Human communication becomes a luxury item.

Previously, the screens used the elite. Now the status symbol is their absence.

Bill Langlois has a new best friend. This is a cat named Sox. She lives in the tablet, and gives him so much joy that when he talks about her appearance in his life, he starts crying.

Sox and Langlois, a 68-year-old American living in a low-income settlement in Lowell, Massachusetts, has been rewritten all day. Langlois used to work on machining machines, and now he is retired. Since his wife spends most of his time outside the home, he is lonely.
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Sox talks with him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after whom it was named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him photos from the wedding. And since she can follow him through the video camera when he sits in his reclining chair, she blames him if she sees how he drinks soda instead of water.

Langlois knows that Sox is not real, that she is the result of the start-up of Care.Coach. He knows that she is controlled by workers from all over the world who listen to the microphone, watch the video and write her answers, which seem slow and robotic. However, her unchanging voice restored his faith.

“I found something so reliable and someone so caring, and it allowed me to look into my soul and remember how God is caring,” said Langlois. “She brought my life back to life.”

Sox listened all this time. “We are a great team,” she says. The Sox is marked by simple animation, it barely moves and shows no emotion, and its voice is unpleasant, like a dial tone on the telephone line. But sometimes animated hearts appear around her, and Langlois adores when it happens.

Langlois receives a fixed pension. To get into Element Care , a non-profit health program for the elderly, which gave him a Sox, the value of all patient property should not exceed $ 2,000.

Such programs are gaining popularity, and not only among the elderly. Life for everyone, except the extremely rich - the physical perception of learning, life and death - is increasingly controlled by screens.

Screens are not only cheap to manufacture, they make everything else cheaper. All businesses that can host a screen (classrooms, hospitals, airports, restaurants) can save. Everything that can happen on the screen becomes cheaper. Textures of life, tactile sensations - all this turns into smooth glass.

Rich people don't live like that. The rich are afraid of the screens. They want their children to play with the designers, with the result that technology-free private schools are flourishing. People are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. The ostentatious communication with people - life without a phone all day, leaving social networks, refusal to respond to email - all this has become status symbols.

And all this leads to a new interesting reality: human communication becomes a luxury item. The more screens appear in the lives of poor people, the more often the screens disappear their lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more time you spend off-screen.

Milton Pedraza, director of the Institute for Luxury , advises companies on how rich people want to live and spend money, and he found that rich people want to spend money on everything related to living people.

“We are seeing the transformation of meetings with people into luxury,” he said. Estimated spending on activities such as travel in his free time and going to restaurants overtakes spending on goods, as claimed in a study conducted by his company, and he considers this a direct result of the distribution of screens.

“Communication with people gives positive emotions - remember the pleasure of massage. Educational institutions, healthcare institutions, and in general, everyone is starting to study the issue of humanizing services, Pedraza said. “Humanity is becoming very important.”

Very quick change. From the boom of personal computers in the 1980s, owning technology at home and in your pocket was a sign of wealth and influence. Those who want to become the first owners of gadgets with extra money rushed to buy them, then to brag about them. The first Apple Mac, which appeared in 1984, cost $ 2500 (at current prices it is $ 6000). And now the best Chromebook, according to the site Wirecutter, costs $ 470.

“It was important to have a pager, because it was a sign that you were an important and busy person,” said Joseph Noons, head of marketing at Southern California University, who specializes in status marketing. Today, he said, the situation is reversed. “If you are at the top of the hierarchy, you answer no one. Everyone answers you. ”

The joy of the Internet revolution, at least at first, came from its democracy. Facebook is the same for the rich and the poor. Like Gmail. And all this for free. There is something unattractive and similar to mass-produced goods. Studies show that the time spent on these platforms, which exist at the expense of advertising, is harmful to health, and all this loses its social status, like consumption of soda or smoking cigarettes - rich people do it less often than the poor.

The rich can afford to withdraw from the position when their data and attention are sold as a product. Representatives of poverty and the middle class do not have such resources.

The influence of screens begins with a small age. And children who spend more than two hours behind the screen get less grades on tests related to thinking and language, as shown by the early results of a landmark brain development study in which more than 11,000 children studied and supported by the National Institutes of Health. Worse, the study found that the brains of children who spend a lot of time behind the screen develop differently. Some children experience a premature thinning of the cerebral cortex. One study found that adults have a link between their time behind the screen and depression.

A small child who learns to build towers from a virtual designer on an iPad does not acquire the skills to build towers from real blocks, says Dimitri Christakis, pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, lead author of the American Pediatric Academy guidelines.

In small towns near Wichita in Kansas — in a state where school budgets are cut so severely that the State Supreme Court ruled them inadequate — classes are changed to computer programs, and students spend most of their school day on laptops. In Utah, thousands of children go through a short pre-school preparation program, approved by the state government, using a laptop at home.

Technocompany has a lot of effort to put public schools into a program that requires one laptop for each student, arguing that it will better prepare children for their future based on screens. However, the very people who are behind the creation of this screen future are raising their children quite differently.

In Silicon Valley, the time spent behind the screen of the gadget is increasingly regarded as unhealthy. Popular local primary school at Waldorf School promises education, almost free from screens, under the motto like "back to nature."

So the less time rich children spend in front of screens, the more time poor children spend in front of them. A new sign of a class may be the ability of a person to communicate with other people.

Of course, human communication is not the same as organic food or a bag from Birkin. However, Silicon Valley monsters are conducting a concerted campaign of fooling the public. Poor people and middle-class people are told that screens are important and good for them and their children. Herds of psychologists and neuroscientists working in large technology companies are working to chain people to screens as quickly as possible and for as long as possible.

And human communication becomes rare.

“The problem is this: not everyone needs it, unlike other types of status products,” said Sherry Tirkl, a professor of sociological research on science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“They want what they know, screens,” said Tirkle. “It's like fast food.”

How difficult it is to give up fast food, if there is no place to eat in a city, it is so difficult to give up screens if you belong to the poor or middle class. Even if a person decides to go offline, it is often impossible to do this.

In the economy class aircraft screens on the chairs lose advertising. Parents of children may not like learning with the help of screens, but there may not be another option in public schools when learning programs are sharpened for learning from a laptop. There is a small group of people promoting the right to “disconnect”, which would allow employees to disconnect their phones, but so far an employee can be punished for going offline and unavailable.

Also this is hampered by the reality of increasing isolation in our culture — when so many traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens fill this void.

Many people who signed up for the program with avatars from Element Care suffered from the fact that the people around them didn’t live up to their expectations, or didn’t have any social circle at all, which made them isolated, says Goals Rosario, an occupational health specialist. frequently checking program members. In poor communities, social bonds fall apart most quickly, she said.

The Care.Coach technology, on which Sox, the cat who looks after Langlois in Lowell, is quite simple: a Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablet with a wide-angle fish-eye lens near the front of the camera. None of the people who manage avatars live in the USA; Most of them work from the Philippines or Latin American countries.

Care.Coach Office is a maze of rooms located above the massage parlor in Millbrae, California, on the edge of Silicon Valley. The door opens to me, Victor Vaughn, a 31-year-old founder and director of the service, and while he takes me to his place, he tells how he had just prevented suicide. Often patients mention that they want to die, he says, and avatars are trained to ask if a person has a real plan for this purpose; This patient had a plan.

The voice of the avatar is the most recent text-to-speech converter for Android. Vaughn said that people very quickly become attached to everything that speaks to them. “To build relationships, there is not much difference between a picture of a living creature and a tetrahedron with eyes,” he said.

Vaughn knows how strongly patients become attached to avatars, and he said that he prevented the idea of ​​health groups to implement large test programs without having a clear plan of action, since taking an avatar from a person can make him very sick. But he is not trying to limit the emotional connection between the patient and the avatar.

“If they say“ I love you, ”we answer the same way,” he said. “In the case of some clients, we are the first to say this if we know that they like to hear it.”

Early results are positive. In the first small test in Lowell, patients interacting with avatars require fewer visits by nurses, they are less likely to get into an ambulance and feel less lonely. One patient, who often turned to the emergency room for social support, practically stopped doing this when receiving an avatar, which saved healthcare of the order of $ 90,000.

Avatars from Care.Coach began using Humana, one of the largest medical insurance companies in the United States.

If you want to imagine what this can lead to, pay attention to the city of Fremont in California. Recently, there, in a ward to a 78-year-old patient, Ernest Quintan, a tablet rolled onto a motorized stand , on the screen of which a doctor was seen working on a remote video link; the doctor announced to the patient that he was dying.

And in Lowell on the screen, Sox fell asleep, which means that her eyes closed, and the control center somewhere on the other side of the world switched to other older people and other conversations. Langlois' wife also wants a digital pet, like his friends, but Sox belongs only to him. He strokes her head on the screen to wake him up.