The in(human) gaze and robotic carers

Google search “robot carers” and you’ll find extremely hyped up articles and think pieces on either how robot carers are just another way of dying even more miserably or how robot carers are saving the elderly from the lives of loneliness and nothing much in between. Not much nuance. Neither is right, of course. Robot carers shouldn’t be dismissed at first hand as the end of human connections and neither should they be overhyped as the flawless substitutes for human care.

I think they can be useful and practical and even preferable to a human carer in some cases while they cannot (and most likely never will) substitute human care and connection in other aspects. The human gaze is my reason for thinking that.

But first let me say a little about the Inhuman Gaze conference, which provoked me to think about robot care givers. The conference took place last week (6^th – 9^th June) in Paris. It was a diverse and multidisciplinary conference that brought together philosophers, neuroscientists, psychiatrists (scholars and practitioners alike) with the common theme of the inhuman gaze. Over the four days, speakers presented their philosophical arguments, empirical studies and clinical case studies, each from their own perspective, what the human/inhuman gaze is and its implication for the sense of self. I, myself, presented my argument for why other’s gaze (human or otherwise) is a crucial constituent to “self”. I looked at solitary confinement as an example. In solitary confinement (complete isolation or significantly reduced intersubjective contact), prisoners suffer from negative physical and psychological effects including confusion, hallucination and gradual loss of sense of self. The longer (and more intense) the solitary confinement goes, the more the pronounced the negative effects, leading to gradual loss of sense of self.

The reason for gradual loss of self in the absence of contact with others, Bakhtin would insist, is that the self is dependent on others for its existence. The self is never a self-contained and self-sustaining entity. It simply cannot exist outside the web of relations with others. Self-narrative requires not only having something to narrate but also having someone to narrate it to. To be able to conceptualize my self as a meaningful whole, which is fundamental to self-individuation and self-understanding, I need an additional, external perspective – an other.  The coherent self is put under threat in solitary confinement as it is deprived of the “other”, which is imperative for its existence. The gaze of another, even when uncaring, is an affirmation of my existence.

So, what is an inhuman gaze? A gaze from non-human objects: like the gaze of a wall in a solitary confinement? The gaze of a CCTV camera (although there often is a human at the other end of a CCTV camera)? or a gaze from a human but one that is objectifying and dehumanizing? For example, the gaze from a physician who’s performing an illegal organ harvesting where the physician treats the body that she’s operating on like an inanimate object? Let’s assume an inhuman gaze is the gaze of non-human objects for now. Because the distinctiveness of the human gaze (sympathizing, caring, objectifying or humanizing) is important to the point that I am trying to make. The human gaze, unlike the inhuman gaze, is crucial to self-affirmation.

From Channel 4’s sci-fi robot series Humans

Robot caregivers and the human gaze…

Neither the extreme alarmist nor the uncritical enthusiast help elucidate the pitfalls and potential benefits of robot caregiving. Whether robotic caregiving is a revelation or a doom depends on the type of care one needs. Roughly speaking, we can categorize care that robots can provide into two general categories. First one is physical or mechanical care – for example., fetching medicine or changing elderly patients into incontinence wear. The second one, on the other hand is companionship (to elderly people or children) where the aim might be to provide emotional support.

Now, robotic care might be well suited for the physical or mechanical type of care. In fact, some people might prefer a robot dealing with such physical task as incontinence care or any similar task that they are no longer able to perform themselves. Such care, when provided by a human, might be embarrassing and humiliating for some people. Not only is the human gaze capable of deep understanding and sympathy but also the potential to humiliate and intimidate. The robotic gaze, on the other hand, having no intrinsic values, is not judgemental. So, in the case of physical and mechanical care, the absence of the human gaze does not necessarily result in a significant negative effect. In fact, it might be desirable when we are in a vulnerable position where we feel we might be humiliated.

On the contrary, if companionship and emotional support are the types of care that we are looking for, the value and judgement free robotic gaze will simply not do. We are profoundly social, dynamic and embodied beings who continually strive to attribute meaning and value to the world. If we are to ascribe an ‘essence of the human condition’, it is that that our being in the world is thoroughly interdependent with the existence of others and context where we continually move and negotiate between different positions. True companionship and emotional connection requires intrinsic recognition of emotions, suffering, happiness, and the like. A proper emotional and ethical relation to the other (and the acceptance of genuine responsibility) requires the presence of a loving and value-positing consciousness, and not a value-free, objectifying gaze.

True human companionship and emotional support cannot be programmed into a robot no matter how advanced our technologies can become, for companionship and emotional connection require sense-making and a value-positing consciousness. Sense-making is an active, dynamic and partly open undertaking – and therefore a never-ending process – not a matter of producing and perceiving mappings of reality which can then be codified into a software.  The human gaze affords mutual understanding of what being a human is like. Recognition of emotions, suffering, etc., requires recognition of otherness based on mutual understanding. The human gaze recognizes an ‘other’ human gaze. As Hans Jonas has put it succinctly in ‘The Phenomenon of Life’, “only life can know life … only humans can know happiness and unhappiness.” 

 

 

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Science! It works, bitches!

Science is constantly pushing the boundaries as to what can be known and it’s the best available tool we have to produce the most reliable knowledge. Scientifically produced knowledge is often taken as legitimate, objective, unbiased and value-free. A scroll through some scientist’s Twitter posts can show just how much a great deal of scientists make it clear that knowledge that science produces is the ultimate fact. Arguably, knowledge grounded in science is perceived as the ultimate and the most authoritative that others need to aspire to – one that is qualified to legitimately dictate correct from incorrect or right from wrong and considered as the standard against all other forms of knowledge should be measured.

This form of knowledge is often presented in sharp contrast with knowledge that is dogmatic and ideological as if they are neatly separable. Those who are reasonable and educated are seen as free from ideologies and dogmas. Those that attempt to dispute this so called fact are often portrayed as anti-science. Typically snarled at “Don’t take it personal it’s science, can’t argue with the facts”.

Don’t get me wrong! I love science. Science is wonderful and yes, as far as the most consensual way of producing knowledge goes, science may be the best tool we have. However, it’s the idea of scientific knowledge as completely objective, free from any values, ideologies and biases that I object to. There is no such thing as ‘a view from nowhere’ and science and scientists are not immune to this. Science as completely free and separable from ideologies, biases and currently available discourses and a tool by which we objectively discover what is out there is simply naive. Nor is science free from theoretical commitments, or epistemological and ontological assumptions on which experiments are founded.

The methods we choose to investigate (and by implication those we choose to ignore) are central to the kind of knowledge we produce. Such methods are essentially tied to certain underlying theoretical commitments, which are embedded in certain ontological and epistemological assumptions. How something is defined has great influence on what conclusion one arrives at. How scientists analyse and interpret data can greatly be influenced by their preconceived notions. These two studies on sex differences on the brain, arriving at almost opposite conclusions despite having comparable data, shows just that. 

Science as a way to establishing facts gets fussier and messier as we move away from the natural sciences and towards studies of human cognition and behaviour. The more socially constructed the concept seems, the more problematic it becomes to make any claims of knowledge as the truth or an established fact. This is evident by the fact that there can be multiple equally plausible theories and research findings explaining certain concepts such as emotions or happiness. Not to mention the difficulties defining these concepts in a manner that scientists agree upon. The very idea of defining the concept or phenomena that scientists are trying to get hold on brings with it associated cultural, historical, and ideological baggage.

We operate within a certain cultural context and are situated in a certain geographical location at a certain time in history where certain ways of practicing science are more acceptable than others. The way we frame how we think about certain things as well as the methods we develop to explore these questions are inseparably tangled with these factors. As well as our historical and cultural past, our own perspective is coloured by our immediate interaction with others around us. The very language we use to formulate our hypothesis predetermines, to some extent, the direction that our research follows. For example, despite the underlying similarities these questions are framed “are you pro-choice?” or “Do you object to the idea of murdering unborn children?” will elicit different responses.

This messy picture of science where the objective and subjective are not neatly separable, makes attempts to develop so called objective approaches with regard to socially constructed behaviours such as criminality questionable. What kind of behaviour is criminal? In which society? At what time? There is no simple and universally defined definition of crime. A brief look at the concept of homosexuality that has developed from being a criminal act to now (for most of the Western society, anyway) as a right, shows how slippery and context dependent the very idea of what counts as a criminal behaviour. Any attempt to understand drug-related crimes, for example, shows how unclear the idea of crime can be – both snorting cocaine and smoking cannabis (in certain parts of the world) being defined as criminal acts, legally speaking .

I am not arguing that all science is biased and that the work scientists have been doing is no use. The point I want to make is that how we come to conceptualise certain phenomena in a certain way but not other does not spring out of nowhere but is inextricably linked to our language, the current dominant theories, current discourses available to us, and our history among other things. Therefore we need to be aware that our science is (implicitly or explicitly) influenced and to some extent determined by these – some fields more than others. And as the scientist is not a robot that is devoid of passion, interests, errors, and biases (which is not necessarily beneficial either as I think some passion and interest in our research is important), the least we can do is acknowledge this and actively question and review whether our views have been clouded by such as well as being mindful of any generalizable claims that we make as objective facts.

What makes me, me?

What makes me like coffee over tea? Why do some people engage in criminal activities? What is it that makes some people a rapist? What are the sources of bullying behaviour?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find simple explanations for such complex questions? Psychology is constantly trying to explain complex behaviour. It’s not uncommon to hear explanations by psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, criminologists, and the like, usually each from their own perspective, asserting why we prefer one thing over the other, why we are repulsed by certain things, or why we behave the way we do. These explanations often invoke factors such as parenting style, genes, environment, history, culture and so on, depending on the perspective the subject has been approached from.

Arguably, explanations that closely focus on certain factors and not others serve a purpose when it comes to narrowly defined investigations. The problem is, in attempting to explain complex behaviour, we often fail prey (knowingly or unknowingly) to false dichotomies. Despite the constant warning against false dichotomies, it is common to read scientific papers making attempts, for example,  to ascribe the influence of genes as opposed to environment in seeking to understand the effect of parenting on the kind of person we grow up to be.

The “person” is an extremely slippery and difficult concept to pin down. What makes me ‘me’ is extremely fuzzy (and constantly changing) to the extent that it cannot be separated from those around me, my historical background, the culture and time I am situated in, and the dynamical interactions at play. We are constantly dynamically interacting and influencing others around us, and the physical environment, as well as being influenced by these factors. My view of what constitutes a criminal behaviour for example, does not spring into being from nowhere. Rather it is an interplay of many factors, such as the currently available discourse, my political, social, economic, and geographical position in a certain society, the kind of shared of language that is available for use, as well as my family, culture and historical background.

Given that we are constantly in the process of becoming mediated by the dynamical interplay of inextricably linked factors such as culture, genes, physical environment, history, currently available discourses, local societal norms, diet and so on, attempting to separate these factors and claiming to have determined  the contribution genes and/or environment makes towards complex behaviour such as criminality would be similar to having successfully separated the inside and outside of a Mobius strip.