Technology As Helpmate

Monday, 31 March 2014

Robert McGinley Myers has written a beautiful post about technology and its increasing use anoutboard brain. Myers examines the brouhaha over Romantimatic, an app that provides reminders to send notes to your loved ones, and places it in a larger context of technology’s role as partner rather than replacement:

This is why I find it odd that apps like Romantimatic are accused of outsourcing our humanity. I’ve been trying out Romantimatic myself in the past couple of weeks. I chose to delete all the prefab text messages (which may have been a design flaw, though I appreciate their sense of humor). Instead, I use the app as an unscheduled, random reminder to think about my wife and tell her what I’m thinking. This does not rob me of my humanity. If anything, it stops me in the middle of my day and reminds me to think about something of greater importance, not unlike a brief meditation or prayer.

Technology is not our savior, ready to deliver some utopian future, but it does not have to be our enemy. It’s been with us since the beginning, from poetry to reminder apps. Far from making us less human, it can even reawaken us to our humanity in the midst of our mechanized, busy lives. We just have to learn how to use it.

Perhaps I am overly optimistic when it comes to technology, but this feels right. As I’ve written before, computational scientific discovery shouldn’t make us worry at our own obsolescence; it can give usnaches and make us proud of the abilities of our creations:

…if it’s our machines doing the discovering, we can still have naches—we can take an often vicarious pride and joy in the success of our progeny. We made these machines, so their discoveries are at least partly due to humanity. And that’s exciting, as these programs of the future begin to uncover new truths about the universe.

And when our technological creations are too complicated to understand, we shouldn’t despair either. We can regain a certain amount of humility, lost since the Enlightenment:

And when things get too complicated and we end up being surprised by the workings of the structures humanity has created? At that point, we will have to take a cue from those who turn up their collars to the unexpected wintry mix and sigh as they proceed outdoors: we will have to become a bit more humble. Those like Maimonides, who lived before the Enlightenment, recognised that there were bounds to what we could know, and it might be time to return to that way of thinking. Of course, we shouldn’t throw our hands up and say that just because we can’t understand something, there is nothing else to learn. But at the same time, it might be time to get reacquainted with our limits.

So, the response of Myers feels like a good one. Technology doesn’t necessarily eliminate what is human within us. It can be a helpmate, showing us certain sides of our humanity that we might have forgotten about.