Making up machine rules

Culture > bans

Lately, Serve delivery robots have been popping up around our neighborhood. They basically look like tiny cars with eyeballs. They have names like ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Maro’ painted on their sides.

They’re presenting a perfect teachable moment to talk to my daughters about anthropomorphic tech.

The stakes feel high. This is my chance to reach them early and, in my hope of hopes, curb the likelihood that they spend their lives in relationships with robots rather than human friends and lovers.

Turns out my messaging is still pretty rough. Like an unhinged prepper, I’ve been known to shriek “Don’t talk to it!” while chasing them down the sidewalk and “Stop waving!” when they eagerly greet the machines.

My 6-year-old, Lily (fulfilling her parentified duties as firstborn), follows my directions; my 4-year-old, Rosie (liberated by birth order), now delights in nothing more than saying hi to the little robots.

These sidewalk fits and starts are proof that even someone who thinks constantly about technology disrupting human connection can struggle to translate those concerns into an airtight argument for why and how to steer clear of technology’s relational risks.

There’s no shortage of people trying to sell airtight opinions. Jonathan Haidt has captured the national imagination on banning tech. The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter recently argued in no uncertain terms that she wants AI out of her kids’ classrooms and devices.

But even their no-tech arguments can feel a little forced and one-dimensional. Winter’s own impassioned argument to ban AI admits the high pitch that parents are operating at. “I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult.”

While I’m sympathetic to the fears behind these rules, I’m starting to realize why crossing the street from robots doesn’t teach you to walk toward people. The problem with my own rulemongering is that it’s more focused on what I don’t want my kids to do, and less on what I do want them to do, when it comes to both robots and humans—even strangers.

Where rules end, and culture begins

Let’s be clear: moving from convictions to coherent, enforceable rules is one of the thorns in the side of any parent. Regardless of how much you try to control, new challenges seep in when you least expect them.

On a recent walk home from school, Lily and I came across Maro loitering on our corner. She looked up at me and dutifully recited the rule: “We shouldn’t say hi to robots.”

“That’s right!” I agreed, feeling victorious over all of Silicon Valley.

Then she asked, “Does that mean we also shouldn’t say please and thank you to robots?”

Crap, I thought. Yes and no. I want you to be a polite human, but this is a slippery slope to attachment.

“That’s a great question,” I said. “What do you think? Why do we say please and thank you to people?” (Asking another question is a trusty parenting cop-out to any question you haven’t figured out how to answer.) She gave a sweet, meandering reply, and I let it drop.

But the exchange kept nagging at me. Maro is a little bellwether of the technology poised to inundate our sidewalks and hearts. But it’s also an invitation for me to clarify our family values animating who we are and how we act. Lily’s question was a window into the bigger issue looming behind any rule: culture.

Culture can sound wishy-washy. But that’s because it’s more about what you practice than what you preach. Clay Christensen often described culture as what you do when you’re not thinking about it. It may get established in part by policies and procedures written in stone, or, in the case of modern parenting, established through the routines we stick to to make logistics more manageable. But Christensen, inspired by thinkers like Edgar Schein, argued that culture is more than that: it’s established by a “significant history of togetherness,” a way of working and being together that becomes a habit.

A rule built without that history will be confusing at best, and hollow at worst.

Building a significant history of togetherness

I love the idea of significant histories of togetherness because it means the very thing it takes to build culture—spending time together—is the same thing that could build a culture that doesn’t let tech overtake us and our relationships.

And when I think hard about the culture I want my kids to grow up in, it’s much less about not saying hi to robots and much more about saying hi to humans.

I want my daughters to do more than follow rules; I want them to understand why we say please and thank you, why we wave to people who wave to us, and why we say sorry when we’ve done something wrong, even when we didn’t mean to.

I want to build a culture of connection in which regardless of whether we say hi to the robots, we always say hi to people so that we know and are known; in which we enjoy the sounds of the world enough to take our ear buds out; in which we read newspapers on our kitchen counter because it gives us common fodder for conversations rather than individual content streams we text more often than we talk about.

Building toward that culture of connection takes a different kind of work than making up and enforcing directives about robots and screens. Inconveniently, it will require me to change, too. I need to make sure that I’m not among the 46% of parents whose kids say they are distracted by their phone in conversations (even though I love doomscrolling LinkedIn); that I’m saying hi to more strangers (even though I’m debilitatingly introverted); and that I read the newspaper on our counter more (even though the headlines are grim).

All of that will happen over a series of small moments together rather than in big, sweeping declarations about what not to do when we’re apart.

A few weeks ago, Lily came downstairs to find me on my computer in the early hours of the morning. She snuggled next to me and asked me what I was doing.

“I’m writing about … why we don’t make friends with machines,” I said, my best shot at describing an article on synthetic empathy in terms a Kindergartner could grasp.

“Like the little robots on the sidewalk?”

“Yes!”

“And like coffee machines and washing machines?” she asked.

Her response made me laugh and then made me pause. I love coffee, and therefore I love my coffee machine. I also use my washing machine almost as much as my coffee machine. By those measures of loyalty and affection, she’d already upended the logic behind my rule.

“Yes, kind of like that,” I said. I thought about how to make it make more sense. At a loss for words, I just hugged her tighter and hoped that, for now, that’s enough to get the point across.