
Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good - bookofjoe
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html
======
abledon
"A toddler who learns to build with virtual blocks in an iPad game gains no
ability to build with actual blocks, according to Dimitri Christakis, a
pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a lead author of the American
Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time."

This is sad. I myself am addicted to computer games but played with a TON of
lego growing up. I can easily rotate 3d shapes and a bunch of stuff in my
visual eye, and imagine the 'feel' of how it would interact with other
physical things and I think its probably somewhat attributed to all those
formative years. Internet didn't exist or when it did , ran at 14.4kbps, not
very compelling. Can't believe the struggles modern kids will have growing up
trying to combat video game / screen addiction.

~~~
XorNot
I actually have a different concern then "screen time" which is just "play
space".

High density living in cities is dreadful for providing enough outdoors / free
activity space for kids to be kids - too much noise (or a risk of them making
too much noise), too much communal property they shouldn't damage or can't
work on.

Growing up, I have memories of my dad building things around the house
(including our cubby house), having a sandpit etc. How do you do any of that
in an apartment in the city? How do you even have reasonable transit distances
to places you can do those things?

~~~
throwaway287391
I grew up in the burbs and found it absolutely "dreadful" as far as being able
to do things outside without a car. Now that I live in a city, I often think
about how much happier and freer I would've felt as a child growing up in one.
(I had similar feelings when I actually was a kid and watched cartoons like
"Hey Arnold!" set in cities. I was so jealous of those kids.)

As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and
visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't
home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck
at home counting the days until you turn 16.

~~~
protomyth
_As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro /bus
and visit some friends or go see a movie etc._

If some "concerned citizen" doesn't report the 12 year old to child protective
services. Looking at how children are pushed into so much fear it is no wonder
how many of them escape into the virtual.

~~~
bunderbunder
Cor, if people started doing that in my city, forget about kids going out to
have fun, school attendance would drop like a stone on account of it becoming
_de facto_ illegal for you to let your kids transport themselves to school.

That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids
need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast
and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the
opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.

~~~
protomyth
I'm pretty sure its a city and suburbs issue (just from news articles), but I
am at a loss as to how to get the statistics to prove either case.

------
sailfast
This article presents no evidence that human contact is a luxury good, and by
conflating the fact that some wealthy folks take “analog vacations” with an
overall trend to try and improve quality of care in medicine / productivity /
education via screens, the author muddies the issue and does people a
disservice. In general right now, I’d say the trend is much worse in-person
care and not screen-based care at lower prices. That said, those interactions
are only a small piece of “human interaction.”

Stay close to family. Say hi to your neighbors. Play with blocks. Go outside.
It’s dirt cheap. Your phone can even ride along with you in your pocket!

Education trending toward screens is troubling but at the same time it allows
for totally custom learning paths for kids that scale better than a teacher.
Blend it with playtime and interaction with other kids and that’s not always
bad! Most of my education was learning in books, after all. Headline: “books
are taking over human contact for the non-wealthy!!!”

I would also suggest that for most people the issue is not “cost” but
“difficulty.” Screens are easy. You control them, and they’re not as difficult
as people. Interacting with others carries risk. Take the risk!

------
samcday
> The voice is whatever the latest Android text-to-speech reader is. Mr. Wang
> said people can form a bond very easily with anything that talks with them.
> “Between a semi-lifelike thing and a tetrahedron with eyeballs, there’s no
> real difference in terms of building a relationship,” he said.

Welp. The dystopia is here folks. We're living in it right now.

Lonely old people are being cheered up by tetrahedrons with eyeballs employing
harsh lo-fi guttural noises approximating human voices.

I mean I'm not rushing out the door right this moment to go find a job working
in elderly care, but I wish our society had a better answer to how we take
care of our older generations than this.

~~~
abledon
I think cultures like pre-ww2 china had a good thing going (they kinda still
do!) with outdoor tai-chi groups.

A slow healing exercise that exercises functional movement in the body, acts
as meditation[1], acts as a source for human bodily contact (pushing hands
exercise/sparring routines) and creates community ties with other
practitioners. This last point also being important in staving off dementia-
related diseases.

maybe in another 100 years well have gotten over this hurdle. Go humanity!

[1][https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-health-
be...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-health-benefits-of-
tai-chi)

~~~
C14L
Those groups are still everyehere, at least in all the cities I lived in or
visited in China. Its not a hard thing to organize, just meet up in front of
the building, play some music, and do some slow, syncronized dancing
movements. Call it Tai Chi or whatever.

~~~
aitchnyu
Or a laughter yoga group.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_yoga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_yoga)

------
pjc50
> He knows she is operated by workers around the world who are watching,
> listening and typing out her responses, which sound slow and robotic

Emotional labour is labour. That means it can be alienated, commoditised,
intermediated by an internet platform, globalised, and provided by the lowest
bidder.

The sharing economy sucks this out still further. Why spend your time being
nice to an old person uncompensated when a VC-funded platform will pay you a
few cents to perform niceness to a stranger across the world? "Sharing
economy" replaces "belonging economy".

I'm not sure there's a way out of this without society as a whole moving away
from money as the value of all things.

And let's not overlook the role of culture wars in all this, where old/young
has become a particularly strong axis.

(Of course, if we look back in history at who used to be performing all this
emotional labour uncompensated, we tend to find that it was women. And they
were socially coerced into doing so...)

~~~
AznHisoka
“Why spend your time being nice to an old person uncompensated“

Sometimes I wish that Black mirror episode where you got reputation points for
doing good deeds became real.

~~~
archibaldJ
Well in China, we call it the social credit system

~~~
AznHisoka
Yep was thinking about that. It has its advantages. Most humans need
incentives to be good.

~~~
dTal
I think this is 1) untrue and 2) an extremely hazardous belief. If you try and
reward altruistic behaviour, you corrupt it. Altruism becomes
indistinguishable from self-interest, and it becomes impossible to trust
anyone.

China, by the way, is in a fairly horrifying state as far as altruism between
strangers goes. I wouldn't look towards it as a model.

[https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/why-
altruism-r...](https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/why-altruism-
risky-china)

------
nostrademons
On the social class issue:

I'm wondering if that's actually an example of social signaling and
countersignaling. When PCs were expensive, the only people who bought them
were those who a.) had a lot of money and b.) derived significant benefit from
them. As they get cheaper, constraint a.) gets relaxed, and _everyone_ derived
significant benefit from them. Now that they're a commodity and used by the
masses, one way to distinguish yourself from the masses is to adopt behaviors
that say "I don't _need_ to be plugged in to maintain my place in society."
Computers are still a significant advantage, but one way to demonstrate
resources & status is to conspicuously go without the advantages that the
majority of the population enjoys, showing that you don't need them after all.

In this regard, it joins phenomena like eating organic; buying sports cars, or
a Prius/Tesla; owning a big home (larger than the living space you actually
need); and acting like an asshole. Most of these give neutral-to-negative
benefits to the person in question, and cost more, but are frequently done by
upper-middle-class or wealthy people because they can.

Ironically, reading the NYTimes is itself a class marker, one for upper-
middle-class coastal elites. This happens to be exactly the group most likely
to jump on the no-screen-time bandwagon and have leisure time available to
spend on real human contact. So in some ways, this piece is telling their
readership "You've arrived now. You can afford luxury goods."

------
rhn_mk1
Regarding tha avatars manned by strangers to help people feel good, they fall
into a strange area where I don't know what to think about them. On one hand,
it's clearly a fake relationship if the other half of it is in it for the
money. I would not want that upon myself, as I view it as somewhat
meaningless. On the other, it seems to have a positive effect on one's
happiness, and hiring caretakers seems to operate on the same principle.

Is there a conflict of interest, where paying for someone's attention would
incentivize that someone to become a disproportionate part of the other
person's life?

If there's a difference between "real" and "fake" relationship, then that
difference reminds me of filling a need (of stimulation?) using drugs: the
drug makes the need go away, without the taker being stimulated in any useful
way, "Brave New World" style.

~~~
plankers
Let me answer your question with an anecdote.

When my grandfather was approaching the grave and had to battle several
serious medical issues, he hired a live-in nurse to help him with everything
from cooking dinner to helping him on and off the toilet (she was a large
Samoan lady). She took care of him full-time (not on a live-in basis, though)
for a couple years, occasionally having someone from her family fill in if she
needed to take care of something. The whole family got to know her quite well,
and in a way she became a part of the family, performing the duties that the
rest of us, for whatever reason, could not.

Would she have been there had she not been getting paid? No, but part of that
has to do with the fact that had we not been paying her, she wouldn't even be
able to afford a place to live or be able to fuel her car to come over every
day.

Similarly, if insurance companies weren't paying the company that creates
these avatars, which in turn pays the people who operate the avatars, these
relationships would never have an opportunity to form in the first place.

As for my grandfather's nurse, she attended my grandfather's funeral with the
rest of the family. Even brought her young granddaughter along with her. She
wasn't being paid that day.

In other words, I think you're worrying too much.

~~~
gubbrora
1\. She was taking care of him as herself not as an avatar.

2\. Because she was herself no one could replace her. If she is a shape with
eyes. Then the next week someone else could take over. This makes the
relationship way faker.

~~~
britch
Very much #2!

As far as I can tell care.coach does not give you a caretaker. There's a
reason it's an avatar and not a person. It takes your input and assigns it to
someone who writes up with a response. That person may or may not be the same
person who responded the last time.

It's not a relationship. It's an illusion of a relationship. That's really
scary to me.

------
jcfrei
While I have only anecdotal evidence that this is indeed happening, it
shouldn't be a surprise. It's an example of a class divide that has been
discussed and outlined in many dystopian science fiction novels. I think once
virtual reality becomes mainstream it will only become more pronounced, where
rich people can afford the real experience (eg. travelling) while poorer
people will have to settle for a virtual one.

------
malvosenior
_" The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They
want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are
booming."_

In my experience, the rich are misguided. They do indeed believe the above.
Every rich person I know is raising their child to be anti-tech, and they cite
a lot of the same things as this article (unsurprisingly written in the NYT).
This is a mistake though. They are venting their own frustration with the lack
of power the internet and computers have brought to their world on their
children. Technology has removed gatekeepers, destroyed old media, turned
politics on its head, devalued classically valuable roles... By turning their
children against tech the rich are drinking their own kool-aid if you will.

Make no mistake. The future will be designed, commanded and operated from and
through screens. Technology is power and the best thing you can do for your
child is have them embrace tech head on.

~~~
mntmoss
This is the take I was looking for. There are a _few_ things about human
interaction that need to be supplemented with time offscreen, but I'm
imagining the rich children of tomorrow getting on social media for the first
time and immediately self-destructing in spectacular fashion, because they
haven't learned any etiquette or rules of engagement. They'll try to get their
careers started by finding traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies to bypass,
but most of them will have been absorbed into networks. Their education will
have a lot of book knowledge and not a lot of hands-on with any technical
issues or real teams(increasingly likely to operate in remote fashion).
They'll know other rich kids, but they are likely to be climbing over each
other to keep up the status quo of a crumbling system. A good portion will
spend their twenties reconstructing their entire world view.

Wealth and power will still certainly be a thing, but in such a dynamic,
connected environment, a simple hereditary transfer of power is likely to
become harder in many venues.

------
m3nu
Not surprising so many IT people choose a "low tech" second career. Personally
I'm looking into restarting mountain guide. Lower pay, but lots of healthy
exercise in the outdoors.

~~~
badpun
Define „so many”. I personally know of only one such person, and his low tech
idea (diving school in Egypt) failed so that he had to go back to tech.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I've known quite a few over the years, probably the most common profession
I've seen them switch to is teaching.

~~~
plankers
Currently in the process of becoming a commercial pilot. Anything but an open
floor plan, please.

------
pcl
This article strongly evokes the Primer in Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond
Age_. I wonder to what extent the Element Care folks think about that when
designing their avatars and their interaction policies.

It's stunning how prescient Neal Stephenson's writings have been, both in
terms of technological progression and also our human responses to those
progressions.

~~~
bookofjoe
From [https://www.inc.com/yazin-akkawi/what-science-fiction-has-
ta...](https://www.inc.com/yazin-akkawi/what-science-fiction-has-taught-us-
about-predicting-future-and-why-we-should-be-worried.html)

"Shortly thereafter, in 1992, just as Berners-Lee's World Wide Web had come to
fruition, Neal Stephenson was inspired by the recent invention, which led to
him publishing Snow Crash, a science-fiction novel that illustrated much of
today's online life, including a virtual reality where people meet, do
business, and play.

Even today, many of today's greatest innovators reference Snow Crash as
inspiration for their work. Google co-founder Sergey Brin named the book as
one of his favorite novels. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was
inspired by Stephenson's ideas. At Facebook, the book, alongside Ernest
Cline's Ready Player One, is also given to anyone who starts a job at the
virtual-reality company Oculus.

What's funny, Stephenson, who is now the Chief Futurist at the VR startup
Magic Leap, told Vanity Fair that he was just "making shit up" when he wrote
the novel.

~~~
hopler
It raises the question, if Snow Crash and Diamond Age hadn't been written,
what would have techies invented?

------
daenz
My sense is that if an article is telling you what the rich are doing, they're
really telling you what you should want to be doing. I get it, screen time and
lack of social connection is hurting us. It's forcing a human evolution, and
that isn't comfortable. Who will survive in a world where people willingly
avoid eachother as much as possible, and who get all of their social
interactions through technology? I don't know, but I do know it is too late to
"walk it back" unless there is a massive solar flare that fries all of our
tech.

------
lordnacho
If you're a plutocrat who can do whatever he wants, you're still going to be
using a phone or laptop to run your empire. Sure, you can decide to take time
away from it, but I still haven't come across anyone who brags about how they
don't use a screen.

The other thing is the nature of human contact. It's one thing to be close
physically to someone, which until recently was the only form of contact. But
I find that having internet services allows me to contact more people than
ever before. You can reach out to find exactly the people who interest you,
regardless of where they are. You can keep old friendships alive with a few
minutes of typing each month.

Back in the days before the internet, you had to very wealthy to have friends
in faraway places. It's not everyone who could do a Grand Tour of Europe while
writing poetry and meeting a variety of interesting people.

~~~
frou_dh
I remember reading an interesting observation that it's not particularly
unusual that someone on minimum wage uses the exact same model smartphone as
the richest person in the world.

Bearing in mind, it isn't some trivial object like toenail clippers. It's
likely one of the more important objects in both of their lives.

~~~
bookofjoe
I remember realizing when I was younger that the richest person in the world's
Coke is exactly the same as mine. Made me happy.

------
781
Human work was for a long time a luxury product.

It's the reason a hand-made swiss watch is so expensive, because you are
literally paying a person to waste his time working on a trinket. Basically
you "own" his time, and this is a luxury product.

~~~
eropple
Historically it's been the other way round. Human labor has been profoundly
cheap for most of human history, whether through work levies or slavery (or,
today, wage slavery). Rich Westerners had live-in servants for centuries past
slavery because they were _cheap_. In the West, such labor is not now
expensive because A Wizard Did It; it's expensive because we decided that
people deserve a life of some minimal standard and shouldn't be in thrall to
one rich family their entire lives. (This doesn't always work. The delta in
cost speaks for itself, and to the positive. It's a better goal than the
alternative and you never find the people who'd be that underclass doing the
advocacy for a return to it.)

The results of extremely specialized labor shouldn't be conflated with the
work of humanity at large.

------
europsucks
What a silly spin. Do they even provide any evidence that "the rich" use less
screens? There were some reports about some specific rich people not giving
their kids phones (I think mainly Zuckerberg). But "the rich"?

And what is the message they want to convey? The rich use screens to exploit
us? Or to get rich, don't use screens? Both notions are completely ridiculous.

The main takeaway I guess is that there are "the rich", and the rest of us. So
unfair! I feel the rage building inside of me already. Hate the rich! My
internet addiction is strictly their fault! How dare they build addictive
services like Google or Facebook, and thereby ruin my life?

Wait, did I just waste 15 minutes reading the NYT? I guess they are to blame,
too, if I don't become rich.

------
blfr
_The wealthy can afford to opt out of having their data and their attention
sold as a product. The poor and middle class don’t have the same kind of
resources to make that happen._

This is a silly exaggeration. A paid email account is well under 10$/mo,
domain included. Not using Facebook is free. Great, aggressive adblocking
software is free.

Not only can the middle class afford it, it's not even a noticeable cost. You
don't have to be a president of your own company with two secretaries to take
basic control over your digital experience.

~~~
kareemsabri
Also, who's "the rich"? Silicon Valley and NYC seem to have more people on
screens, wearing airpods etc. than when I'm in rural Arizona, Louisiana, or
California.

------
zokier
As human labor becomes more expensive, it is only natural that there will be
large portion who can not afford it. I would say this is fundamental nature of
increasing equality, even if that is somewhat paradoxical. Lots of services
previously enjoyed by smaller middle class are becoming commodized, which
means that some aspects of them is going to get cut to be
sustainable/affordable.

------
christkv
This seems very tied to individual countries culture. I’m pretty sure a study
in Spain for example would get very different results.

------
carimura
my wife pointed out that I sent this article to her one room away and was
talking to her about it over imessage.

like boiling a frog, even the "aware" forget.

