This Saturday, I’m officiating a wedding for a friend I’ve known
since high school. She and her fiancee have chosen to have a section from the Velveteen
Rabbit read during the ceremony. It became
the spark for my wedding meditation and I want to share just a bit of the
reflection I’ve had around this beloved children’s story.
The section begins as the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse,
“What is real?” The Rabbit is curious about what makes a toy real. The Skin
Horse responds with, “It isn’t how you are made, it’s a thing that happens to
you. When someone loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but
REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
As I’ve read this passage, I was reminded of a story I heard
about MIT Professor Sherry Turkle taking her young daughter to a natural
history museum. As she and her daughter observed 150 year-old, Galapagos
turtles, her daughter remarked, “For what those turtles are doing, they could
have just had a robot.” Professor Turkle noted that what surprised her most was
how the fact that the turtle was alive, mattered to her daughter not at all.
For her daughter, it was what the turtle was accomplishing, its function that
mattered most. The fact it fell into the category of the living was not part of
the equation.
Smart phones are the tip of the iceberg of Artificial
Intelligence (AI). Today, there are robots who can follow your eye movements
and gesture in your direction in response to your advances. Sherry Turkle says
that neurologically, once robots can do these things we’re hooked. These
movements are emotive triggers for us humans. Robots will continue to become
more and more a regular part of our lives and existence. Prototypes of robots
designed to meet basic needs for children and the elderly already exist.
So, what makes something real? Of course, it depends on what we
mean by real. Is it how we are made? Is it based upon something’s function? Is
it how well it meets our needs? Must something be loved, as the Skin Horse
suggests, for it to be real? Being real, at least as the Velveteen Rabbit
inquires, seems to involve more than mere existence. Existence and “realness”
are separate. As AI continues to advance to meet not only our needs, but our
eyes as well, how we answer the question, what is real, and a second,
what is alive, could have particular consequences.
We have gained much from our technology. Great things that
humans on our own cannot offer one another. So great in fact, perhaps we should
ask, is technology more valuable than life itself? Do these benefits trump the
value of what humans can innately offer one another? It might be easy for some
to say, of course life is more valuable than technology. Particularly easy for
adults. Adults can quickly dismiss that it was a child that suggested replacing
an animal with a robot. She doesn’t know better. It’s also easy to forget that
this child did not create any of the technology she knows as normal. It’s easy
to take for granted that today we give birth to children who will never live in
a pre-technological world. And for so many reasons, thank God. While we give
thanks, we might also pause to consider the question posed by a simple
children’s story, “what is real?” If we don’t, we may risk losing track of
which, humanity or technology, is the chicken and which is the egg.
