Side-glances at simulation

When I was 12 or 13, I found one of the first chapters of Asimov's I, Robot disturbing, the one where the little girl has a robot as her only friend. That was my first introduction to the idea of technology threatening to replace the organic.

I think this is the exact version
we had— I guess the warning
must've been on the back or side

I think my discomfort with it had its roots some years before, being a young kid and feeling this sense of coldness while playing the Windows solitaire games. I was used to playing card and board games with my dad, and then here I was playing a game against a computer who had no emotional connection to playing together or to me.

We owned an Othello board game which had a warning on the box, something like "We strongly urge you to eat and sleep between games." As a little girl who had never heard of addiction, it made me sad to think a pair of people could be so crazy as to ruin themselves and each other by playing relentlessly, ignoring that they were hungry and tired. My dad would never let me do that even if I tried, because he cared about me, but that was not the case with the computer. I could destroy myself playing a hundred games in a row and it would make no difference to my computer.

That dismal child-thought was probably at least partly responsible for my years of discomfort with any suggestion that machines could ever in some way replace people. I didn't read Asimov's "Bicentennial Man" until a class in university, which put that chapter of I, Robot, or the whole book really, into a different perspective, since perhaps the robots were supposed to really have emotions? My distaste for the idea joined up with my distaste for overly positivistic sociology, which seemed to hurt from the opposite direction: reduce people to machines, suggesting emotions and motivations could come down to a bunch of mechanistic rules.

Now I'm fond of myNoise, a collection of online soundscape generators ranging from forest noises to musical instruments. What led me in particular to write this post is the recent addition of a generator that seems described by the artist as being something like computer-generated music. (Or, less recent now, because I'm lazy with finishing posts). It's precisely the sort of thing that would have made me uncomfortable—and I realize there are a number of examples of computer-generated arts out there—but I suppose there's little to be so uneasy about—

I'm sort of revisiting my old issues with this discomfort, which is why I'm reflecting on their origin. What am I worried about: that programmed music is cold in the same way that replacing my dad with a computer is cold? I certainly don't find playing games with a computer all that cold anymore, I

Despite being a bit rusty at FreeCell

suppose due to the internet rendering games a shared experience whether or not you're directly playing against a human, and due to knowing that programs are a creation, that even if they're not people, there are people right behind them. When I think about computer games now—well, even as a kid the feeling of coldness didn't keep me from playing—I don't think of the computer replacing a human at all. I don't know if that's just my own development or whether it's a change in how people as a whole are thinking about technology.

I wonder how many people now would think about robots becoming someone's only friend. I get the sense that would be seen these days as a sign of a deeply lonely person. It seems like now it's more a matter of simulations being extensions of people, not replacements for people. I've had a couple brushes with 'digital humanities' recently at university, and one of its great themes appears to be that computers change people's relationship with the humanities. When I learned about that, I didn't have a problem with it and it just seemed intuitive. Over time, it seems experience has quietly replaced the understanding I had that caused the discomfort in the first place. And I've only just noticed what it left in its place.