Are we becoming Facebook Robots?

I know it’s terribly unfashionable to talk about Facebook and I’m probably not to be the first one to have this thought but I was wondering if this could potentially be the first official step we humans are taking in turning into robots. If you think about it, we post something up on a screen which is of emotional relevance to us, such as ‘My Mum died two years ago today, and I still miss her’ and people write back on the screen ‘she was an amazing lady’ and we read the screen and then think for a moment and then move on.

Through Facebook we are processing our emotions through a computer and getting feedback via a screen. So something as incredibly poignant as the anniversary of your mother’s death is being reduced to sitting in front of a screen typing into a computer and then waiting for the feedback the computer gives you. Through this technology we are missing real human contact and taking the time to really sit down and feel what is going on today and process the feelings that come with the memories. Even if we do that and we want to share that, we are going to a computer to share it, and write it up on a screen, as if the computer is the one from whom we can get human contact, validation and empathy. Even though it is a human being on the other end who is reminding you how amazing your mother was, it’s still going through a computer.

So if we go to a computer screen to process, express or validate our emotions; or if we go to a computer screen to talk about our day, our memories, our thoughts, how far away are we from being robots? I remember last year I would be in my bedroom and would read a status update by my flat mate who was in the next dorm room and I would comment on the status rather than go next door to speak to her. That’s mental! As technology progresses, I was also wondering how long it will be until we just have a chip in our wrist which carries all our information like Oyster card and bank cards etc and we just swipe our wrist when we want to travel or when we want to buy something.

If you don’t have enough money the product you’re trying to buy in the supermarket will simply remain locked on the shelf. We now have self checkout, soon the checkout will be on the shelf and soon we might have robots helping us like we have robotic services when buying cinema tickets. I was speaking to my friend Brendan about this and he said one day the chip might also be able to create relevant pop up adverts in shop windows as you pass them. Selfridges covered in porn, I joked. They are already coming up with passwords where you just have to think of your favourite song and the computer registers your brain activity. Soon we will just have to think of our status update and it will go up on our Facebook status. We’ll be sitting in a restaurant opposite our best friend during a meal and we will think: (robotic voice) “Isn’t this food nice?” And you get a robotic voice back: “Yes. Very nice.” It really is hard to break away from Facebook and twitter and all the updates, but perhaps we need to keep an eye on how we relate to people and how much human contact we get vs computer contact.

 If not we will probably form some new race of humanoids and there will be a divide, between those who opt to play outside, do a bit of gardening, play musical instruments or whatever and those who tapped into The Matrix and living a completely different, emotionally repressed and stunted existence. I am taking this quite far, because I’ve been spending too much Facebook and really need to quit. But it might be worth thinking about how much emotionally relevant experiences are being fed into the computer rather than into a person in front of you. Is your social life predominantly going through a computer or through other people? Are you turning into a human robot?

By Harry