If ever there is a populist uprising against the usurpation of human functions by mechanized intelligence, surely it will be provoked by the stupidity of telephone answering systems. Or, at least, that’s what I thought the last time I found myself pushing buttons in tune with some anonymous programmer’s infinite loop—a time-consuming journey, incidentally, that my pocketbook was funding.

But, hope as we might, the rebellion will not happen, for a simple reason: most of us have been convinced by a simple lie, namely, the lie that the worrisome effects of our answering systems will very likely improve with future generations of the technology. The lie deserves precise dissection.

Technology pundits have long put us on notice that more sophisticated voice recognition software will lead to more user-friendly computers. The frustrations of the current telephone answering systems will yield to—have already in some respects been yielding to—kinder, gentler, more solicitous capabilities. When I call a business in the future, the options will be more numerous, and I’ll be able to negotiate those options with voice commands more complex than single phrases.

True as this may be, it ignores a pertinent fact about the new capabilities: their reach will be extended. Where primitive software eventually routed me to a human operator, the “friendlier” version will replace the operator with a software agent who will attempt to conduct a crude conversation with me.

So the earlier frustrations will simply be repeated—but at a much more critical level. Where once I finally reached a live person, now I will reach a machine. And if you thought the number-punching phase was irritating, wait until you have to communicate the heart of your business to a computer with erratic hearing, a doubtful vocabulary of four hundred words, and the compassion of a granite monolith!

In other words, the technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level. This is no accident. The technical improvements we apply within a restricted arena entail exactly the sort of broader reach that carries them beyond this arena. Programs that do a better job recognizing spoken words like “one” and “two” are almost certainly based upon technology that we can now apply, if only clumsily, to a much wider range of speech.

Certainly the technology is getting more sophisticated—no one would deny that. But my frustration on the telephone was not, in the first instance, a frustration with the state of the technology. What bothered me was an artificial disruption of the normal potentials of human exchange. Yes, an ill-considered use of technology was the cause of my discomfort, but what I wanted, in a direct sense, was relief from the disruption, not technical advance. And if the technical advance prepares the way for a yet more critical barrier to human exchange—well, forgive me if I say this does not necessarily imply progress.

My own observation suggests that, since I first voiced this concern about telephone answering systems several years ago, many of them have gotten much better. Some designers have paid attention to the needs of the actual users of these systems and to the limited domain within which the software can operate satisfactorily. But, at the same time, many other answering systems have gotten horribly worse. And this dual potential was very much my point. Nothing about the technology as such can infallibly deliver us from the negative to the positive potential.

So long as we look to externalized technology for the improvement we seek, we only participate in a vicious and endless cycle: technical progress comes between us and certain of our expressive powers, and we complain. The complaint is met by an honest assurance that the responsible technology is getting better—which we all can see is true—so that the remaining, muted complaints are dismissed as Luddite. Never mind that the improvements at issue may move the spear point of the complaint yet a little closer to the tremulous heart of the human condition.

Or, consider our suffocation beneath a flood of information we don’t know what to do with. We have repeatedly been told that the next advances in technology will ease our burden. More elaborate filters, information rating schemes, personalized software agents (“knowbots”) that roam the Net gleaning information precisely targeted to our interests—by these devices and their successors we will finally learn to ride the crest of the flood rather than drown in it.

What we forget is that the arms race between the powers of information proliferation and the powers of information management is an endlessly escalating one. The logical finesse with which we manage information is the same logical finesse that generates yet more information and outflanks the tools of management. Software agents are quite as capable of mindlessly flinging off information as of mindlessly collecting it.

Surely there is only one escape from the mindlessness: to realize that the essential contest is not between information management and information inflation, but between the obsession with information (well managed or otherwise) and the habit of quiet reflection. It is not an overload of information so much as a deficit of meaning we suffer from, not a lack of proper filters so much as the loss of mental focus—an inadequate power of sustained attention to what is important.

The technical advances of the past decades have not perceptibly improved our position. Quite the opposite: the sheer abundance of these advances requires from us an even more heroic resistance to the temptation of mental scattering. We must work ever harder to prevent the attenuation of the threads of meaning beneath the accumulating weight of undigested information.

Everyone seems to believe that the cell phone is an instrument conducing to personal safety. And, in a narrow sense, this is certainly true. Many a parent breathes more easily after conferring a phone upon a son or daughter who must travel alone.

But what is it that makes one alone? Doesn’t the widespread use of cell phones, in our cultural milieu, tend to thicken a little further that mutual insulation between us by which society becomes a less hospitable and less safe place? Each of us becomes less inclined to seek help from those immediately around us, and the habit of offering help weakens. For people who pass each other with cell phone attached to ear, the important items of business—including the sources of help—always seem to be elsewhere, and there is not much room for attention to the immediately surrounding social context. The question “Who is my neighbor?” becomes harder and harder to answer.

But let me clarify what I am and am not saying. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t give your son or daughter a cell phone. I can imagine situations where I would do it. This would have the immediate virtue of contributing to the safety of a loved one. But if I were not also working consciously against the unhealthy tendencies of the larger context that necessitated the phone, and to which the phone itself all too naturally contributes, then I would be adding my small share to the miseries of society. I would be making society safer only in the sense that exclusive, gated communities may make a society safer—for some people, and for now.

Seeking clarity at this point is crucial because what the technology critic seems to be saying can easily provoke a justified incredulity in those who, with all good faith, are working to put more sophisticated technical resources at our disposal. “Do you really mean that, in terms of our underlying social problems, we’d be better off without cell phones—and computers, and GPS locators, and space probes, and genetic engineering techniques? And even if this were true, can you possibly believe that, outside the dreams of madmen, the world’s vast apparatus of technological advance could be dismantled?”

No, I believe none of those things. What I do believe is that, with our technologies in hand, we are given the freedom to construct a hellish, counter-human, machine-like society, or else a humane society in which the machine, by being held in its place, reflects back to us our own inner powers of mastery. And the difference between these antithetical movements is the difference between focusing more on the human dimensions of whatever domain we are concerned with, or on the technological dimensions. In the former case, we will recognize that the primary challenges always have to do with the development of character, insight, volitional strength, imagination, and so on; our technical activities will be valued above all for the way they can help us develop these capacities. The other, gravely misdirected approach is to focus on technological developments as if they themselves held solutions.

So, no, I don’t suggest that we ban cell phones. But our society’s fixation upon technological development as the very substance and marrow of human evolution has become ferocious. There is a grotesque disproportion within American culture between the terms in which we see our billion-dollar investments and the underlying real needs around us. This distortion is dangerous and needs healing—a prospect that admittedly appears as unlikely today as a broad, public consciousness of recycling, pollution, and environmental issues must have seemed in the Fifties.

I can’t say what our technological trajectory would look like if we were fully conscious of the issues; but it is certain that, with our attention upon the things that count, the trajectory would be radically different—which is not the same as saying we should “halt all technological progress.” The point, rather, is to escape the mindset that sees progress primarily in terms of technology.

For several years now you could have purchased lie-detecting software for your personal computer. Not only you, but businesses and government agencies. An Israeli firm, Trustech, introduced PC-based lie-detecting software several years ago, and now there is a thriving little industry pursuing this business. Various versions of the software are designed for use by insurance companies (is a claimant falsifying his claim?), credit card companies (are you telling the truth when you say your credit card was stolen, accounting for the astronomical charges to a 900 number?), call centers (is a customer or a call center agent under great stress?—better notify a supervisor), employers (to screen job applicants), law enforcement agencies (which have long employed lie detectors), and you and me when we’re worried that a spouse or girl friend or co-worker is doing us dirty.

An early Trustech product was called “Truster—a personal truth verifier.” It adapted to your phone, allowing you to monitor all callers for their veracity (doubtless helping you build more trusting relationships)—or, rather, for a statistical indication of veracity. One advertised use was for agents at traveling checkpoints and airports:

Trustech’s CEO, Tamir Segal, running into the expected controversy over the use of such software, gave the usual, bulletproof response:

Yes, the truth is a vital one: “It’s up to us to decide how to use it.” But this includes, to begin with, the responsibility to decide whether to use it at all. For the truth is that the minute you and I pick up Segal’s invention with the intent to use it, we have already made a crucial choice. After all, merely to decide to monitor your conversational partners in this way is already to enter into an altogether different relationship with them. And that underlying difference in quality is likely to transform society far more than any particular decisions you make about “good” and “bad” uses in Segal’s sense.

Trustech’s software analyzes supposed stress levels and other psychological indices in the human voice, focusing on measurable features such as “microtremors.” But the notion that you can gain a basis for trust by such methods is hardly persuasive. The more significant and likely outcome is that, as we improve our analyses of the external and physical aspects of speech, and as we rely more fully on these externalities when making judgments, the less practiced we will become at hearing and understanding the speaking self behind the sound waves. And the only enduring basis for trust lies in this inner, intimate, delicate wedding of hearing and response—the meeting of persons. By shifting the search for trust onto technical ground, we all too easily subvert the deeply social and humane consciousness upon which all trust finally depends. Just as you cannot read the meaning of a text while attending to its alphabetic characters, so, too, you cannot understand what is being said and who is saying it—certainly not in any deep way—while focusing on the physical characteristics of the voice.

There’s also this to consider: Truster can be used not only as a putative lie detector, but also as a reliable biofeedback device. Employing it, we can train ourselves to project and manipulate the physical sound features that Truster presumptuously correlates with such things as “confusion,” “excitement,” “exaggeration,” “sarcasm,” and “falsehood.” Before the advent of the new software, the general public had no convenient access to such training tools. So, to the extent voice-analysis software enters into the normal give and take of society, becoming a factor all mischief makers must reckon with, we can look forward to an endless technological arms race between those who would detect technical features of the voice and those who would camouflage them. There can be no end or final resolution of such an arms race.

Imagine Mr. Smith, early in the last century, climbing into his Model T to go help a sick friend on the other side of town. He might well have the thought, “This automobile is an amazing machine! Look how easily I can visit someone in need. Surely the automobile will draw us together, knitting our towns and cities into much more tightly integrated communities.”

It would have been a reasonable surmise. The ensuing century, however, told a different story—a story of urban sprawl; devastated city centers; malls; neon-lit commercial strips; the dissolution of families; long commutes; a culture of distraction and flight; the disappearance of an underclass beneath the freeway ramps; and the strange “society” of drivers crammed together in congested traffic, each isolated within his own bubble of glass and metal.

Not much of this looks like a strengthening of community.

As with the other devices we have considered, there is no need for the simplistic argument that the automobile made all these things happen. The point is only that it fits harmoniously into the picture—a picture that differs radically from the seemingly assured results the early users might have expected.

Certainly it was a good and neighborly deed when Mr. Smith drove his Model T across town to assist his friend. The act seen by itself was a strengthening of communal ties. And certainly the trip now seemed easier than with the old horse and buggy. What, then, went wrong?

Nothing went wrong. Mr. Smith’s good deed remains, in its own terms, a good deed, and we can be glad for it. It’s just that he committed the mistake that bedevils nearly all initial assessments of technology: he looked at some particular new thing he could do, marveled at it, and then extrapolated from it. He didn’t bother to consider how society as a whole would re-shape itself around the technology.

Yes, his was a deeply communal gesture. But, if he had the historical perspective we now have, he might instead have said to himself as he got into his Model T, “By using my car to do this good, communal deed, I am doing my small part to destroy community.”

Technologies pose a riddle for us. If, as we use our new inventions, we are not also looking deeper than the immediate uses, if we are not addressing their riddle, then we can be pretty certain we are cooperating in the production of some very unhappy consequences.

Part of the problem lies in the narrowness of our focus when we take the new technology in hand and say, “Look! Now I can do this!" We assume that everything about our current circumstances will remain the same, except that now we have this neat, new capability.

But things do not stay the same. How, after all, would the benefits Mr. Smith enjoyed spread more widely throughout society? As it happened, they spread by means of ownership—one or more cars per family—as well as millions of miles of paved roads carving up both countryside and city. What fuels the automobile, where does the fuel come from, how will it be gotten to consumers, and what are the by-products of its burning? By what processes, social and technical, is the machine manufactured, and what institutions and policies bear on the economics of manufacturing? What sort of road is required, and how will the proliferation of these roads change the landscape? What pronounced tendencies of our own does the machine play into? (If we have already shown a preference for abandoning community, won’t the automobile give us a more effective tool for the abandonment?) How will the presence, noise, and emissions of the automobile affect the various ecological balances upon which it impinges? And so on ad infinitum.

Or think of it this way. The whole idea of a distancecollapsing technology is to enable us to get more quickly from point A to point B. But getting more quickly from A to B means having less time and opportunity for attending to any of the points between A and B. Moreover, as the influence of distance-collapsing technologies spreads, A and B themselves become intermediary points in an ever-expanding net of one-time destinations that are now mere way stations. If we’re to cover those spaces efficiently, we have no more time for A and B than for any of the points between. And so we find ourselves in a world where we’re all just passing through.

How can people who are just passing through—determined to crisscross each other’s paths at ever more dizzying speeds—come closer together? The easiest result—not an absolutely necessary one, but the result we can most naturally fall into—is the one that can seem paradoxical only at first glance: we find ourselves flying further and further apart rather than coming together. As abstract spatial distance yields to our technological prowess, the qualitative nooks and corners of particular places—places where significant meetings can occur—disappear into the quantitative vastnesses of that abstract space.

Clearly I am distinguishing here between two different senses of “coming together.” And that is the crux of the matter. Technology can indeed overcome those physical spaces, but if this is how we frame the problem (and we must frame it this way if we want a perfectly effective technological “solution”) then we have turned our eyes away from the much less easily defined problems that hinder our social coming together. This is how the new and wondrous technology becomes guaranteed to make the real problem worse.

The likelihood of the unhappy reversal, in other words, is a direct result of a technological fixation that encourages a subtle but disastrous shift in what we imagine our problems to be. The engineer, of course, can always say, “Hey, I was just trying to overcome the problem of spatial distance. What people do with this opportunity is their choice.” There’s profound truth in that. But the disclaimer is more than a little disingenuous in a society—and an engineering culture—where the exercise of the technical machinery for connecting persons is chronically confused with personal connections.

In sum, you have to picture how this new capability you have enjoyed will be realized across the whole of society, and how all the elements of this realization will bring the world into a different shape. A lively imagination is required—one that can grasp complex, organic interrelationships.

This, then, is the Great Technological Deceit. Confusing the technical and human levels of a problem, we assure ourselves that technical advances will improve the situation, whereas in fact they ensnare us (as long as we are unaware of the problem) ever more securely. There is a kind of rampaging technological aggrandizement at work here, and we have not yet shown, as a society, that we have a clue about managing it.

But do not think there is a neat symmetry between the risks and the benefits of technology, as I have framed them here. The subtleties of risk-benefit analysis notwithstanding, not all risks and benefits can be weighed in the same balance. The nursing home bracelet, by offering safety and convenience, does not elevate our humanity; but the bracelet we thoughtlessly allow to become a shackle helps to destroy our humanity.

That’s the way it is with technology. The real benefits we stand to gain—the ones that truly elevate us—always result from our overcoming technology rather than yielding to its invitations. It requires a wrenching inner effort to make that bracelet an occasion for more humane and loving attention rather than less. We gain from technology by learning how to work against its pull—a gain of inestimable value, essential for our future.

The deepest risks of technology, on the other hand, are realized without effort on our part. In fact, this lack of inner effort is itself the realization of the risk. It is the disappearance of ourselves—the loss of the power and will to struggle against technology toward higher ends (higher, for example, than convenience).

We can be positive about technology, in other words, only by being negative about it—that is, only by recognizing its downward pull and exerting ourselves against this pull. If we do this, the gift that technology holds out for us is the gift of our own highest capacities.

Look at contemporary discussions of technology and you will almost invariably find that this paradox is overlooked. The most common denial of the paradox consists of the attempt to weigh all of technology’s pluses and minuses in the same balance. This is to forget that we must stand above technology, and that what we gain through our mastery of it (or lose through our failure of mastery) is of an entirely different order from any supposed goods (or ills) the technology is thought to offer in its own right.