The Cost of Losing Human Interaction

By Shlomo Maital  

         Last night on Israeli TV news, three small children were shown sitting in kindergarten chairs next to one another; each was playing a game on his or her tablet.  Someone came in with a tray of their favorite candy and put it on the table right in front of them.  None of the three lifted their eyes from the tablet.   When they were invited to come to the table and enjoy the candy (with their tablets),  they were told that they had to turn off their tablets in order to partake.  Two of the three refused, choosing to continue playing with their tablets rather than enjoy the candy. Normally, three kids sitting together begin to talk and interact. Not these three, absorbed with their plasma screens.

          Do we really understand the hypnotic power that plasma screens have over us?

           In today’s New York Times, Jessica Grose reports on some disturbing research. The title is:  Human Interaction is now a luxury good.   The key point:  As AI and digital software are increasingly employed to boost productivity and cut costs, human services become a high cost luxury item only the wealthy can afford.

       Grose cites a new book “The Last Human Job,” by the sociologist Allison Pugh.   She spent five years following teachers, doctors, community organizers and hairdressers — more than 100 people in total who perform what she calls “connective labor,” which is work that requires an “emotional understanding” with another person. Even when human services are indeed offered and provided, the bureaucratic tangle that requires them to account for what they do digitally, constantly, is a huge butden and interferes with human interaction. (Ask doctors who fill out Medicare forms). 

           “Pugh explains that increasingly, people in these jobs have to use technology to obsessively monitor and standardize their work, so that they might be more productive and theoretically have better (or at least more profitable) outcomes.”

            A vivid example in Pugh’s book was the hospital chaplain, who provided crucial spiritual comfort – but still had to report online, endlessly, in detail —  because God too is an accounting cost.

           Conclusion:  A paradox.  As we are addicted to plasma screens at an early age, we come both to rely on them and to distrust them, because …. The services they provide are inhuman, non-human.  And it is this, perhaps, that can help account for the collapse in trust in such institutions as doctors, public health, police, judges, and more than ever, the political democratic system.  Real human interaction becomes a luxury good only the rich can afford. 

            I don’t know how to escape this quandary.  As far right politicians ascend, and attack government and slash budgets, evermore services will be digitized and non-humanized, leading to further loss of trust. 

             Something has to break this spiral.