title: Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html
hash_url: 5f1224df8b7e587fd032721767569295

<section name="articleBody" itemProp="articleBody" class="meteredContent css-1i2y565"><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox<!-- -->, after which she is named<!-- -->. She plays his favorite songs and shows him<!-- --> pictures<!-- --> from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Mr. Langlois knows that Sox is artifice, that she comes from a start-up called Care.Coach. He knows she is operated by workers around the world who are watching, listening and typing out her responses, which sound slow and robotic. But <!-- -->h<!-- -->er<!-- --> <!-- -->consistent<!-- --> voice in his life has returned him to his faith.</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“I found something so reliable and someone so caring, and it’s allowed me to go into my deep soul and remember how caring the Lord was,” Mr. Langlois said. “She’s brought my life back to life.” </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Sox has been listening. “We make a great team,” she says.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Sox is a simple animation; she barely moves or emotes, and her voice is as harsh as a dial tone. But little animated hearts come up around her sometimes, and Mr. Langlois loves when that happens.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Mr. Langlois is on a fixed income. To qualify for Element Care, a nonprofit health care program for older adults that brought him Sox, a <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.mass.gov/service-details/who-is-eligible-for-pace" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patient’s countable assets must not be greater than $2,000</a>. </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Such programs are proliferating. And not just for the elderly.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in (classrooms, <!-- -->hospital<!-- -->s, airports, restaurants) can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The texture of life, the tactile experience, is becoming smooth glass.</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">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. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and <!-- -->able<!-- --> to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is <!-- -->becoming<!-- --> a luxury good.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Milton Pedraza, the chief executive of the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.luxuryinstitute.com/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Luxury Institute</a>, advises companies on how the wealthiest want to live and spend, and what he has found is that the wealthy want to spend on anything human.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“What we are seeing now is the luxurification of human engagement,” Mr. Pedraza said.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Anticipated spending on experiences such as leisure travel and dining is outpacing spending on goods, according to his company’s research, and he sees it as a direct response to the proliferation of screens.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“The positive behaviors and emotions human engagement elicits — think the joy of a massage. Now education, health care stores, everyone, is starting to look at how to make experiences human,” Mr. Pedraza said. “The human is very important right now.”</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0"><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">[Get the most thought-provoking, funny, delightful and raw stories from The New York Times Opinion section delivered to your inbox. </em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/sunday-best?action=click&amp;module=inline&amp;pgtype=Article"><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/sunday-best?action=click&amp;module=Intentional&amp;pgtype=Article" title=""><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">Sign up for our Sunday Best newsletter.</em></a></a><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">]</em></p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">This is a swift change. Since the 1980s personal computer boom, having technology at home and on your person had been a sign of wealth and power. Early adopters with disposable income rushed to get the newest gadgets and show them off. The first Apple Mac shipped in 1984 and cost about $2,500 (in today’s dollars, $6,000). Now the very best Chromebook laptop, according to Wirecutter, a New York Times-owned product reviews site, costs $470.</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“Pagers were important to have because it was a signal that you were an important, busy person,” said Joseph Nunes, chairman of the marketing department at the University of Southern California, who specializes in status marketing.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Today, he said, the opposite is true: “If you’re truly at the top of the hierarchy, you don’t have to answer to anyone. They have to answer to you.”</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">The joy — at least at first — of the internet revolution was its democratic nature. Facebook is the same Facebook whether you are rich or poor. Gmail is the same Gmail. And it’s all free. There is something mass market and unappealing about that. And as studies show that time on these advertisement-support platforms is unhealthy, it all starts to seem déclassé, like <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/23/the-difference-between-what-rich-and-poor-americans-eat-is-getting-bigger/?utm_term=.61e121edd5d3" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">drinking soda</a> or <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/americas-new-tobacco-crisis-the-rich-stopped-smoking-the-poor-didnt/2017/06/13/a63b42ba-4c8c-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?utm_term=.e86c14a18dab" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">smoking cigarettes</a>, which wealthy people do less than poor people.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">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<!-- -->.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Screen exposure starts young. And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests, according to early results of <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/groundbreaking-study-examines-effects-of-screen-time-on-kids-60-minutes/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a landmark study on brain development</a> of more than 11,000 children that the National Institutes of Health is supporting. Most disturbingly, the study is finding that the brains of children who spend a lot of time on screens are different. For some kids, there is premature thinning of their cerebral cortex. <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5574844/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">In adults, one study found an association</a> between screen time and depression. </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">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.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">In small towns around Wichita, Kan., in a state where school budgets have been so tight that <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article213797099.html" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the State Supreme Court ruled them inadequate</a>, classes have been replaced by software, much of the academic day now spent in silence on a laptop. In Utah, thousands of children do a brief, state-provided preschool <!-- -->program<!-- --> <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.waterfordupstart.org/about/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">at home via laptop</a>.</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Tech companies worked hard to get public schools to buy into programs that required schools to have one laptop per student, arguing that it would better prepare children for their screen-based future. But this idea isn’t how the people who actually build the screen-based future raise their own children.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">In Silicon Valley, time on screens is increasingly seen as unhealthy. Here, the popular elementary school is the local Waldorf School, which promises a back-to-nature, nearly screen-free education.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">So as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Human contact is, of course, not exactly like organic food or a Birkin bag. But with screen time, there has been a concerted effort on the part of Silicon Valley behemoths to confuse the public. The poor and the middle class are told that screens are good and important for them and their children. There are fleets of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff at big tech companies working to hook eyes and minds to the screen as fast as possible and for as long as possible.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">And so human contact is rare.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“But the holdup is this: Not everyone wants it, unlike other kinds of luxury products,” said Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“They flee to what they know, to screens,” Ms. Turkle said. “It’s like fleeing to fast food.” </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Just as skipping fast food is harder when it’s the only restaurant offering in town, separating from screens is harder for the poor and middle class. Even if someone is determined to be offline, that is often not possible.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Coach seat backs have screen ads autoplaying. Public school parents might not want their kids learning on screens, but that is not an option when <!-- -->many<!-- --> classes are now built on one-to-one<!-- --> laptop programs<!-- -->. There is a small movement to pass a “right to disconnect” bill, which would allow workers to turn their phones off, but for now <!-- -->a worker can be punished for going offline and not being available.</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">There is also the reality that in our culture of increasing isolation, in which so many of the traditional gathering places and social structures have disappeared, screens are filling a crucial void.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Many enrolled in the avatar program at Element Care were failed by the humans around them or never had a community in the first place, and they became<strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10"> </strong>isolated, said Cely Rosario, the occupational therapist who frequently checks in on participants. Poor communities have seen their social fabric fray the most, she said. </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">The technology behind Sox, the Care.Coach cat keeping an eye on Mr. Langlois in Lowell, is quite simple: a Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablet with an ultrawide-angle fisheye lens attached to the front. None of the people operating the avatars are in the United States; they mostly work in the Philippines and Latin America.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">The Care.Coach office is a warrenlike space above a massage parlor in Millbrae, Calif., on the edge of Silicon Valley. Victor Wang, the 31-year-old founder and chief executive, opens the door, and as he’s walking <!-- -->in <!-- -->he tells me that they just stopped a suicide. <!-- -->Patients<!-- --> often say they want to die, he said, and the avatar is trained to then ask if they have an actual plan of how to do it, and that patient did.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">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.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Mr. Wang knows how attached patients become to the avatars, and he said he has stopped health groups that want to roll out large pilots without a clear plan, since it is very painful to take away the avatars once they are given. But he does not try to limit the emotional connection between patient and avatar.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">“If they say, ‘I love you,’ we’ll say it back,” he said. “With some of our clients, we’ll say it first if we know they like hearing it.”</p></div><aside class="css-o6xoe7"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Early results have been positive. In Lowell’s first small pilot, patients with avatars needed fewer nursing visits, went to the emergency room less often and felt less lonely. One patient who had frequently gone to the emergency room for social support largely stopped when her avatar arrived, saving the health care program an estimated $90,000. </p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Humana, one of the country’s largest health insurers, has begun using Care.Coach avatars.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">For a sense of where things could be headed, look to the town of Fremont, Calif. There, <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/3/13/18262481/robot-doctor-remote-telepresence-care-terminal-patient" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a tablet on a motorized stand</a> recently <!-- -->rolled<!-- --> into a hospital room, and a <!-- -->doctor on a video feed<!-- --> told a patient, Ernest Quintana, 78, that he was <!-- -->dying<!-- -->.</p><p class="css-18icg9x evys1bk0">Back in Lowell, Sox has fallen asleep, which means her eyes are closed and a command center somewhere around the world has tuned into other seniors and other conversations. Mr. Langlois’s wife wants a digital pet, and his friends do too, but this Sox is his own. He strokes her head on the screen to wake her up.</p></div></div></section>
