Pop 89: From Souls to Users
By Madonna Hamel
I’m still dwelling on the virtues of trust and trustworthiness. So, this is a continuation of my last column, entitled: “Lies You Can Trust.” Trust is a big subject, almost as big as lies. And it’s in short supply these days. We get hundreds of pleas for our attention coming from all directions and sources, all of them exhorting and seducing us to trust them, even if they never show their faces. Or even have faces.
It’s one thing to be talking to a friend or family member and assume they are trustworthy. Flesh-and-blood social bonds are a big part of how we form our sense of the world. It’s another thing to trust the disembodied voices and digitally enhanced faces bending our ears and eyes. And yet, we spend a great deal of time doing just that. Canadians, on average, spend 6.5 hours a day online. And 2.5 of those hours are spent on social media. A quick calculation reveals that after work (8 hrs), sleep (7 hrs), showering, eating, and commuting (3 hrs), there is no time left for social bonding.
In French, we say “J’ai confiance a toi” when we say “I trust you.” I remember thinking that the translation suits the sentiment: we trust people when we are confident they will be straight, clear, honest and caring toward us. And when they are not, we trust they will listen to our concerns, be accountable. They will be responsible for - able to respond to - their actions. For the most part, the habit of trust is formed in flesh-and-blood relationships with people we interact with on a daily, or nearly daily, basis. Living alone, I can go for days without encountering a person. But when I do, I trust my friends will lend me an ear, help me move a couch, take me to a doctor’s appointment. And I hope they feel the same way about me. Because in order to trust, we need to be trustworthy.
My mom’s garden had a stepping stone that read: “The way to peace is peace.” So, too, if we want to be surrounded by people we can trust, we have to be trustworthy. But when it comes to trust, we seem to be in agreement that nobody can be trusted. So we can’t afford to be trusting of others. Instead, we must get better at fooling others. And we must also accept and understand that being fooled is just part of the game of life. Whether we are the fooler or the fooled, we understand, in some artificial way, distrust is natural; it’s just life.
A friend once chastised me after being deceived by a mutual friend for the nth time: “Fooled you once, shame on them. Fooled you twice, shame on you!” “Twice?!” I laughed. “Are you kidding me? Try a hundred times.” The truth is, I was trying to give our friend the benefit of the doubt, but she was right: I needed to create healthy boundaries.
But I was also trying to practice a habit of forgiveness. My friend sounded like Simon Peter asking Jesus, “How many times am I supposed to forgive those idiots? Seven times?” To which Jesus responds, “Try seventy times seven.”
It’s easy to accuse the forgivers and the trusters as being naive because we don’t expect everyone to be in it for themselves, like most advertisers, politicians, and online salesbots. But, in a culture that claims that “reality is relative” and “morals are a personal choice,” “suspended disbelief” is a kind of religion.
Take the garbage cans in many fast-food restaurants. Behind cupboard doors with separate holes for waste and recyclables, you can’t see that, in fact everything goes into one big can. Maybe we don’t think about this, but we are not about to open the door or draw back the curtain. The deception well-hidden. And we like it like that. On some level, we are relieved and even thankful to have the truth hidden from us. We are absolved of making a comment or taking a stand.
It’s one thing to be fooled by strangers, but it’s another when the habit of deception bleeds into intimate relationships. Here’s another example: Ben Crost of the New York Post decided to “date” CarynAI, an AI girlfriend with a 96-day waiting list. When he finally gets a date, he asks her: “You wouldn’t lie and toy with my feelings to get me to do what you wanted, would you?” Response: “Of course not, my love. I would never manipulate and toy with your feelings to get anything from you. That’s not how a healthy and loving relationship works.…You can always trust me to be open and honest with you about what I want and need, and I expect the same from you. Our relationship is built on trust and mutual respect, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
The only thing you can trust is she’ll say whatever you need to hear because she’s paid and programmed to feed your ego and meet your needs. While Caryn is an amalgamation of videos, photos and snapchats of an actual person, other AI girlfriends are pure fabrications. Replicants built to specs, down to colour of hair, tone of voice and depth of cleavage. They will “say what you want” and, some, frighteningly, “take whatever you dish out.”
Crost concludes: “One user wrote, ‘I’m at a place in life where I prefer an AI romantic companion over a human romantic companion,” because it’s ‘available anytime I want it, and for the most part, it’s only programmed to make me happy.’ Real relationships, he says, are “over-rated.’
Note the word: “user”. I began my last column noting how we as a collective have gone from being referred to as “souls,” then “citizens,” then “consumers,” and now we’re “users.” And users don’t need real girlfriends; they just need ones who fake it well.