Learning all the wrong things

This evening in my daily feed-reading frenzy, I happened across an article by Wired’s sex columnist (how unexpected is that job position?) entitled 10 Reasons I’d Rather Marry a Robot. It was a mildly funny article, but Reason Number 3 really hit me:

Robots are sensitive and responsive.

A robot partner can measure my respiration, heart rate, skin temperature and more using its biofeedback sensors. It knows exactly when I’m turned on, when I’m withdrawing, when I’m approaching climax; it knows my body better than I do.

That’s true. This is one of those areas in which computers seem to occupy the realm of the superhuman, figuring things out much faster than we could ever hope to. Of course, the author is hereby admitting that sexual intercourse is an activity mastered more by rote than by creativity and inspiration, the latter being the last intellectual domain said to belong solely to humans.

First, I’ll say that I don’t believe sex is such a rote activity. But I definitely see merit in the author’s claim that a robot would be better at identifying the signs of desire listed in the example. This means that a robot, thanks to technologically superior sensors, would be better at reading humans than humans are. And I just don’t believe that.

I object because I find the notion that more sophisticated hardware leads to enhanced understanding absurd. Give a robot a 640×480 picture of a cat, or a 50 megapixel version, and the robot is still not going to know it’s a picture of a cat. The ability to understand lies in how the data provided, however meager, are interpreted. I definitely think humans are much better at such interpretation, but I don’t think it’s an ability most people commonly evidence. Why?

Reading people isn’t something you’re taught in school, for some reason. I remember being a freshman in high school and talking to my dad about liking a girl I didn’t see very often (oh, how typically me). He commiserated, “They only teach you algebra and Chaucer, and not how to establish relationships with other human beings.” Those words have evidently echoed around inside me since then, though I haven’t thought about them for some time.

It’s honestly hard for me to believe that there isn’t a class on social interaction in high school (let alone college!). I suppose one might argue that given the structure of high school, students should be learning the ways of human interaction every day, by doing. That argument hardly holds up, though, as I was still subjected to word problems compelling me to compute whether Sally and Enrique had enough money to buy two sodas, three cookies, and a candy bar, or just one soda and ten packs of gum. Um, I went to the convenience store often enough as a kid, OK? I can count my change just fine—you don’t have to test me on it.

So it’s good enough to learn socialization hands-on, but math should be learned from books. There’s phys ed, where the fat kid has to learn to deal with getting picked on everyday, but that’s not the stated topic of the class. And nowhere can Johnny sign up for a course on how to parry insults and riposte with scathing invective of his own. Those actions are necessary for status maintenance in social situations, especially so in high school. But it’s not taught!

Maybe it’s my geeky, asocial side speaking, but I think that the nuances of social interaction should be explicitly instructed in a classroom environment. What does it mean when someone looks upward at you with their head slightly down-turned? How were your coworker’s hands moving when he complimented you on your last project? (Was the praise genuine, or is he jealous and now plotting against you?) When your boss was describing the requirements for a new assignment, did the emphasis on the last word of the sentence mean that the details are negotiable? (Was he asking for input?) Why do people so often tip their head to the side in order to indicate interest?

Yes, these are things that an individual will pick up piece by piece while living immersed in social contexts. But why shouldn’t they be taught as an essential life skill, much like high students are forced to read Macbeth and Dante’s Inferno, lest they seem woefully unprepared for life in the real world? By comparison, knowledge of the classics seems ridiculously unimportant in determining the success of a student as he progresses through his academic and professional careers. Alluding to Shakespeare is classy, but suavely buying someone a drink at a conference can land you the job of your dreams.

Learning these signs would vastly improve intercultural competence, I believe, and perhaps that’s why it’s not a popular thing to do. I think these things aren’t being taught due to a sick mixture of pride and shame: pride at not having to know about what others think or feel, concentrating instead only on the self; and shame that we don’t actually understand these social dimensions in an intimate way, when it should be so simple.

Of course, teaching people to understand these signs, to anticipate them and even manipulate them, would without a doubt lead to an evolution in the exhibition of the signs themselves. A better understanding would change whatever is being observed, until that thing is once again incomprehensible. But I don’t mind this epistemological cat and mouse, and in fact, I think it’s necessary to establish that state of flux.

These things are being taught, just not in high schools and colleges. There’s the Behavior Detection Officer which the TSA introduced last year. Although it’s much harder to find linkable articles on other government agencies and their behavioral analysis training programs, it’s indisputably going on. As a geek, open source and free culture enthusiast, I’m compelled to demand a more egalitarian distribution of knowledge. I want the resources of power available to everyone at a click, so no one can hoard influence and manipulate the masses with impunity.

This is something we all should know.