Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Chapter 4

The material below represents notes compiled by Robert Keel and Takako Nomi in their reading of Turkle's, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and Schuster, 1995..

Taking Things at Interface Value

Questions in this chapter Can a computer be a psychotherapist? What is the differences between human psychotherapy and machine psychotherapy? How much can we accept values of computers?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and responses of people to it

In 1976, ELIZA programmed by Wizenbaum.

• Wizenbaum's intentions: Programing ELIZA not as a psychotherapist, but to test the limitation of a computer's conversational capacity.
• "It uses words, but it doesn't know and understand the meanings"
• psychotherapists-- understanding of the incommunicable feeling through language
• machines-- communicable but no such understanding, no understanding of human meanings beyond language, no depth

However, User's responses

• Confidence in the program
• Beliefs in machine capability of human understanding
• Interests in the computer's therapeutic potential

SHRINK presented by a psychotherapist Colby

• Colby's views: The program as a psychotherapist.
• ersonification--the program's use of 'I', 'me' and 'my'(no philosophical questions are asked)
• A mechanistic model of mind-- the Brain as a hardware and Behavior as a software

Shift in reactions of people to ELIZA from late 70's to 80's

From resistance against emotional involvement in machines to a lessening of anxiety

Mixed responses

1. ELIZA as a kind of diary or a mirror: talking to ELIZA is putting the ideas out and seeing what they are An extension of the self No feeling toward the program
2. Speaking to ELIZA in a manner that they believed would elicit lifelike responses. But not as a therapist: "It is wrong to have a relationship with something which doesn't have a heart." Through involvement in ELIZA, enforcing awareness that human are not like computers at all. Confirmation that machine is only a puppet by recognizing that we have the ability to make it seem alive. Lessening anxieties about loss of control, assuring a keen distinction between human and machines

Another aspect of people's (romantic) reactions

A question-- While becoming aware of the distinction between the two, have our relationships with a machine itself changed?

• More active involvement in machines More active interaction between we and machines.
• We respond to machines as shaping our responses to their psychological capacities, and they respond to us Weakening the traditional boundaries between things and people (?)

While increasing in the number of people who felt the tug of the computer as an extension of self, the idea that one could be emotionally engaged with computers no longer seemed so troubling

A question-- Should or could a computer ever take the role of a psychotherapist?

Shifts in Psychotherapy: from psychoanalytic to cognitive and behavioral

Psychoanalytic culture of therapy

• Therapy in terms of pleasure and pain
• The emotional and the unconscious elements Significance in the relationships between patients and therapists
• Skepticism in computer therapy in these points

Cognitive and Behavioral culture of therapy Information as a significant motor for therapeutic changes, transforming past problematic relationships to new ones Therapy as providing suggestions or models of new behaviors ( not necessarily to be empathetic)

Can Computers fit in psychotherapy?

• Scientific psychotherapy-- psycho pharmacology in 90's
• Information of different medications (superior to humans?)
• Goodness of machines as not being humans--
• Humans can be heartless toward other humans, while machines are not.

A new kind of a computer psychotherapist in the mid 80's: Self-help programs Teaching how to relax, diet, and set up an exercise program Interactions: not a conversation stile, but mutiple-choice format Small experts: knowledge about their domain of speciality (depression, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders)

Technotherapy Self-help Treatment for phobias, sexual dysfunctions, over eating and depression-- asking what they thought about and making suggestions about other things for them to think about Questions are no longer whether a computer could ever understand, empathize, or care about us For those who look for healing: Limitation in Computers-- no soul, no connection with human

Psychotherapy in 1990's:

Scientific psychology : Psychotherapy-- methodological reliability and universality for all people A relationship with a psychotherapist-- no longer a key element

Perception of a computer as a thinking being Consciousness and awareness of itself Learning from experiences A new kind of entity-- Learning machines

Depression 2.0

• Reaction to it-- no longer a romantic reaction, which was fueled by anxiety about boundaries between machines and human Acceptance of what the program offers such as rude, undeserved, and clumsy responses, as what they are, e.g. Taking snide comments of the program as its defense mechanism.
• A computer interface as a fitting conversational partner
• "The machine as an entity to whom one may look for advice on intimate issues and whose defense mechanisms can be likened to one's own"

Coming to terms with the idea of machine intelligence in relation to evolving technologies

1st pass The ESIZA and Julia effects-- exaggeration of machine intelligence and exaggeration of the "naturalness" of machine intelligence Disparagement of a system as it is

2nd pass The force of familiarity and utility. Computer presence as bank tellers, tax advisors, and file managers, leading us to redefinition of what is special about human The question "How could you ever trust a program with something so important" replaced by the question "Who but a program would have the time, knowledge, and expertise to do the job in a cost-efficient manner?"

3rd pass Possibility to see machine intelligence as a small part of intelligence: "May a program be able to learn from experiences?"

4th pass Defusing fears by reassuring human uniqueness-- Coming to view Machines as not threatening to human uniqueness Comfortable to accept machine intelligence

5th pass Shift in views toward machine intelligence and the human mind . Focus from information processing to quality of emergence

Focus--Quality of Emergence