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Communication in the modern day has a variety of different meanings. We do not just communicate face-to-face naturally anymore, some claiming this form is now redundant in comparison to the likes of instant messaging, and the communication with the rapidly evolving forms of artificial intelligence.

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Discussions involving the controversy around Hello Barbie.

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This Advocacy Group is Saying 'Hell No' to 'Hello Barbie'

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The Campaign for Commercial-Free Kids says the doll is a viral marketing tool and invades children's privacy

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The Attention Economy: Sherry Turkle in Conversation with Marty Kaplan

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The Attention Economy: Sherry Turkle in Conversation with Marty Kaplan

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Turkle discusses how parents are becoming consumed by distractions on their phones. This enforces her notion that: ‘our children are neglected’ (Turkle, 2011, p.10), and parents are expecting robots to tend to them.

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The Attention Economy: Sherry Turkle in Conversation with Marty Kaplan

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Why You Will Never Be Friends With an AI

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Why You Will Never Be Friends With an AI

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Carl. T. Rogers discusses the limitations to companionship with artificial intelligence.

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"Help...friend."

Those two enigmatic words spoken by the Robot of Netflix's Lost in Space encapsulate its second season's theme. Season 1 revolves around exploring and protecting the new friendship that Will and the Robot forge after being mysteriously stranded on an alien planet. Released on Netflix right before the start of 2020, the season 2 shows the two friends finding one another after being separated at the end of the previous season.

Friendship, and teaching others the true nature of friendship itself, is at the heart of the series. A common line uttered by several characters as the newest season reaches its climax is, "That's not what friends do." Coworkers, parents and children, and married couples struggle with this issue in every single one of the twenty episodes thus far produced.

The show's core, however, is the fascinating bond between teenage Will and his giant alien Robot, as Paul Tassi for Forbes points out:

The second season dives into the robot race which is mainly made up of murderous machines, rather than the "nice robot" that is friends with Will Robinson, and is one of the most compelling storylines of the series as it continues to grow and evolve adopting human-like emotion and affection for other living things.

My wife still laments that the Robot hasn't been given a name! Alas - he's merely called The Robot. Nevertheless, he's still endeared himself to fans in both hemispheres.

Will's bond to the monosyllabic machine in the narrative brings this thought to my to mind: Can you be friends with an artificial intelligence?

Before we can approach the intriguing concept of AI friendship, we must define artificial intelligence. Ask a group of scientists the definition of Artificial Intelligence, and you'll get a plethora of answers. An average person will be even less precise, with the normal meaning something akin to "a machine that thinks" or "a computer that acts human," and examples ranging from Siri to Optimus Prime.

These aren't much help.

Famed computer science pioneer Alan Turing proposed a way to discover AI, known now as the Turing Test: if a computer can answer questions convincingly enough to trick a person into thinking it's also a human, then it is intelligent. Nowadays, with the rise of chatbots and virtual assistants, this test sets the bar too low for actual intelligence.

The Turing Test is still an important element in AI research, but it's by no means the final word. Typically, there's a differentiation in the field of AI between Weak and Strong AI, as explained by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Weak" AI seeks to build information-processing machines that appear to have the full mental repertoire of human persons. ..."Strong" AI, on the other hand, seeks to create artificial persons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including phenomenal consciousness. By far, [Strong AI is the area] that most popular narratives affirm and explore. The recent Westworld TV series is a powerful case-in-point.

Dr. Timothy Brown likewise posits that artificial intelligence in now-commonplace "Weak" manner should be defined as "virtual reality," meaning that the software approximates human intelligence without actualizing it - like Siri. True "Strong" AI would be Data from Star Trek or the eponymous .

Leave aside the other philosophical implications of AI, such as personhood and ethics. In the end, the definition of AI comes down to a metaphysical question: is intelligence based on behavior, or ontology?

This is a 21st-century addition to the Mind vs. Brain problem which ponders whether or not consciousness is only chemical in nature. A "Mind" has a non-physical aspect, while a "Brain" is purely physical. Therefore, if consciousness is merely a matter of complex neuroscience, then computers with the same level of sophistication are inevitable, according to some. However, if your philosophy of Mind has a metaphysical component, then Strong AI is probably not possible.

For example, an algorithm can be trained to recognize and catalog circles, but only a mind can then abstract the concept of circularness from a specific shape. Medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas said that intelligence is the act of an intellect, or to paraphrase, what a soul is doing when it is thinking. Soul here metaphysically refers to the immaterial, intrinsic nature of a person, not a separate, wispy substance that leaves the body at death - or when sucked out by a dementor.

This hylomorphic (being = matter + form) understanding of existence concerns AI because, without a soul-ish intellect, a robot cannot achieve consciousness. The mind cannot come solely from matter. Since self-awareness is the lynchpin to Strong AI, it remains relegated to science fiction.

Sorry, Data.

Whether positive (C-3PO) or negative (HAL 9000), other film and television examples of artificial intelligent friends still share that common boundary between fiction and reality.

Now that we understand AI philosophically, we can turn to the philosophy of friendship. Don't worry, this won't be as technical as AI - relieved?

The concept of friendship itself seems elementary to the point of ignoring it. However, just like all things in everyday life, friendship at a deeper level is inseparable from philosophy. So, what is friendship?

Colloquially, friends are the people you enjoy spending time with while sharing activities and interests. Some have even said friends are "the family you choose." Deep thinking on this subject goes back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle described friendship as coming in three flavors: enjoyment, usefulness,and mutual appreciation. His views are explored by Zat Rana:

While [Aristotle] saw the value in accidental friendships based on pleasure and utility, he felt that their impermanence diminished their potential. They lacked depth and a solid foundation.

Instead, Aristotle argued for a different kind of bond:

Things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done.

Kindness. Charity. Selflessness. Friendship is beginning to sound a lot like love! That's how Aristotle saw it too; Aristotle used the Greek word phileo to refer to this type of "brotherly" love. Therefore, to have a mutually edifying friendship, both parties must be able to love.

Notice I said "both parties." That's the key to the AI friendship question! Stanford, please explain:

Love and friendship often get lumped together as a single topic; nonetheless, there are significant differences between them.As understood here, love is an evaluative attitude directed at particular persons as such, an attitude which we might take towards someone whether or not that love is reciprocated and whether or not we have an established relationship with her. Friendship, by contrast, is essentially a kind of relationship grounded in a particular kind of special concern each has for the other as the person she is; and whereas we must make conceptual room for the idea of unrequited love, unrequited friendship is senseless.

Even an animal can in limited fashions return the affection of a person, though they may not be self-aware. Start Trek: The Next Generation circumvented this problem by having Data explain friendship in a scientific yet humanizing fashion:

As I experience certain sensory input patterns, my mental pathways become accustomed to them. The input is eventually anticipated and even missed when absent.

Data's identity as a synthetic being with personhood was explored extensively throughout the seven-season series and spin-off films. The newly-released Star Trek: Picard show is plumbing this theme even further.

Still, Starfleet aside, would a real-world machine ever say, "I missed you," unless it was programmed to? This leads us to the crux of the debate.

According to Lost in Space, this question has already been answered. Not all the characters came to that conclusion easily, however. Writing for The Verge, Karen Han points this out:

Lost in Space's AI storyline should feel familiar to anyone even remotely interested in science fiction....The way characters choose to treat artificial intelligences is often a leading indicator of how the audience is meant to perceive them, and how their characters will develop. Will... immediately refers to the robot as ''him'' instead of ''it,'' a person rather than an object. Everyone else takes some time to adjust. Will's mother sees a tool; his father sees a threat; [and] Dr. Smith sees a weapon.

Taking both seasons into account, here are more examples of how the boy's connection to the machine grows throughout the show:

Will saves the Robot's life when it's still intending him harm. This act of kindness forges their bond.

Afterward, the Robot continually does things to save Will, Judy, Penny, and their parents.

The Robot trusts Will enough to walk off a cliff even though it's against his best interest to do so.

When the horse he bonded with dies, the Robot holds onto the horse's bridle as a keepsake.

Like Will, the Robot even begins to use the word "friend."

The Robot deprioritizes his bond with Will to save another of his kind - and Will chooses to help him do so.

I'm so used to the anthropomorphizing of the character of the Robot that even I'm calling it a "him," just like Judy and Penny learn to do from Will.

The anthropomorphic nature of the character is part-and-parcel a function of the story as science fiction. Am I splitting hairs by differentiating between actual Strong AI and the fictional Strong AI in Lost in Space? Perhaps, but narrative media often influences societal worldviews and expectations, especially with unrealized technology.

The mind cannot come solely from matter.

In a real-life context, this is reminiscent of the meditations of Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi, an AI technologist and Ph.D. candidate:

AI agents reflect on their actions and try to maximize their rewards. But in what sense could we say that they "reflect" on their "motivation(s)" or "actions"? We cannot simply ascribe such concepts to AI without anthropomorphizing. But anthropomorphizing only enables us to talk about what AI does, and not how it comes to do it.

Is this reciprocity between Will and the Robot learned, or innate? The Robot seems to grow in its conception of friendship the more it spends time with the Robinsons. In season 1, it's like a faithful but simple-minded companion like a dog, while in season 2 it shows agency. Penny and Will even debate the matter. "He's changed. But that's okay since I've changed too."

Thousands of years later, Aristotle's words reverberate into the vacuum of space (Yeah, I know nothing can echo in a vacuum, but humor me, okay?):

Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.

In fact, Lost in Space frequently references a "telepathic connection" between Will and the alien machine. Will receives images and feelings, but the Robot could also gain human characteristics such as this enhanced capacity for friendship - assuming it wasn't present before (season 2 makes this seem unlikely).

With the addition of more planets and giant killer robots, season 2 makes it clear that the Robot is alien technology. It is unclear about the nature of the alien intelligence which created them, as the Netflix story has yet to reveal the origin of the seemingly-sentient robots. (My statement presumes that the robots are created.) This type of AI would be inherently different than our conception of AI, leading to a host of new conundrums. Robotics professor Murray Shanahan refers to this otherworldly source of intellect as consciousness exotica:

To explore the space of possible minds is to entertain the possibility of beings far more exotic than any terrestrial species. Could the space of possible minds include beings so inscrutable that we could not tell whether they had conscious experiences at all? To deny this possibility smacks of biocentrism. ...Either a being has conscious experience or it does not, regardless of whether we can tell.

"Whether we can tell." This is another potential in-road to the necessity of mutuality in a true friendship. C.S. Lewis echoes this truth of phileo friendship in his masterful work The Four Loves:

Every step of the common journey tests his [a friend's] mettle; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative Love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is "about", we should not have come to know...him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes... better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

Try doing any of those things with an AI. Doesn't work so well. An AI can search Google or turn the lights on, but can it argue or pray with you?

Even if you deny the hylomorphic composition of body and soul, an AI will never be "Strong" enough to cultivate friendship because AI cannot develop needs or goals, as cognitive science professor Margaret Boden points out:

Will we be able to share with our AI 'colleagues' in-jokes over coffee, in the banter between rival football fans, in the arguments about the news headlines, in the small triumphs of standing up to a sarcastic or bullying boss? No - because computers don't have goals of their own. ...It makes no sense to imagine that future AI might have needs. They don't need sociality or respect in order to work well. A program either works, or it doesn't. ...The users and designers of AI systems - and of a future society in which AI is rampant - should remember the fundamental difference between human and artificial intelligence: one cares, the other does not.

Can you be friends with an AI?
Perhaps, but it won't be friends with you.

AI responds to external stimuli according to its programming - it has no intellectual "soul." Friendship is relational, and algorithms can only compute, not comprehend. The machine will not care about you like you do for it and will be, at best, unrequited friendship - which is an oxymoron.

Unless you meet this robot. Then you can totally be best buds.

What's your favorite on-screen robot or AI? Let me know in the comments! (As you can tell, I'm leaning towards Lt. Cmd. Data.)

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Why You Will Never Be Friends With an AI

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Why You Will Never Be Friends With an AI. Can endearing relationships between people and artificial intelligence ever be realized as seen in Netflix's Lost in Space?.

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Jill Suttie discusses Sherry Turkle's (2015) Reclaiming conversation. She notes how she believes people rarely have face-to-face conversations anymore

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Recently, I was on a plane traveling from Chicago to Charlottesville, Virginia, when something strange happened: I had a conversation with my seatmate. A recent college graduate, this young woman talked to me for the entire two-hour flight!

The sad thing is that this is so unusual as to be remarkable. These days, it seems as if people rarely have conversations at all, let alone with a stranger. Instead, too many of us studiously turn away from each other, bent over computers, ipads, and phones, trying to connect online rather than with the people right in front of us.

But, is this really a problem, or is it just the new normal? And, if it is problematic, what should we do about it?

That is the subject of Sherry Turkle's new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle, an MIT professor, makes a convincing case that conversational skills, connection, and intimacy are fast disappearing, in large part due to our over-attachment to ubiquitous technology. She argues that, instead of throwing up our hands or giving in, we need to reclaim conversations and engage more with those around us. Otherwise, we risk losing much that makes our society work-like empathy, introspection, and the ability to work productively and creatively together.

Turkle's book provides a wealth of scientific studies, as well as interviews with experts and technology users of all ages. According to research, the presence of cell phones in social situations, even when turned off, are associated with many ill effects, including inhibiting conversation and changing the nature of what is discussed. This leaves us vulnerable to shallow interactions that limit our ability to truly understand one another.

"If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence," writes Turkle. "Conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection."

What we learn from boredom

Researchers have found that those who spend more time online connecting with others are worse at identifying the feelings of others and even their own feelings. This is because we need eye contact in order to learn to read each other's emotions correctly, which helps us create closeness.

The problem is that cell phones are hard to give up, because they lure us with their promise of instant gratification. I know I often open up my phone when I'm waiting in a doctor's office or standing in line at a store, and I see others doing it too. We don't like to be bored, lonely, or otherwise uncomfortable, writes Turkle, and our phones provide us with opportunities to escape those feelings. So, instead of resisting, we turn to our phones to relieve us, when we would do much better if we stayed with our feelings until they dissipated or transformed us.

Though escapism may seem innocuous, Turkle's book connects it to some pretty damaging outcomes. Children don't learn how to treat others in a way that considers their feelings, because they don't look people in the eye. Teens no longer can concentrate in their classrooms, because they feel impelled to check cell phones for updated social messages or to fight boredom by surfing the web. Workers no longer interact with each other in casual conversations over lunch or even in work meetings, where everyone present can tune out to check email or shop online, leading to decreased productivity, creativity, and connection.

"Every time you check your phone in company, what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt," she writes.

Many people become anxious without that hit of dopamine. But boredom has a purpose, writes Turkle, because it's a signal to go deeper and to reflect. It teaches us to engage our imagination, which is important to creativity. Plus, when we tune out boredom, we learn to be uncomfortable with solitude, which is important for human development.

"Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience," write Turkle. "It is only when we are alone with our thoughts-not reacting to external stimuli-that we engage that part of the brains' basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past."

Losing contact

More important for society at large, if we rely only on online connections for social contact, we lose perspective, shrouding ourselves in fixed ideas that we share with our networked circle. This creates group tensions in our society and a widening intolerance of difference, a situation we see in political discourse, as well as in personal relationships.

"Studies show that people don't like posting things that their followers won't agree with-everyone wants to be liked," writes Turkle. "So technology can sustain ever more rigid partisanship that makes it hard to talk, enabling us to live in information bubbles that don't let in dissenting voices."

To her credit, Turkle gives voice to the people, including many teens, who support the ubiquitous use of technology and who see no point in turning it off. For example, she talks to LGBT youth who might feel ostracized living in isolated communities, but who receive support online from others living far away.

Also, some of her interviewees spoke about how texting or emailing was a positive way to communicate during conflicts, because responding online allowed you to edit yourself and avoid perpetuating fights or having knee jerk reactions to emotionally-threatening communications from others. It gives you a chance to avoid making a fool of yourself, and that is to the good.

But Turkle counters these examples by illustrating the many ways texting and emailing in these situations can go wrong, such as when it promotes misunderstanding. In addition, when someone delays responding to a text, or doesn't respond at all, it can make the recipient feel lonely and humiliated. In hundreds of conversations Turkle had with teens and adults about their online lives, she found that many of them didn't know how to interpret silence or delays, and were desensitized to the rudeness of it. That, in turn, sometimes turned into paying it forward, or even bullying others.

"I saw a generation settle into a new way of dealing with silence from other people: namely, deny that it hurts and put aside your understanding that if you do it to others, it will hurt them too."

In one study recounted in the book, college-aged friends found that face-to-face conversations led to more emotional connection than other forms of communications, like video chatting online or instant messaging. That's because you need that in person closeness to truly connect with another person. Texting just can't convey emotion the way a face can-even with emoticons. In romantic contexts, texting can be downright misleading, as it's nearly impossible to decipher sexual interest online. Plus, many people who go to parties or get-togethers often use their cell phones to search for the "perfect date," leading them to discount whomever they happen to be with, in search of something better.

How to reclaim conversation

Luckily, some people are taking notice and trying to change their behavior. More and more young people are creating technology-free spaces and times while socializing, instead of tolerating when their friends or parents tune them out-a practice with tremendous benefits for all.

Employers are also taking note of problems with technology at work, as studies reveal the importance of social connections in job performance. In one study, employees wore devices that allowed researchers to measure how much social interaction they had with other employees during their workday, both on and offline. Results showed that those people who had more face-to-face conversations at work demonstrated higher productivity and less stress, while their online conversation had no impact on these.

Parents also should take heed of the research. Too often children are ignored by their parents, who turn to cell phones rather than giving children the attention they need to learn social and emotional skills. Even young toddlers are sometimes entertained with cell phones, depriving them of their most basic need for attachment to the adults in their lives. Infants deprived of eye contact and faced with a parent's "still face" [the face turned toward a phone] "become agitated, then withdrawn, then depressed," writes Turkle. "These days, neuroscientists speculate that when parents caring for children turn to their phones, they may 'effectively stimulate a still-face paradigm'...with all the attendant damage."

We would all be wise to consider more carefully how we behave around technology, and Turkle includes a list of guidelines that can help us gauge how to use cell phones wisely to avoid missing out on important social connection. Here are some of her suggestions (paraphrased):

Remember the power of your phone, and don't take it with you automatically into every situation, especially when a conversation is needed.

Slow down, and don't seek instant gratification for entertainment or relief from boredom or loneliness. Learn to savor solitude.

Protect your creativity by taking quiet time for yourself, so you can tune into its workings.

Talk to others with whom you don't agree, and don't be afraid to disagree.

Engage in a conversation for at least seven minutes before giving up on it, allowing it to deepen and potentially lead into unexpected directions.

Don't bring engineering sensibility into every aspect of your life. Instead, practice tolerance for ambiguity, cultivate empathy and compassion toward others, and go into conversations where you don't know the outcome.

Learn from conflict, rather than avoiding it.

Put down your phones and pay attention to the person in front of you-your child, your friend, your partner, your employee. Whomever you are interacting with, remember to nurture your relationships through engagement.

Luckily, it's not too late to change the path we are on, because we are resilient as a species. Even small breaks from technology can help restore conversation, if we take the initiative. Turkle calls upon us all to do so, writing, "This is the wrong time to step back. Those who understand how conversation works-no matter what their ages-need to step up and pass on what they know."

After reading Turkle's book, I found myself on a return flight trying to engage again with a young passenger sitting next to me, but to no avail. He spent the flight staring out the window, playing with his cell phone, and answering my attempts at conversation with short, abrupt answers.

But, at the very end of the flight, I learned from him that he'd traveled in Iran and participated at a conference in Washington DC on the Iran nuclear power pact, where he'd been lobbying for peace in the region. That's something, right?

Still, imagine what I might have learned by talking in more depth with this young man about his experience. That would have required a conversation!

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Recently, I was on a plane traveling from Chicago to Charlottesville, Virginia, when something strange happened: I had a conversation with my seatmate. A recent college graduate, this young woman talked to me for the entire two-hour flight! The sad thing is that this is so unusual as to be remarkable.