My post on Cuddly Tech led to a thought-provoking email thread. One writer focused on the Bambi conundrum — “large numbers of ceramic or plastic fawns in gardens around here, while the real animals are considered a nuisance. We had one woman beat a fawn to death with a shovel for eating her flowers. People already replace live with fake, whether it’s flowers, or fawns, or their own faces.”
“I guess we, as a species, have always had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality,” wrote another.
I would have posted in reply earlier, but spent a few days deliquescing in the heat (I love that word ‘deliquesce’ — it perfectly evokes that sense of melting into a puddle of torpor). But now that my head is cool again — or as cool as it ever gets — it occurs to me that children may be wiser than we are about what’s real and what’s not.
It seems reasonable that as most people agreed, “if children can play with inanimate furry creatures, why not old people?” Yet surely there’s an essential difference at work here. When children play with toys, they know they’re playing. “Let’s pretend,” they say. The delight of it is the willing suspension of reality, the willed use of imagination. Someone with dementia has no opportunity to do this. They’re not playing; they’re being deceived. And although, as all the writers agreed, this may bring comfort and happiness, what are the terms of such happiness?
The email group is right: the robotic baby seals catch the eye not because they’re shockingly new, but because they’re an instance of technology taking what we’re already doing a little bit further. They’re a necessary nudge, letting us see how deeply peculiar it is that plastic fawns are treasured while real ones are beaten to death.
It comes down to the issue of control. Seal pups, for instance (time to stop calling them ‘baby seals’ — a deliberate and manipulative anthropomorphism on the part of the robot’s promoters) are heavy and stinky and liable to thrash and bite in panic. Like real fawns, they’re uncontrollable. So we make a representation of one — a Barbie doll seal, with none of the perceived disadvantages of the real thing. A cuddly avatar of a seal, that is. A non-seal seal.
This may make an ominous kind of sense. At the current rate of species extinction – as many as 30% of current animal and plant species facing extinction within the next century – the future of many animals exists only in human heads. And if what is in our heads has close to zero correspondence to what actually is or was, what will it even matter?
But what then? Are we creating the conditions in which we will all suffer from some form of technologically induced dementia? When does the online avatar become more real than the person behind it? When do we forget what a real human face looks like as it ages? At what stage does the virtual shed its bonds to the actual, like a helium-filled balloon lifting off into the stratosphere?
How far will we retreat from the actual world, from the hard and slow business of the political sphere and the equally hard and slow business of loving and caring — the hard and slow business, that is, of being human?
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(thanks to Pietra for forwarding the email thread to me, and to the emailers for giving permission to quote)
Filed under: existence, technology Tagged: | Bambi, Barbie, dementia, fantasy, reality, robotic baby seals, species extinction
Hi Lesley, here’s a report of a plastic tortoise that’s apparently making an old real tortoise very happy.
‘Timmy has doted on Tanya since they were brought together at the Tortoise Garden sanctuary in St Austell, Cornwall, England, after he was “bullied” by other tortoises. The 60-year-old Timmy fetches Tanya’s food, nuzzles her and doesn’t seem to mind the lack of response. “He’s much happier when it’s just the two of them,” says sanctuary owner Joy Bloor.’ Animals do appear just as ready as humans in certain circumstances to accept a dummy companion. Baby monkeys will cling to a cloth mother substitute when scared even though ‘she’ can’t possibly smell right.
I’d agree with others and say it’s OK to offer whatever brings happiness or peace of mind – because there’s little enough of it. But I’d also like to ask, does play really stop with childhood?
I think we all have a fundamental need for myths, a narrative of some kind running at the back our lives, and often we need to make a concrete representation of those ideas and even act them out. (I’m not getting into either religious imagery or cosmetic surgery here but you can think on!).
Of course not everyone admires garden gnomes or plastic bambies but we must acknowledge they represent an idea that their owners will never capture in reality (or persuade to behave perfectly). Yes, it’s control if you like, but is it any different from choosing to display only smiling or flattering photographs of family and friends? Or the general preference for frankly naff paintings of kittens and roses over an abstract masterpiece that doesn’t give us a ready key to understanding?
Love the tortoise story, Charlotte. A friend in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem had two tortoises living in her courtyard, and we used to sit for hours at a time drinking mint tea and watching their courtship ritual — the male running at the female (insofar as tortoises run), crashing his shell into her, nipping at her legs, again and again until finally this turned her on enough for them to execute their antideluvian mating. So perhaps because tortoises bring happy memories, I can’t help feeling sad for your bullied one and his plastic passion, the same way as there is something ineffably sad about those photos you mention of young monkeys separated from their mothers and clinging instead to a cloth-covered metal grid over a hot-water bottle. That said, when it comes to humans, you and other readers here on the AT are clearly far more tolerant of the propensity to confuse fantasy and reality than I am. This probably means that you’re all far nicer people than I am, or better adjusted, or less judgmental (or perhaps all three are the same thing). But then, if I was nice and well adjusted and less judgmental, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, nor you in reply. Could it be that my propensity to judgment and yours to wry acceptance balance each other rather well? — Lesley.