Analysis Of Lauren Slater's Article 'Who Holds The Clicker'

In today’s world, technology has become a medium of connections among people. Through the advanced technology people are able to communicate with each other. Social media and artificial intelligence are one of these technologies. People are able to use robot in place of human. Medical technology has grown a lot to cure the patient’s diseases. In “Who Holds the Clicker”, Lauren slater’s article, she wrestles with the question of how to define good medical technology. She explains a mental disorder, OCD and how medical technologies are handling it through neural implants. She took an example of Mario, a person who has OCD to show her point of view to readers. She describes Mario’s situation before the neural implantation and after the neural

Authentic and intimate relationships are very important in our life. Turkle has defined the word authenticity in her article. She says that “Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself to the place of another, to relate to the other because of shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death. A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop” (268). By stating this she wants point out that when mankind shares experiences with others, they get attached emotionally and establish authentic relationships. However, sharing experiences with robots does not involve emotions, because robots are not humans. They are just human made creatures which seem alive, but cannot have any feelings. People use robots to make love out of it and to share their feelings. “Love and sex seems to celebrate an emotional dumbing down, a willful turning away from the complexities of human partnership- the inauthentic as a new aesthetic” (268). Here aesthetic means appreciating the beauty of robots. When people start loving robots, they appreciate the beauty of unreal relationships with robots rather than having real and intimate relationships. Having love and sex with robots has no emotions involved. As a technological creature, robot can only give pleasure and satisfaction to the user without any feelings of love and care. There are many medical technologies which are developed to make produce love in inauthentic way. Slater talks about the medical technology like neural implantation. She talks about Mario who had OCD and got neural implantation to love his daughter and his family. Slater says that, “He wanted a shot at the ordinary, a lawn he might mow just once a week. The ability to endure the mess and touch of children. He decided the