized the “biophilia” hypothesis: We thrive in the presence of nature and suffer in its absence

This history has left its mark on our minds. Children are irrepressible taxonomizers, placing the world of distinct individuals into categories based on their appearance, their patterns of movement and their presumed deeper natures, and some psychologists have argued that the hard-wired capacity to organize and structure the world is specially adapted to nature: we are natural-born zoologists and botanists. We may also have evolved to get pleasure from certain aspects of the natural world. About 25 years ago, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson popularized the “biophilia” hypothesis: the idea that our evolutionary history has blessed us with an innate affinity for living things. We thrive in the presence of nature and suffer in its absence.

Our hunger for the natural is everywhere. It is reflected in art: the philosopher Denis Dutton, in his book “The Art Instinct,” suggests that popular taste in landscape painting has been shaped by preferences that evolved for the African savanna. The appeal of the natural is also reflected in where we most want to live. People like to be close to oceans, mountains and trees. Even in the most urban environments, it is reflected in real estate prices: if you want a view of the trees of Central Park, it’ll cost you. Office buildings have atriums and plants; we give flowers to the sick and the beloved and return home to watch Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel. We keep pets, which are a weird combination of constructed things (cats and dogs were bred for human companionship), surrogate people and conduits to the natural world. And many of us seek to escape our manufactured environments whenever we can — to hike, camp, canoe or hunt.

Wilson emphasizes the spiritual and moral benefits of an attachment to nature, warning that we “descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us.” But there are more tangible benefits as well. Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild re­duces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients. The author Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” because they have been shut out from the physical and psychic benefits of unstructured physical contact with the natural world.

Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” because they have been shut out from the physical and psychic benefits of unstructured physical contact with the natural world

So the preservation of the natural world should be important to us. But how important? The psycholo­gist Philip Tetlock has pointed out that many people talk about the environment as a “sacred value,” protected from utilitarian trade-offs — when the Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil, 80 percent of the respondents in one poll said that we should pursue greater environmental protection “regardless of cost.” But he also points to the need to balance environmental concerns with social and political and personal priorities. (Few of these respondents would be willing to hand over their pensions for a more efficient cleanup of the Alaskan shoreline.) And even if we did value nature above everything else, we would still have to decide which aspects of nature we care about the most. You can see this in the debate over the creation of giant wind farms in the ocean or on hillsides. Proponents are enthusiastic about the cheap, green energy; critics worry about the loss of natural beauty and the yearly filleting of thousands of songbirds and ducks.

In the end, an indiscriminate biophilia makes little sense. Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus. Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don’t want to be dropped naked into a swamp. We want to tour Yosemite with our water bottles and G.P.S. devices. The natural world is a source of happiness and fulfillment, but only when prescribed in the right doses.

You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures. There is a fortune to be made, for instance, by building a robot that children would respond to as if it were an animal. There have been many attempts, but they don’t evoke anywhere near the same responses as puppies, kittens or even hamsters. They are toys, not companions. Or consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery.

All of this provides a different sort of argument for the preservation of nature. Put aside for the moment practical considerations like the need for clean air and water, and ignore as well spiritual worries about the sanctity of Mother Earth or religious claims that we are the stewards of creation. Look at it from the coldblooded standpoint of the enhancement of the happiness of our everyday lives. Real natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans. We intuitively grasp this, and this knowledge underlies the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss. It might be that one day we will be able to replace the experience of nature with “Star Trek” holodecks and robotic animals. But until then, this basic fact about human pleasure is an excellent argument for keeping the real thing.

This article touched on so many interesting ideas, the most fascinating also being the most simple: We need nature.  We look to nature for many things: for relaxation, for play, for spiritual sustenance.  Indeed, writers and philosophers alike have turned to the natural world to reveal truths about humanity. (”I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau once famously wrote.)

And yet, it’s interesting that even in light of this, people find it challenging to commit to spending time in nature, or even to preserving it.  We seem to have little problem enthusiastically championing technology, embracing new products and new developments in our technologically-driven lifestyle — but we do this even if and while nature is being eroded at its expense.  We know nature is important to our happiness in some fundamental way, yet we seem to take it for granted, and increasingly live our lives enveloped by the technologies we have created for ourselves.

This mentality seems important to examine.  The study of trying to recreate nature scenes on HD TVs is telling: it raises the issue that there is value to nature that can never be replicated or equaled by technology.  The experience of interacting with nature — full-fleshed, real nature–it seems, can never be equalled by a virtual, digital experience.  We can watch Avatar in 3D (whose message, ironically, is to respect nature), 11 million of us can play “Farm Town” on Facebook per day, and we can even try to hook up HD TVs with nature scenes to recreate the calming, serene image of a forest; but these digital mediums can never substitute for the authentic pleasure that nature can provide.  And this seems interesting to reflect on, particularly if we are pursuing a world that is centered and focused more and more on technology, and less and less on appreciating and being in the natural world.  Are we ever as fulfilled after a day on the computer as we are spending a day out of doors?  If not, then why are we such slaves to our screens?

So this article left me thinking: What is the value of nature, and why in our technological age does it seem harder and harder to be in touch with it?  Are there ways in which technology has enhanced our experience of nature, or are nature and technology fundamentally at odds with each other?  By choosing to embrace technology, are we automatically giving up a close relationship nature?

Questions:

Do you spend more or less time in nature as a result of technology?

How has your appreciation for nature shifted over time as our lives have become more “digitally” focused?

Modern technology

Owes Ecology

An Apology.

-Alan Eddison

Each year, we lose over 38 million acres of rainforest as a result of deforestation; rainforests used to cover 14% of the earths surface; now, they cover less than 6%, and are depleting more each year. Our 800 million+ cars in the world emit carbon emissions at such a high level that they erode the atmosphere and are contributing to drastic changes in our weather patterns.  The trash we have discarded – including, of course, man-made non-biodegradable plastics– accumulate in landfills throughout the world and leach toxic chemicals into the land and water, greatly affecting the survival of animal and plant life.

And in a pursuit to feed the ever-growing world population, agricultural biotechnologists are altering the genetic make-up of food and plants, splicing the genes from fish into the genes of tomatoes, for example, to increase the amount that we can grow and the “nutrient content” they possess –  a type of species cross-breeding that has heretofor never occurred, and never would occur, naturally in nature.

Thinking about modern technologies of the past 100 years, one can’t help but see how they have radically transformed our planet.  The cars we drive, the massive amounts of waste we discard, the agricultural techniques we employ, among many other examples: each has led environmental aftereffects such as climate change and depletion of natural resources that have altered the biosphere in which we live in very significant ways.

Before our widespread technological developments, we may have modified the earth for our needs, including hunting wildlife and farming for food, as well as gathering necessities for living and shelter, but fundamentally, as Rudi Volti writes in Society and Technological Change, we “used to leave the earth roughly as we found it.”   Yet with modern technologies, we no longer leave the world the way it was when we came into it. With modern technology, we have the capacity to not only influence the world, to leave our footprint, but to radically transform it.  We even have the power to destroy it.

Imbued by technology with this capacity to literally destroy our own habitat, some philosophers contest that we need to catch our ethics up to speed – that our previous ethical frameworks do not address this relatively newfound authority to impact the planet so significantly.  Ethics that were established in an age before we could drastically impact our biosphere – before we knew about carbon emissions, or nuclear power, or genetic engineering—are not equipped to help us cope with modern day problems.  Morton Winston, Hans Jonas, and writers like Bill McKibben call for a new type of ethics that takes this power modern technology gives us into account, where we consider not only our individual moral decisions, but the aggregates of our actions; where we consider not only human beings in our decision making, but the planet, and nature, as well; and finally, where we consider the timeline of our decisions, and the future of humanity, and not only how the decisions we make now affect us currently, but how they will affect the livelihood of future generations as well.

In his essay, “Children of Invention,” MortonWinston writes eloquently about technology’s game-changing influence on ethics, and how we need to develop a new framework as we proceed in the technological age:

“Our previous ethics has not prepared us to cope with such global threats.  Traditional ethics has focused primarily on the moral requirements concerning individual action, on the direct dealings between persons, rather than on the remote effects of our collective action.  This problem is particularly important with respect to widely distributed technologies, such as the internal combustion engine, whereby the cumulative effects of individual decisions can have a major impact on air quality even though no single individual is responsible for the smog.

By and large, traditional moral norms deals with the present and near-future effects of actions of individual human beings and do not prepare us to deal with cumulative effects and statistical deaths.  Traditional ethics, above all, has been anthropocentric – the entire nonhuman world has been viewed as a thing devoid of moral standing and significance except insofar as it could be bent to satisfy human purposes.  We have assumed the natural world was our enemy and that it did not require our care (for what could we possibly do to harm it really?) and nature was not regarded as an object of human responsibility.

In the past, we have attempted to fashion out ethical theories in terms of these assumptions.  The traditional maxims of ethics – for example, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “Never treat your fellow man as a means only but always also as an end in himself” – are in keeping with the individualistic, present-oriented, and anthropocentric assumptions of our ethical traditions. Even the Christian ethic of universal love does not transcend the barriers of time, community, and species.  Even more modern ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics do not provide particularly good guidance when it comes to the sorts of ethical concerns raised by technology.  In part this is because they were designed to be used to evaluate individual actions of particular moral agents.

But the sociotechnological practices that comprise our collective action are not only made up of many individual choices – such as the choice to have a child, to eat a hamburger, or to invest in a mining stock – but also the aggregation of these individual choices, plus those of organized collectivities such as corporations and governments.  In most cases, the individuals, business executives, or politicians who are making the choices that add up to our collective insecurity do not intend these threats to result, and neither they nor we consequently feel any sense of responsibility for them.

Although individuals view themselves as moral agents and consider themselves bearers of responsibility in all the roles in which they participate, the collectivities to which we belong do not.  All the threats we face are in part the result of this diffusion of responsibility.  How then should we, the citizens of Earth, be responding to these environmental questions? Do people in richer countries have any responsibility to those in poorer ones?  Do we, in general, have any responsibilities to future generations concerning the long-term social and environmental effects of our present economic, lifestyle, and political choices?

The notion of responsibility that we need to cultivate is not the backward-looking notion of responsibility as liability, which seeks to allocate blame for past harms, but the forward-looking sense of responsibility in which each of us and every organization and institution “takes responsibility” for future generations of humans and the nonhuman species with whom we share this planet.  This notion of social responsibility, although it is voluntary and discretionary, places real demands on us as individuals and members of communities and requires that we think carefully about the decisions and choices that we make.”

Winston outlines a number of reasons I’d like to highlight about why he believes technology poses new ethical challenges that we have not yet had to face.

First, he stresses that the impact of technology is different from other ethical issues because it is not individual decisions but the aggregate of those decisions that have an ethical impact. This is an interesting idea to consider: one person driving a car is not intrinsically wrong; however, millions of people driving a car might be, because of the cumulative impact on others health and on the environment.  Therefore, when we consider what is ethical, we must consider not only the individual, direct consequence of our own decisions, but the aggregate of those decisions…and extrapolating from this idea, one wonders if driving a car therefore does become unethical.  Do you generally think that when you throw away a plastic water bottle, you are making an ethical decision, because you are contributing to build up of plastic in landfills?  When you eat tuna at a restaurant, do you consider yourself a contributor to the epidemic loss of deep sea wildlife occurring on the planet right now?

Another interesting concept Winston raises is that the harm caused by technology is not direct, per se, but diffuse and broad, often perpetrated without any knowledge from the people performing the harmful actions. Indeed, industrial technology has alienated us from nature – we no longer produce our own food, make our own shelter, sew our own clothes.  This is not inherently a bad thing; of course, it has allowed us tremendous freedoms.  But it contributes to what Winston calls a “diffusion of responsibility”, in which we don’t connect our actions with their consequences, because we are so removed from them.  Might you assume more responsibility for your actions if you got to see the amount of waste that your lifestyle accumulated, instead of being isolated from the industries that make your food, clothes, and shelter for you?  How does this separation lead people to feel less accountable for the way they live?

And finally, Winston raises the point that we must consider that in the technological age, the effects of our actions are not always immediate, but in fact influence the lives of generations to come. The issue of environmental ethics is on the level not of an individual human being, living now, but rather on humankind and the survival of the planet as a whole.  When you consider the way we treat the planet now, do you think about how it affect the lives your grandchildren? That destroying land now for our use currently might result in future generations never seeing that land?  One can’t help but think of the movie Wall-E, in which people become so preoccupied with their technology that they completely ignore nature, and in the process, forget nature’s value, leaving a ravaged planet behind.  Is this the type of road we are on, and if so, how do we stop from going down it?

Winston, as well as Hans Jonas and others, call for a new ethical framework that takes the future of the planet into consideration – a framework that is not focused on the individual, or the immediate moment, but on humanity on the whole, and its survival. So what might this new type of ethics look like?

New Ethical Frameworks

Jonas says that “An imperative responding to the new type of human action and addressed to the new type of agency that operates it might run thus: “Act so that the effects of your action is compatible with the permanence of human life;” or expressed negatively, “Act so that the effects of your action is not destructive of the future possibility of such life.”

Another view is that of Deep Ecology, which Mark Somma writes about this framework in his essay, “Radical Environmentalism.”

In the early 1970s, philsopher Arne Naess laid the ground work for an ecological movement called Deep Ecology. Deep Ecology is rooted in the idea that nature has wisdom and value independent of the value ascribed to it to meet human needs.  It emphasizes a “biocentric” view of the world that seeks to cultivate human being’s relationship with nature, based on the principle that nature doesn’t exist solely to meet human ends, but is intrinsically valuable in its own existence.  Human beings should promote the well-being of the entire biosphere, including the oceans, forests, and other natural resources, because they deserve, morally speaking, to be preserved.

Deep Ecology also emphasizes that our moral and spiritual well-being as humans is dependent on a wholesome and integrated relationship with our surrounding world – that we lose something vital and important about ourselves as we increasingly alienate ourselves from the natural world that surrounds us.  When we lose our connection with nature, when we stop valuing nature for nature’s sake, we become less complete, less morally developed human beings.  Deep Ecology also maintains that the amount of interference we have with the nonhuman world currently is excessive, and that as humans, we don’t have the right to reduce biodiversity in such a drastic way, and to exploit nature as much as we do.  Ultimately if we continue down this path, Deep Ecology suggests, it is human beings that will lose out as a result.  Jonas Salk once said, “Eventually we’ll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.”

Deep Ecology contrasts with Shallow ecology, which may be more recognizable as our current way of relating to the planet.

Deforestation in The Amazon

Shallow ecology refers to the practices that many people would characterize as an industrialized view of living on the planet.  In shallow ecology, human beings see nature as valuable only as it meets human needs.  It is a human-centered ethos (also known as an “anthropocentric” focus) in which people think about how nature can serve their own needs or wants, and focus on mastery and control of nature, not an appreciation of it.  In shallow ecology, “wilderness is wasted unless developed.” In other words, the rain forests exist to provide resources for human use,minerals exist to be mined, and plants exist to be used by human beings. In this framework, as is evident today, humans are increasingly alienated from nature by their modern technologies. Driving in cars, sitting inside in air conditioning, we are comforted by our technologies, but exist apart from nature; we care less and less about it, seeing it as something to use, rather than something to value.

“For shallow ecology the forest becomes a collection of discrete resources measured by their respective values to an exploitative human society; for deep ecology, the forest has an intrinsic value distinct from human society’s use for it.”

Like Winston, Somma argues that we need a new type of ethics: “Such transformation requires a new social movement and a positive vision of a new society, the likes of which does not yet exist and remains to be invented.” And whether or not this transformation needs to be as extreme as Deep Ecology, it nevertheless raises some important questions:

Does the planet have intrinsic value, apart from its value of being used as a resource for human beings?  Should we care about nature for nature’s sake?

Is nature important to humanity, or can we alter it to any extent to meet our needs, even if that means a destruction of biodiversity, and even, as deep ecologist Bill McKibben writes, “The End Of Nature”?

If nature does have intrinsic value, what steps would human beings have to take to “put nature first”?  Reducing populations? Reducing waste?  Even abandoning the development or use of modern technologies that affect the planet negatively?  At what point do you draw the line between valuing nature, and living a comfortable life? Is driving a car reasonable? How about eating meat?  Cutting down forests for housing developments?

Reflecting on these questions is critical to how we will address the environmental issues facing us today.  Ultimately, they also cause us to ask,  ”What, for me, is an ethically sustainable way of living?”

Leave your reflections about the principles of Deep Ecology and a “new ethics” below.

Watch a video explaining Shallow and Deep Ecology:

Questions:

Address any of the questions above, or these below:

In what ways has the technology  influenced our relationship with the natural world?

Does the planet have value intrinsically apart from its value for human use?

What steps do you think human beings should take to live ethically and eco-consciously in the 21st century?

“An object of an entirely new order – no less than the whole biosphere of the planet—has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it.” -Hans Jonas

“It will certainly not be easy to awaken in people a new sense of responsibility for the world, an ability to conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever, and to be held answerable for its condition one day.” -Vaclav Havel

“The Ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” –Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day

“The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?” -Jeremy Rifkin

Deep Ecology:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.” –Leopold’s Land Ethic

“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — of sun, and wind, and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford for ever!  And such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rains tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.  Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Many of us have opinions about technology that can be classified along the spectrum of being a “techno-optimist” or a “techno-pessimist” — categorizations that reflect our general attitude about our technological past, present, and future.

When you think about the way in which technology has impacted our world—from the environment, to our medical achievements, to human relationships — are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about its influence?

Are you a techno-optimist? Do you think technology has consistently improved our lives for the better, and that it will continue to do so into the future?  When you consider problems in society, or even problems with current technology, do you think that the solution to those problems is more technology?

Or would you characterize yourself as a techno-pessimist? Are you generally concerned with the impact that modern technology has had on humanity, believing that it has created just as many problems as solutions?  Do you think that seeking out more technology is likely to bring about new problems, because technology inevitably introduces unforeseen consequences and dangers? Do you think that since technology creates so many of its own problems, the answer to human progress often lies in a reduction of technological dependence, rather than an expansion of it?

You may find that you don’t fall solidly into one camp or the other; and extremes of these two camps, of course, both hold with them their risks.  Blind technological-optimism and faith in technological fixes for problems leads one to always focus on looking for a technological fix, thereby overlooking non-technological interventions.   Alternatively, complete resistance to technology is untenable, and may cause us to overlook potential technologies that could be helpful.

But it’s important to remember that neither of these characterizations has to be relegated to an extreme.  A techno-optimist is not necessarily a Singularity-obsessed Cyborg-wannabe, blindly advocating for technological expansion; and a techno-pessimist is not necessarily a techno-phobe who withdraws from society completely to a cabin in the woods (although that’s not to say that these types of people don’t exist, to be sure).

It’s likely you fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two extremes, and have developed that view based on how technology has influenced your own life, and how you have perceived that technology has affected our society.  Consider some of the following examples, and reflect on where you fall on the techno-optimist/techno-pessimist spectrum:

• Have social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, alongside communication technologies like cell phones, texting, and so on, increased our capacity to communicate, or diminished it?  Have we forged better relationships as a result of these technologies, or has the quality of our relationships deteriorated?  Do such technologies stimulate or dull our intellects?  Do they tend to enhance our emotional depth, or inhibit deep emotional responses? Do they lead us to be more or less active, physically and socially?  Do they allow us to become more aware of the world around us, or less?

• Is the solution to the climate crisis to be found in the hopes of green technologies, or to be found by making changes to human behavior?  Should we invest in technology to solve our climate problems, or should we invest in reducing our dependence on energy through social and behavioral changes, such as reducing our habits of consumption?  Even if we can do both, does focusing on future hopes for new ‘clean’ and ‘green’ technologies reduce our motivation to make necessary lifestyle changes now?  Or are such technologies the only real solution we can expect for our environmental problems?

• Have advancements in medicine been unequivocally positive?  What has been the impact of technologies like x-rays, antibiotics, antidepressants, and end-of-life care (like respirators) had on the whole of human experience?  To what extent have they improved our quality of life, and to what extent have they affected it negatively?

• Can social and environmental problems, ones that are arguably “non-technical” in nature, have “technological” solutions? For example, given the world’s global food shortage, should we encourage the proliferation of agricultural biotechnology, including genetically engineering crops, with the aim to increasing food yield?  Or should we look to individuals and social movements to make changes in human behavior, such as putting emphasis on limiting food waste, distributing food supply more evenly, and placing value on a certain degree of self-sacrifice?

Leave your comment below, assessing where you fall on the spectrum, and why:

Are you a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist?  What experiences or ideas have caused you to develop this view?

“Today’s world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind – the drought, floods, communicable diseases- are less of a problem than ever before.  They have been replaced by the risks of humanity’s own making – the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war.  Society must hope that the world’s ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to create them.”– J. Clarence Davies, quoted in Conservation Foundation: State of the Environment, An Assessment at Mid-Decade, 1984

In the 2004 film I, Robot, Will Smith’s character Detective Spooner harbors a deep grudge for all things technological — and turns out to be justified after a new generation of robots engage in a full out, summer blockbuster-style revolt against their human creators.

Why was Detective Spooner such a Luddite–even before the Robots’ vicious revolt?  Much of his resentment stems from a car accident he endured in which a robot saved his life instead of a little girl’s.  The robot’s decision haunts Smith’s character throughout the movie; he feels the decision lacked emotion, and what one might call ‘humanity’.

“I was the logical choice,” he says. “(The robot) calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival.  Sarah only had an 11% chance.”  He continues, dramatically, “But that was somebody’s baby.  11% is more than enough.  A human being would’ve known that.”

But what, exactly, is it that the human being would’ve known?  And how would they have known it?

Humans seem equipped to solve ethical dilemmas by relying on biological and socialized intuitions, intuitions that supplement logic with humanity, mere numbers with emotion.  While the robot made ethical decisions based on narrow algorithms of numerical inputs and outputs, the human makes ethical decisions based on a wider range of factors, drawing from wells of varying experiences, prejudices, and conceptions of justice.  One person might evaluate the situation from a rights perspective, while another might imagine himself or herself in the position and use empathy as a rationale.  Whatever the conclusion, the human agent would engage in a complex process of thinking, feeling, and imagining — a process that relies on a set of moral intuitions and intellectual rubrics we refer to broadly as a “moral compass.”

Would it be possible for a robot to have a moral compass, too?  And if so, what would it look like? In their seminal book on robot ethics entitled “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong,” Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen discuss the very real, very pressing questions posed by the immediate future of robotics, in which moral decision making extends beyond the realm of human beings to what Wallach and Allen call “artifical moral agents” — non-human moral machines that make decisions with ethically significant repercussions.

Though fully conscious robots are still confined to science fiction, consider some of the following examples of “moral machines” in today’s world:

Wendell Wallach is a consultant and writer affiliated with Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics; Colin Allen is a Professor of Cognitive Science and History & Philosophy of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.  They are co-authors of the book “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong” and maintain a blog on related topics at MoralMachines.blogspot.com.  This post is the introductory chapter of their book, reprinted here with their permission.

Introduction To Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong

By Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen

In the Affective Computing Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), scientists are designing computers that can read human emotions. Financial institutions have implemented worldwide computer networks that evaluate and approve or reject millions of transactions every minute. Roboticists in Japan, Europe, and the United States are developing service robots to care for the elderly and disabled. Japanese scientists are also working to make androids appear indistinguishable from humans. The government of South Korea has announced its goal to put a robot in every home by the year 2020. It is also developing weapons-carrying robots in conjunction with Samsung to help guard its border with North Korea. Meanwhile, human activity is being facilitated, monitored, and analyzed by computer chips in every conceivable device, from automobiles to garbage cans, and by software “bots” in every conceivable virtual environment, from web surfing to online shopping. The data collected by these (ro)bots—a term we’ll use to encompass both physical robots and software agents—is being used for commercial, governmental, and medical purposes.

All of these developments are converging on the creation of (ro)bots whose independence from direct human oversight, and whose potential impact on human well-being, are the stuff of science fiction. Isaac Asimov, over fifty years ago, foresaw the need for ethical rules to guide the behavior of robots. His Three Laws of Robotics are what people think of first when they think of machine morality.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov, however, was writing stories. He was not confronting the challenge that faces today’s engineers: to ensure that the systems they build are beneficial to humanity and don’t cause harm to people. Whether Asimov’s Three Laws are truly helpful for ensuring that (ro)bots will act morally is one of the questions we’ll consider in this book.

Within the next few years, we predict there will be a catastrophic incident brought about by a computer system making a decision independent of human oversight. Already, in October 2007, a semiautonomous robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing 9 soldiers and wounding 14 others—although early reports conflicted about whether it was a software or hardware malfunction. The potential for an even bigger disaster will increase as such machines become more fully autonomous. Even if the coming calamity does not kill as many people as the terrorist acts of 9/11, it will provoke a comparably broad range of political responses. These responses will range from calls for more to be spent on improving the technology, to calls for an outright ban on the technology (if not an outright “war against robots”).

Today’s systems are approaching a level of complexity that requires the systems themselves to make moral decisions

A concern for safety and societal benefits has always been at the forefront of engineering. But today’s systems are approaching a level of complexity that, we argue, requires the systems themselves to make moral decisions—to be programmed with “ethical subroutines,” to borrow a phrase from Star Trek. This will expand the circle of moral agents beyond humans to artificially intelligent systems, which we will call artificial moral agents (AMAs).

We don’t know exactly how a catastrophic incident will unfold, but the following tale may give some idea.
Monday, July 23, 2012, starts like any ordinary day. A little on the warm side in much of the United States perhaps, with peak electricity demand expected to be high, but not at a record level. Energy costs are rising in the United States, and speculators have been driving up the price of futures, as well as the spot price of oil, which stands close to $300 a barrel. Some slightly unusual automated trading activity in the energy derivatives markets over past weeks has caught the eye of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but the banks have assured the regulators that their programs are operating within normal parameters.

At 10:15 a.m. on the East Coast, the price of oil drops slightly in response to news of the discovery of large new reserves in the Bahamas. Software at the investment division of Orange and Nassau Bank computes that it can a turn a profit by emailing a quarter of its customers with a buy recommendation for oil futures, temporarily shoring up the spot market prices, as dealers stockpile supplies to meet the future demand, and then selling futures short to the rest of its customers. This plan essentially plays one sector of the customer base off against the rest, which is completely unethical, of course. But the bank’s software has not been programmed to consider such niceties. In fact, the money-making scenario autonomously planned by the computer is an unintended consequence of many individually sound principles. The computer’s ability to concoct this scheme could not easily have been anticipated by the programmers.

Unfortunately, the “buy” email that the computer sends directly to the customers works too well. Investors, who are used to seeing the price of oil climb and climb, jump enthusiastically on the bandwagon, and the spot price of oil suddenly climbs well beyond $300 and shows no sign of slowing down. It’s now 11:30 a.m. on the East Coast, and temperatures are climbing more rapidly than predicted. Software controlling New Jersey’s power grid computes that it can meet the unexpected demand while keeping the cost of energy down by using its coal-fired plants in preference to its oil-fired generators. However, one of the coal-burning generators suffers an explosion while running at peak capacity, and before anyone can act, cascading blackouts take out the power supply for half the East Coast. Wall Street is affected, but not before SEC regulators notice that the rise in oil future prices was a computer-driven shell game between automatically traded accounts of Orange and Nassau Bank. As the news spreads, and investors plan to shore up their positions, it is clear that the prices will fall dramatically as soon as the markets reopen and millions of dollars will be lost. In the meantime, the blackouts have spread far enough that many people are unable to get essential medical treatment, and many more are stranded far from home.

Detecting the spreading blackouts as a possible terrorist action, security screening software at Reagan National Airport automatically sets itself to the highest security level and applies biometric matching criteria that make it more likely than usual for people to be flagged as suspicious. The software, which has no mechanism for weighing the benefits of preventing a terrorist attack against the inconvenience its actions will cause for tens of thousands of people in the airport, identifies a cluster of five passengers, all waiting for Flight 231 to London, as potential terrorists. This large concentration of “suspects” on a single flight causes the program to trigger a lock down of the airport, and the dispatch of a Homeland Security response team to the terminal. Because passengers are already upset and nervous, the situation at the gate for Flight 231 spins out of control, and shots are fired.

By the time power is restored to the East Coast and the markets reopen days later, hundreds of deaths and the loss of billions of dollars can be attributed to the separately programmed decisions of these multiple interacting systems

An alert sent from the Department of Homeland Security to the airlines that a terrorist attack may be under way leads many carriers to implement measures to land their fleets. In the confusion caused by large numbers of planes trying to land at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, an executive jet collides with a Boeing 777, killing 157 passengers and crew. Seven more people die when debris lands on the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights and starts a fire in a block of homes.

Meanwhile, robotic machine guns installed on the U.S.-Mexican border receive a signal that places them on red alert. They are programmed to act autonomously in code red conditions, enabling the detection and elimination of potentially hostile targets without direct human oversight. One of these robots fires on a Hummer returning from an off-road trip near Nogales, Arizona, destroying the vehicle and killing three U.S. citizens.

By the time power is restored to the East Coast and the markets reopen days later, hundreds of deaths and the loss of billions of dollars can be attributed to the separately programmed decisions of these multiple interacting systems. The effects continue to be felt for months.

Time may prove us poor prophets of disaster. Our intent in predicting such a catastrophe is not to be sensational or to instill fear. This is not a book about the horrors of technology. Our goal is to frame discussion in a way that constructively guides the engineering task of designing AMAs. The purpose of our prediction is to draw attention to the need for work on moral machines to begin now, not twenty to a hundred years from now when technology has caught up with science fiction.

The field of machine morality extends the field of computer ethics beyond concern for what people do with their computers to questions about what the machines do by themselves. (In this book we will use the terms ethics and morality interchangeably.) We are discussing the technological issues involved in making computers themselves into explicit moral reasoners. As artificial intelligence (AI) expands the scope of autonomous agents, the challenge of how to design these agents so that they honor the broader set of values and laws humans demand of human moral agents becomes increasingly urgent.

Does humanity really want computers making morally important decisions? Many philosophers of technology have warned about humans abdicating responsibility to machines. Movies and magazines are filled with futuristic fantasies about the dangers of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. Emerging technologies are always easier to modify before they become entrenched. However, it is not often possible to predict accurately the impact of a new technology on society until well after it has been widely adopted. Some critics think, therefore, that humans should err on the side of caution and relinquish the development of potentially dangerous technologies. We believe, however, that market and political forces will prevail and will demand the benefits that these technologies can provide. Thus, it is incumbent on anyone with a stake in this technology to address head-on the task of implementing moral decision making in computers, robots, and virtual “bots” within computer networks.

As noted, this book is not about the horrors of technology. Yes, the machines are coming. Yes, their existence will have unintended effects on human lives and welfare, not all of them good. But no, we do not believe that increasing reliance on autonomous systems will undermine people’s basic humanity. Neither, in our view, will advanced robots enslave or exterminate humanity, as in the best traditions of science fiction. Humans have always adapted to their technological products, and the benefits to people of having autonomous machines around them will most likely outweigh the costs.

If humanity is to avoid the consequences of bad autonomous artificial agents, people must be prepared to think hard about what it will take to make such agents good.

However, this optimism does not come for free. It is not possible to just sit back and hope that things will turn out for the best. If humanity is to avoid the consequences of bad autonomous artificial agents, people must be prepared to think hard about what it will take to make such agents good.

In proposing to build moral decision-making machines, are we still immersed in the realm of science fiction—or, perhaps worse, in that brand of science fantasy often associated with artificial intelligence? The charge might be justified if we were making bold predictions about the dawn of AMAs or claiming that “it’s just a matter of time” before walking, talking machines will replace the human beings to whom people now turn for moral guidance. We are not futurists, however, and we do not know whether the apparent technological barriers to artificial intelligence are real or illusory. Nor are we interested in speculating about what life will be like when your counselor is a robot, or even in predicting whether this will ever come to pass. Rather, we are interested in the incremental steps arising from present technologies that suggest a need for ethical decision-making capabilities. Perhaps small steps will eventually lead to full-blown artificial intelligence—hopefully a less murderous counterpart to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey—but even if fully intelligent systems will remain beyond reach, we think there is a real issue facing engineers that cannot be addressed by engineers alone.

Is it too early to be broaching this topic? We don’t think so. Industrial robots engaged in repetitive mechanical tasks have caused injury and even death. The demand for home and service robots is projected to create a worldwide market double that of industrial robots by 2010, and four times bigger by 2025. With the advent of home and service robots, robots are no longer confined to controlled industrial environments where only trained workers come into contact with them. Small robot pets, for example Sony’s AIBO, are the harbinger of larger robot appliances. Millions of robot vacuum cleaners, for example iRobot’s “Roomba,” have been purchased. Rudimentary robot couriers in hospitals and robot guides in museums have already appeared. Considerable attention is being directed at the development of service robots that will perform basic household tasks and assist the elderly and the homebound. Computer programs initiate millions of financial transactions with an efficiency that humans can’t duplicate. Software decisions to buy and then resell stocks, commodities, and currencies are made within seconds, exploiting potentials for profit that no human is capable of detecting in real time, and representing a significant percentage of the activity on world markets.

Automated financial systems, robotic pets, and robotic vacuum cleaners are still a long way short of the science fiction scenarios of fully autonomous machines making decisions that radically affect human welfare. Although 2001 has passed, Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL remains a fiction, and it is a safe bet that the doomsday scenario of The Terminator will not be realized before its sell-by date of 2029. It is perhaps not quite as safe to bet against the Matrix being realized by 2199. However, humans are already at a point where engineered systems make decisions that can affect humans’ lives and that have ethical ramifications. In the worst cases, they have profound negative effect.

Is it possible to build AMAs? Fully conscious artificial systems with complete human moral capacities may perhaps remain forever in the realm of science fiction. Nevertheless, we believe that more limited systems will soon be built. Such systems will have some capacity to evaluate the ethical ramifications of their actions—for example, whether they have no option but to violate a property right to protect a privacy right.

The task of designing AMAs requires a serious look at ethical theory, which originates from a human-centered perspective. The values and concerns expressed in the world’s religious and philosophical traditions are not easily applied to machines. Rule-based ethical systems, for example the Ten Commandments or Asimov’s Three Laws for Robots, might appear somewhat easier to embed in a computer, but as Asimov’s many robot stories show, even three simple rules (later four) can give rise to many ethical dilemmas. Aristotle’s ethics emphasized character over rules: good actions flowed from good character, and the aim of a flourishing human being was to develop a virtuous character. It is, of course, hard enough for humans to develop their own virtues, let alone developing appropriate virtues for computers or robots. Facing the engineering challenge entailed in going from Aristotle to Asimov and beyond will require looking at the origins of human morality as viewed in the fields of evolution, learning and development, neuropsychology, and philosophy.

Reflection about AMAs forces one to think deeply about how humans function, which human abilities can be implemented in the machines humans design, and what characteristics truly distinguish humans from new forms of intelligence that humans create

Machine morality is just as much about human decision making as about the philosophical and practical issues of implementing AMAs. Reflection about and experimentation in building AMAs forces one to think deeply about how humans function, which human abilities can be implemented in the machines humans design, and what characteristics truly distinguish humans from animals or from new forms of intelligence that humans create. Just as AI has stimulated new lines of enquiry in the philosophy of mind, machine morality has the potential to stimulate new lines of enquiry in ethics. Robotics and AI laboratories could become experimental centers for testing theories of moral decision making in artificial systems.

Three questions emerge naturally from the discussion so far. Does the world need AMAs? Do people want computers making moral decisions? And if people believe that computers making moral decisions are necessary or inevitable, how should engineers and philosophers proceed to design AMAs?

Chapter Overviews

Chapters 1 and 2 are concerned with the first question, why humans need AMAs. In chapter 1, we discuss the inevitability of AMAs and give examples of current and innovative technologies that are converging on sophisticated systems that will require some capacity for moral decision making. We discuss how such capacities will initially be quite rudimentary but nonetheless present real challenges. Not the least of these challenges is to specify what the goals should be for the designers of such systems—that is, what do we mean by a “good” AMA?

In chapter 2, we will offer a framework for understanding the trajectories of increasingly sophisticated AMAs by emphasizing two dimensions, those of autonomy and of sensitivity to morally relevant facts. Systems at the low end of these dimensions have only what we call “operational morality”—that is, their moral significance is entirely in the hands of designers and users. As machines become more sophisticated, a kind of “functional morality” is technologically possible such that the machines themselves have the capacity for assessing and responding to moral challenges. However, the creators of functional morality in machines face many constraints due to the limits of present technology.

The nature of ethics places a different set of constraints on the acceptability of computers making ethical decisions. Thus we are led naturally to the question addressed in chapter 3: whether people want computers making moral decisions. Worries about AMAs are a specific case of more general concerns about the effects of technology on human culture. Therefore, we begin by reviewing the relevant portions of philosophy of technology to provide a context for the more specific concerns raised by AMAs. Some concerns, for example whether AMAs will lead humans to abrogate responsibility to machines, seem particularly pressing. Other concerns, for example the prospect of humans becoming literally enslaved to machines, seem to us highly speculative. The unsolved problem of technology risk assessment is how seriously to weigh catastrophic possibilities against the obvious advantages provided by new technologies.

How close could artificial agents come to being considered moral agents if they lack human qualities, for example consciousness and emotions? In chapter 4, we begin by discussing the issue of whether a “mere” machine can be a moral agent. We take the instrumental approach that while full-blown moral agency may be beyond the current or future technology, there is nevertheless much space between operational morality and “genuine” moral agency. This is the niche we identified as functional morality in chapter 2. The goal of chapter 4 is to address the suitability of current work in AI for specifying the features required to produce AMAs for various applications.

Having dealt with these general AI issues, we turn our attention to the specific implementation of moral decision making. Chapter 5 outlines what philosophers and engineers have to offer each other, and describes a basic framework for top-down and bottom-up or developmental approaches to the design of AMAs. Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, describe the top-down and bottom-up approaches in detail. In chapter 6, we discuss the computability and practicability of rule- and duty-based conceptions of ethics, as well as the possibility of computing the net effect of an action as required by consequentialist approaches to ethics. In chapter 7, we consider bottom-up approaches, which apply methods of learning, development, or evolution with the goal of having moral capacities emerge from general aspects of intelligence. There are limitations regarding the computability of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches, which we describe in these chapters. The new field of machine morality must consider these limitations, explore the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to programming AMAs, and then lay the groundwork for engineering AMAs in a philosophically and cognitively sophisticated way.

What emerges from our discussion in chapters 6 and 7 is that the original distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches is too simplistic to cover all the challenges that the designers of AMAs will face. This is true at the level of both engineering design and, we think, ethical theory. Engineers will need to combine top-down and bottom-up methods to build workable systems. The difficulties of applying general moral theories in a top-down fashion also motivate a discussion of a very different conception of morality that can be traced to Aristotle, namely, virtue ethics. Virtues are a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up approaches, in that the virtues themselves can be explicitly described, but their acquisition as character traits seems essentially to be a bottom-up process. We discuss virtue ethics for AMAs in chapter 8.

Our goal in writing this book is not just to raise a lot of questions but to provide a resource for further development of these themes. In chapter 9, we survey the software tools that are being exploited for the development of computer moral decision making.

The top-down and bottom-up approaches emphasize the importance in ethics of the ability to reason. However, much of the recent empirical literature on moral psychology emphasizes faculties besides rationality. Emotions, sociability, semantic understanding, and consciousness are all important to human moral decision making, but it remains an open question whether these will be essential to AMAs, and if so, whether they can be implemented in machines. In chapter 10, we discuss recent, cutting-edge, scientific investigations aimed at providing computers and robots with such suprarational capacities, and in chapter 11 we present a specific framework in which the rational and the suprarational might be combined in a single machine.

In chapter 12, we come back to our second guiding question concerning the desirability of computers making moral decisions, but this time with a view to making recommendations about how to monitor and manage the dangers through public policy or mechanisms of social and business liability management.

Finally, in the epilogue, we briefly discuss how the project of designing AMAs feeds back into humans’ understanding of themselves as moral agents, and of the nature of ethical theory itself. The limitations we see in current ethical theory concerning such theories’ usefulness for guiding AMAs highlights deep questions about their purpose and value.

Some basic moral decisions may be quite easy to implement in computers, while skill at tackling more difficult moral dilemmas is well beyond present technology. Regardless of how quickly or how far humans progress in developing AMAs, in the process of addressing this challenge,humans will make significant strides in understanding what truly remarkable creatures they are. The exercise of thinking through the way moral decisions are made with the granularity necessary to begin implementing similar faculties into (ro)bots is thus an exercise in self-understanding. We cannot hope to do full justice to these issues, or indeed to all of the issues raised throughout the book. However, it is our sincere hope that by raising them in this form we will inspire others to pick up where we have left off, and take the next steps toward moving this project from theory to practice, from philosophy to engineering, and on to a deeper understanding of the field of ethics itself.

To Order “Moral Machines”, please click here.

Questions:

Should we develop Artificial Moral Agents?  If so, what ethical decisions do you think robots should be permitted to make?What ethical principles should guide their behavior?

How much responsibility should AMAs have for their actions?  If a robot commits a crime, who should be held responsible?  (For example, if a military robot kills an innocent civilian, who is responsible for that death?  The robot, or the person who programmed it?)  If the robot has moral culpability, does the robot also deserve rights?

-Anthony F. Beavers, Ph.D., in Review of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong by Wendall Wallach and Colin Allen. Read more here.

Can you remember life before cell phones?

A time when if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you had to leave a message, and (gasp!) wait until they returned home to call you back?

A time before digital contact lists, when you memorized your friend’s phone numbers?

A time when if you planned to meet someone at a specific time and they were late, you’d just have to hang around until they got there?

It’s hard to imagine, but just give it a try: can you remember life before you had a device with you, at all times, everywhere you go?

Today’s post is about the gadget that has wormed its way into the life of over 80% of American’s lives, and explores what it’s like to live in a world where quiet, un-connected moments are few and far between, increasingly replaced by the twitter of texts and cell phone chatter.  Guest poster SCU student Chris Kelly explores this everpresent issue in his article Smartphones Distract From Reality, writing that cell phones are “changing the way we think about free time.” Chris’s article, ahead.

Chris Kelly is an English major and a Senior at Santa Clara University.  This post is adapted from his article, “Smartphones Distract From Reality“, which originally appeared in SCU’s newspaper The Santa Clara.  He can be reached at crkelly@scu.edu.

Smartphones Distract From Reality

It’s annoying, but I find myself doing it. No, it’s not sleeping through the alarm clock or spilling instant oatmeal on my shirt in the morning. It’s that five-minute filler, that substitute for silence.

As far as I am concerned, iPhones and other products of the like are now cooler than neon spandex was in the 1980s or Kanye West’s music is to the current white middle class. I do not personally own an iPhone or Blackberry, but that does not keep me from participating in useless phone conversations in order to kill time. With or without high-tech cell phones, kids, parents, businessmen, the people who steam your lattes and yes, the rest of the world, are changing the way we think about free time.

Modern society is slowly eliminating what we often define as peacefulness, only to replace it with unnecessary, superficial conversation and web surfing.

A college campus, office building or busy city street are perfect locations to witness firsthand how modern society is slowly eliminating what we often define as peacefulness, only to replace it with unnecessary, superficial conversation and web surfing.

How often do you overhear someone on the phone orating something along the lines of “O hey, watcha doin? Nothing? O, me either,” while you, by yourself, are walking peacefully? Tranquility, apparently, has lost its stock value, while looking like Ari Gold from Entourage and keeping extremely busy has broken the glass ceiling of coolness.

While normal texts and conversations are socially acceptable, tethered technologies, such as the Blackberry and iPhone, are the power tools that are constructing the barrier between ourselves and the traditional daily events to which we are accustomed, such as face to face conversation and, more importantly, paying attention to our superiors during college classes and office meetings, instead of the YouTube shenanigans playing on our hand-held screens.

According to Apple, over 16 million Americans owned an iPhone as of last June. I cannot imagine that the Blackberry is very far behind, and I can guarantee that Santa Clara University represents a couple thousand of those in active use and another couple hundred that are now broken from using them incidentally as coasters, bottle openers and napkins. In any case, they are being used as much as 15-cent ramen packets are used in my kitchen.

The infatuation with these phones is not difficult to understand. There are certain tools and games that are simply addictive. How about those crafty widgets? They are the solution to avoiding that moral obligation we call responsibility or using that difficult thing we call a memory. Can’t spell? No problem. Don’t want a real hamster? Put a digital one on your phone, name him Lemmingwinks and feed him when you feel like it; he will not die if your phone runs out of battery.

Maybe, if we are lucky, we will whimsically fall back into the Dark Ages and barbarians will come burn all our books and sack our cities while we drink mead and reinvent the feudal system.

There are, however, plenty of advantages to these dangerous technologies. For example, the new Apple “bump widget,” which allows you to physically bump your iPhone against another iPhone and exchange contact information.

So next time you are walking by yourself to the library or to your favorite sandwhich shop, instead of screaming out “my friend likes you!” when you see that beautiful girl carrying an iPhone, you can just bump into her and say “Oh, hey, look at that, I got your number, we might as well make this work.”

My personal favorite widget was created by Jordan Palmer (no, not Carson Palmer, his brother). It’s called Run and Pee, a comprehensive list of convenient times to visit the bathroom while watching a movie at the theatre.

Though the program has yet to be officially approved by Apple, I have approved it as totally hilarious and totally necessary for those who order a liter of cola at the concession stand.

So should we continue to embrace these technologies with eager fingers? Maybe, but the next time you find yourself walking to wherever it is that you walk, creeped out by the tranquility that surrounds you, just remember that it’s natural, even healthy, and at the end of the day remember: no one really likes Ari Gold.

I think Chris is spot on that people are increasingly “creeped out” by tranquility; everywhere you look, people are glued to their cell phones, and it has become harder and harder to just sit in silence for a few minutes without feeling the urge to check your phone, send a quick message, or search through your phone mindlessly until the period of waiting is over.  Haven’t we all had the experience of waiting for a friend to show up or for a class to start, when we pull out our cell phone and start messaging someone, simply because it feels awkward just sitting there? Tranquility, as Chris says, has lost its stock value: cell phones have bred a culture where it is simply uncomfortable to sit alone without being (or even just looking) busy.  Moments of downtime that perhaps used to be time for quiet thought or a casual conversation with someone nearby are now filled to the brim with ‘texts’ and ‘widgets’ — it seems there’s not a moment that goes by now that can’t be occupied by this tethered technological gadget.

Chris’s article also brings to mind a few interesting points about our “cell phone society”, about the way cell phones have affected communal spaces and how they have changed how we interact with one another.  His comment that cell phones “are constructing the barrier between ourselves and the traditional daily events to which we are accustomed” reminds me of an article by Christine Rosen called, “Our Cell Phones, Ourselves,” in which she writes that cell phones have led to a “radical disengagement in the public sphere” wherein people sacrifice not only etiquette, but also engagement in the world around them as a result of being so cell-phone centric.  Standing in lines at the supermarket chatting away, sitting in coffee shops hooked into our text messages, conducting conversations in person while checking our phones every other minute: cell phones have caused us to become “absently present”— physically in a place but mentally absent, off in another world preoccupied by our phones.

This “absent presence” is all too common on college campuses, as Chris writes, where students are glued to their cell phones, chatting or texting, paying attention to their miniature screens instead of what is actually going on around them.  It can be almost comical to observe “absent presence” in the classroom, where rows of students are eagerly texting away on their cell phones before, after, and during breaks in classes, often at the expense of talking to their peers sitting right next to them. Indeed, everyone in the room is having a conversation: however, it’s not with each other, but with the network of people they are connected to on their phones.  What effect does this have on classroom dynamics?  On how a community functions as a whole?  Psychologist Kenneth Gergen thinks that this erosion of face-to-face community is a moral failing; Rosen adds, “It would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life — an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and tolerable.”  Is there merit to Gergen and Rosen’s point? Are our cell phone habits harmless time fillers, or are they actually contributing to the degradation of community life?

It may seem like no big deal to whip out your cell phone during these periods of “downtime” in your day…but it is interesting to consider the opportunity cost of these moments that are now busied by “superficial conversations and websurfing”–moments when we used to be able to let our minds wander, or might have struck up a conversation with an actual person nearby.  When you think about life before cell phones, are there aspects of it that you think would be wise to regain? In being so technologically connected, what other connections are we losing as a result?

Questions:

Have cell phones changed the way you experience “downtime” throughout your day? Have you ever tried to go “cell-phone-less” and if so, what effect did it have on what you thought about or did when you would have otherwise been on your phone?

But as trust is being built and bolstered moment by moment between individuals, public trust among strangers in social settings is eroding. We are strengthening and increasing our interactions with the people we already know at the expense of those who we do not. The result, according to Kenneth Gergen, is “the erosion of face-to-face community, a coherent and centered sense of self, moral bearings, depth of relationship, and the uprooting of meaning from material context: such are the dangers of absent presence.”

-Christine Rosen, Our Cell Phones, Ourselves.  Read more here.