Analysis Of Selections From Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology

Technology has been a steadily evolving partner to humankind for the past couple decades. As technology continues to grow at an exponential rate, humans must cope with the fact that their evolutionary progress has been halted. Aspects that make humans unique are slowly being replicated in robotics, which are technologies that have artificial intelligence, making the line between human and machine more obscure. There exists a controversy on whether or not robots can acquire a level of thinking that is similar to that of humans. Some people believe that there are several traits unique to humans, such as emotions, that cannot be replicated in technology. These emotions are the psychological response to experiences, not the physiological response

This intellect is the sheer knowledge and brain power that each individual human being possesses. These experts believe that traits such as emotions are not an essential part of the singularity, and that robotics can advance without emotional qualia, the conscious experience of emotions. The singularity is the point in time when technology’s efficiency and cognitive power equals that of human’s. This controversy is touched upon in Sherry Turkle’s “Selections From Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other”. Turkle also defines the singularity as “the moment when machine intelligence crosses a tipping point” (Turkle 459). She also provides the frame that the singularity requires technology to have a psychological response to emotions. Being that there exists a consensus of experts that all advocate that the singularity is possible, a question is brought forth; what would the effects of the singularity be, if it is possible? If the singularity is not possible, then these effects will be negligible. If the singularity is possible, then the way humankind functions as a whole may change

Due to Moore’s Law, technology is continuously evolving and soon they will no longer need humans to program them or provide them with the means to gather information. They will be able to learn from and program themselves. “The breakthroughs necessary for such programs to learn from themselves could happen easily in [this decade]” (Hall 47). The interesting situation arises with computers that are programmed to be modeled after the human brain and its neural connectivity. If these computers are able to learn from themselves, they would essentially be learning from a human brain. By doing this, it is possible that the computer may be able to develop human values and morals. Computers learning what it means to be human enables them to become human themselves, for they would now adopt our values, our morals, and they would not need the emotional qualia necessary to perform humanlike cognitive tasks (Hall 47). Our values and morals are our consistent behaviors that humans pursue in order to do what they consider or what society considers right. This leaves a considerable amount of power in the hands of the programmers of these robots. Programmers will have to provide robots with the knowledge of our values and morals, however, they will also have the ability to give the robot its own ideals. This will have to be prevented with careful monitoring of the