Romantic Selves

Traditionally, children came todefine what was special about people in contrast to what they saw as their nearest neighbors, the animals: their pet dogs, cats, and horses. Pets have desires, but what stands out dramatically about people is how intelligent they re, their gifts of speech and reason. Computers upset this distinction. The machine presents itself to the child as a thing that is not quite a thing, a mind that is not quite a mind. As such, it changes the way children think about who are their nearest neighbors. The Aristotelian definition of man as a "rational antimal" (powerful even for children when it defined people in contrast to their nearest neighbors, the animals) gives way to a different distinction.

Today's children appropriate computers through identification with them as psychological entities and come to see them as their new nearst neighbors. And they are neighbors that seem to share in or (from the child's point of view) even excel in our rationality. Children stress the machines' prowess at games, spelling, and math. People are still defined in contrast to their neighbors. But now, people are special because they feel. Many children grant that the computer is able to have a "kind of life," or a "sort of life," but what makes people unique is the kind of life that computers do not have, an emotional life. If people were once rational animals, now they are emotional machines. This is their romantic reaction.

As children tell it, we are distinguished from machine intelligence by love and affection, by spiritual urges and sensual ones, and by the warmth and familiarity of domesticity. In the words of twelve-year-old David, "When there are computers who are just as smart as people, the computers will do a lot of the jobs, but there will still be things for the people to do. They will run the restaurants, taste the food, and they will be the ones who will love each other, have families and love each other. I guess they'll still be the ones who go to church." Or we are distinguished from the machines by a "spark," a mysterious element of human genius.

Thirteen-year-old Alex plays daily with a chess computer named Boris which allows its human user to set its level of play. Although Alex always loses if he asks the computer to play its best game, Alex claims that "it doesn't feel like I'm really losing." Why? Because as Alex sees it, chess with Boris is like chess with a "cheater." Boris has "all the most famous, all the best chess games right there to look at. I mean, they are inside of him." alex knows he can study up on his game, but Boris will always have an unfair advantage. "It's like in between every move Boris could read all the chess books in the world." Here, Alex defines what is special about being a person not in terms of strengths but in terms of a certain frailty.

For this child, honest chess is chess played within the boundaries of human limitations. His heroes are the great chess masters whose skill depends not only on "memorizing games" but on "having a spark," a uniquely human creativity.

In my studies of adults in the computer culture, I have found that many follow essentially the same path as do children when they talk about human beings in relation to the new psychological machines. This path leads to allowing the possibility of unlimited rationality to computers while maintaining a sharp line between computers and people by taking the essence of human nature to be what computers cannot do. The child's version: the human is the emotional. The adult's version, already foreshadowed in Alex's formulation of the human "spark": the human is the unprogrammable.

Few adults find it sufficient to say, as did David, that machines are reason and people are sensuality, spirituality, and emotion. Most split the human capacity for reason. Then, the dichotomy that David used to separate computers and people becomes a way to separate aspects of human psychology. One student speaks of his "technology self" and his "feelings self," another of her "machine part" and her "animal part."

Or, people talk about those parts of the psyche that can be simulated versus those parts that are not subject to simulation, frequently coupled with the argument that simulated thinking is real thinking, but simulated feeling is not real feeling. Simulated love is never love. Again, this is a romantic response, with the computer making a new contribution to our formulas for describing the divided self. We have had reason and passion, ego and id. Now, on one side is placed what is simulable; on the other, that which cannot be simulated, that which is "beyond information."