Emotionally Intelligent Design

Chapter 4. Cultivate Human–Machine Harmony

MAYBE YOU’VE WATCHED THE viral video “I’m Poppy” on YouTube. Take a trip down that rabbit hole, and what you’ll see is as mesmerizing as it is unsettling. Whether the slight delay between Poppy’s lips and the audio, the hint of autotune in her voice, or the silvery sheen of her skin and hair, something seems off. She tells us that she’s “from the internet.” She has stilted conversations with a mannequin named Charlotte. Charlotte speaks to Poppy in a computerized voice, and Poppy answers with her own kind of “artificial intelligence.” Part of the reason, perhaps, that Poppy has piqued collective curiosity is that people aren’t quite sure what to make of her; she brings attention to the boundary shift between human and machine.

The line between humans and technology seems like it’s becoming blurrier. Social media profiles prompt us to consider how we present ourselves in new contexts. We shuffle through identities more rapidly than ever, moving from anonymous to avatar in a blink. We have real conversations with fake people, or maybe a mashup of chatbot and human—we’re no longer sure. Robots that look like people challenge our idea of personhood, relationships, and citizenship.

Technology is urgently insisting that we reconsider what it means to be human. It turns out to be much more complicated than “let humans do human things and machines do machine things.” Human and machine things are jumbled together. Although some embrace the potential ...