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In Defense of the Tangible

We are poised hesitantly before a future in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital technology will be an integral part of our lives - decision making, production capabilities, education platforms, medical practice, warfare, business transactions, governance, policing and many more functions we cannot even anticipate.

Hesitant, because as Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI", warns, within the next five years AI could dominate our lives with more intelligence than humans and more alarmingly it can potentially make decisions independently of human instructions. He has worked on deep learning and Artificial Intelligence since the 70s, so his words carry weight.

Digital technology is already a part of our lives – on our phones, laptops and in our surroundings. We can walk through a Van Gogh painting, or among the dinosaurs in a museum and travel to distant places with virtual reality devices. Virtual Assistants, the ever-attentive Siri and Alexa in our homes, respond to our most trivial needs.

Its all very exciting. No more maps when trying to find the best route, no space consuming shelves full of books, no need to depend on others for information.

While digitizing, converting data to a digital form, is so essential to preserving books and images, digitalizing or using digitized data to create systems is a grey area. 

 Experiencing the world with our five senses is integral to being human, to feeling alive. We make sense of our experiences when the brain combines information from multiple sensory systems. Sight, hearing and touch have been digitised and it is claimed that smell and taste will soon be digitally available. It is difficult to not be sceptical of the ability of digital technology to truly replace real multisensory experience.

While it may work as a marketing tool it, it cannot capture the real experience of jostling through a bazaar, hot and tired, catching snippets of conversations, the weight of shopping bags cutting into the palms. The poet William Wordsworth would not have compared Lucy to “a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye” if his walks in the woods were virtual.

Some experiences are personal and unique such as touching the rough stone of an old building, seeing a thumb print on a 4000 year old terracotta toy from Harappa, feeling a sudden breeze rustling through a tree, the smell of rain on parched earth.

Reading a book on Kindle is perfect for accessing the content of a book, but the sensation of turning a crisp page, feeling the weight of a hardbound book is absent. We can digitally access the art collections of museums. However, the experience of seeing brush marks on a Mondrian painting, or the scale of a Courbet painting cannot be imagined when seen as a uniformly sized image on a 17 inch or even a 40 inch computer screen. Learning to play the sitar by feeling the tension of its taut strings cannot be experienced with a synthesizer.   

The psychoanalyst, Erica Komisar emphasizes “there’s simply no real substitute for physical presence” especially in the first 1000 days of a child. Skin to skin contact with new born babies is recognised as the best way for parents to bond with their child.

Social media enables self-learning, makes it easy to contact friends or long-lost relatives online, especially for those who may be housebound.  On the other hand, real human interaction- the firmness of a handshake, an averted glance, a broad smile or eyes filling with tears, cannot be truly conveyed by the limited set of cartoon-like emojis. Augmented reality takes us to places we may never travel to, but it is on physical journeys that true learning takes place - interacting with people and landscapes, testing our endurance.  In real experiences thing go wrong, we lose our way only to discover parts of a city we never knew.

Human autonomy lies in balancing virtual and real experiences, with a larger proportion allocated to real experiences, making the difference between leading our lives or having them led for us.

The book ‘Tangible things: making history through objects’ studies the Harvard University collections of objects from iridescent beetles to things stored in a bottom drawer, each with a story that links the present to the past.

Future generations need to find our photo albums, our letters and notebooks, not stored in an inaccessible ‘cloud’, but in an old battered box. 

 

Duriya Kazi

November 4, 2024

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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