PUPPIES R US
PUPPIES R US
by Steven Goldsmith MD
Can we talk about Waggy Dog? The YouTube promo for it, the concept of it scared the snot out of me. An online ad proclaims: ”A Fluffy Robotic Puppy that Loves Your Child Back. . . . With over a million users worldwide, Waggy Dog brings the joy of a real puppy into your home — without mess, allergies, or stress. . . . an AI-powered robotic puppy crafted to replicate the warmth, charm, and playfulness of a real pet — without the mess or maintenance. . . . encourages imagination, empathy, and screen-free fun. Perfect for . . . anyone wanting a lifelike companion that’s always ready to play.” (The video ad touted it as, inter alia, a boon for the elderly, a cure for loneliness.) The dog responds in a reinforcing fashion to “pets, cuddles, and hand gestures” by tail-wagging, approaching, tilting its head.
This reminds me of one of my scariest dreams as a boy. In it I watched the keys of a piano rising and falling as if someone was playing it. But no one, no human being, was there! Only a poltergeist, a phantom. It may not sound like much, but I awakened in a cold sweat. The tagline of the 1979 film Alien was “In space, no one can hear you scream.” No one was there.
More disheartening, an online reviewer of consumer goods rated Waggy against 20 competing makes of robotic dogs. So Waggy is not merely a one-off but the leader of a cultural trend. What disturbs me most about the proliferating packs of AI dogs? Not their robotic simulations of living beings. We humans have always played with dolls, collected them, comforted ourselves with their proximity in the dark of our childhood bedrooms. Though we knew after the age of three they were pretend, we interacted with them as if they were real. What distinguishes our interactions with AI dogs, not to mention Siri, Alexa, ChatGBT, sex robots, video porn, virtual reality goggles, our cell phones, texts and social media communications with invisible strangers is that we are losing the as if quality. We are losing the sense of what qualifies as a living being versus a mere simulacrum; what qualifies as life itself.
In defining ourselves, our self-images, in relation to the living beings with whom we interact, we cannot retain core features of our humanity by engaging primarily with nonliving things. We must wake up and combat the anti-human influences permeating our lives—dismissal of biological sex; devaluation of children, the family and community, heterosexuality, and God; estrangement between the sexes; vanishing allegiance to our respective cultures and their histories and standards.
OK, I’ll put my cards on the table. The AI dogs are sick, Satanic shit. They and their makers are shepherding us into a transhuman world in which we are all instruments that transmit and receive electronic signals from robots and other ex-humans; in which humanity has obsolesced. Remember, in space no one can hear you scream. Questions that confronted the protagonist Deckard in the film Blade Runner will challenge us more profoundly than we realize: Are we humans or machines? Are the machines we created more human than we are? What’s the difference?
Where does this lead? To an isolation and loneliness so profound as to beggar the imagination. If that prognosis seems extreme, get a load of this. Last year Canada’s ever-expanding MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program executed a man because officials judged him to be suffering from a “grievous and irremediable” (i.e. incurable) condition, their qualification for euthanasia. What was that condition? Loneliness. An emotional state fostered by the sense of isolation and reality of societal disintegration. An age-old problem, now medicalized and dehumanized by MAID into a diagnostic label, a bureaucratic criterion. All the easier then to extinguish the carriers of this malady with euthanasia or profitable drugs or both. No wonder we feel tempted to purchase fluffy pseudodogs, for they can assuage our pangs of realization that no one out there can hear us scream. But we need real dogs, with their poops, barks, and the rest of the mess and inconvenience inherent in life.
Be well.
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Stimulation instead of meaning.
Hedonism in place of purpose.
Distraction rather than connection.
This is how humankind starts down the path of nihilism without realizing it before it is too late. Something really bad is about to happen, and we will end up sorting it out the hard and painful way.
I think it's time to disconnect from the chip world as much as possible.
This is an eye-opening article. I had no paid any attention to the robot dogs until you pointed out the direction the whole effort is going. I remember being stunned by the MAiD story. A worse one I read about was in France. A woman in her late forties decided she wanted to be euthanized because of depression. The day before it was to happened, she changed her mind. They said: "Too late" and went ahead and killed her.