Many American homes built in the late 1800s and later had porches intended to help their owners escape the heat, and—not so incidentally—make it easier to keep in touch with neighbors.
Last month the U.S. Surgeon General issued a health advisory declaring loneliness a “public health epidemic.” There is obscure but useful reference point for this finding. Homes that once facilitated connection with neighbors now often do the reverse.
It was once harder to feel isolated when neighbors were just a few feet away. Fences, open space, and virtual media have now mostly replaced the humble front porch as a place that could knit neighborhoods together. Its harder to withhold the routine courtesies of acknowledgment when the family next door is just a few feet away. In an emergency, a neighbor can be a life safer. But on any given day, even ordinary exchanges can help a person feel anchored to a place.
The Porch Tradition
Elm St. Lambertville, N.J.
Any number of older Americans can remember growing up in towns with housing stock that was built in the first half of the 20th Century and even earlier. Many lived in homes with a front porch. In our older cities we still see plenty of bungalows near the street and close to nearby neighbors, each with a covered space in the form of a rectangle of maybe eight by fifteen feet: enough for a few chairs and a bench-swing. This extension to a house provided shade and a breeze. It also allowed people to dry off or stay out of the sun as they moved from the sidewalk to the home’s front room. This architectural feature is especially an enduring remnant of America’s love of the Victorian style. A porch was another chance to break up a home’s front walls with decorated brackets, pillars, railings and generous eaves.
From this perch it was also easier to see and be seen. The pre-suburban vernacular of brick or wood-frame homes were usually on small lots and near a neighbor’s own elevated and welcoming porch. Every block had its own variations: some expansive, some small. They were duplicated in homes of a similar vintage from Washington D.C. to Chicago, from Minneapolis to Memphis. A balustrated extension of a home was its own version of a party line, where greetings and gossip were easily exchanged. My own humble porch in a newer townhouse honors the customary elevated space with a bead board ceiling, a few circular pillars, and enough room for a few chairs and a side table. Few can pass by on the nearby sidewalk without getting or giving an acknowledgment. Remember the gauntlet of comments Atticus Finch drew as he made his way on foot from his Maycomb, Alabama home down the street to the courthouse?
Clermont Street, Denver, CO.
Her own little brick veranda was my grandmother’s preferred spot for reining in exuberant grandkids. On warm summer nights that Clermont Street porch in Denver was a gathering place for family and– maybe if we were lucky–a root beer float. Kids also spilled onto the solid porch railing and small front yard that it overlooked. For a short time I lived in the same style of house before moving to a newer 50’s box shorn of any inviting space in the front.
Duplex with adjacent front doors
The older New Jersey town where I now live is made up of duplex or row houses built mostly in the late 1800s, nearly every one of which still has a covered space within a few feet of a neighbor’s matching version. Few of the houses in the nearby commuter suburbs even bother, shifting all the action to the backyard. In those fat lots neighbors are separated by much more distance and—often—a six-foot-high stockade fence in the backyard: a virtual requirement if you buy a home in California.
Obviously, air conditioning and the vast expanses of newer suburbs made it easier for builders to turn their backs on the street. In addition, an ersatz colonial or modernist home aspired to look self-sufficient and private. Among other influences, Hollywood made each home seem like it should be its own island surrounded by leafy isolation. Many adopted the look of a little manor house, with a few decorative pillars around the front door, but nothing that would be mistaken for a full porch. Indeed, an authentic colonial home built in the 1700s could be just as austere, all the better to separate the dirty streets of horses and wagon traffic from the front parlor.
Even so, early turn of the Century porches remain plentiful in virtually every corner of the country. And many buyers of new properties want them back. Few other nations have defined their prototypical homes so clearly than with a covered space open to the street. It has been a durable enactment of the unique American penchant for lingering and connecting.
[My confidence in 2015 that we have nothing to fear from Artificial Intelligence may look distinctly antique in light of the warnings now coming from A.I. researchers. Even Elon Musk is calling for a moratorium in the implementation of dense generative language systems that can replicate the words, sounds and images of humans. Maybe the confidence expressed in the piece below is a tad high. And my examples are dated. But let me take a minority view and argue that most of the claims made below still hold. We can now surely pass off good fakes. Humans have always had a knack for that. But it remains true that machines and software lack a self. What is essential to the human experience is our natural impulse to interpret others. This capacity has no meaningful counterpart in machine-generated language; machines lack the features of human character that always give our thoughts tendencies. We are interpreters more than recorders of our world.
There is another problem in the current hand-wringing that I have seen. Everyone seems to be describing humans as information-transfer organisms. But, in truth, we are not very good at creating reliable accounts of events. What we seem hardwired to do is to communicate our understanding of events around us. Human understandings come from prior experience. For example, does a chatbot “like” the music of Franz Joseph Haydn? I could care less. Judgments and understandings about human products must be made by other humans.]
We are awash in articles, books and films about the coming age of “singularity:” the point at which machines will supposedly duplicate and surpass human intelligence. For decades it’s been the stuff of science fiction, reaching perhaps its most eloquent expression in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 motion picture, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is still a visual marvel. Who would have thought that Strauss waltzes and images of deep space could be so compatible? Functionally, the waltzes have the effect of juxtaposing the familiar with a hostile void, making the film a surprising celebration of all things earthbound. But that’s another story.
The central agent in the film is the HAL-9000 computer that begins to turn off the life support of the crew during a long voyage, mostly because it “thinks” the humans aren’t up to the enormous task facing them.
Kubrick’s vision of very smart computers is also evident in the more recent A.I., Artificial Intelligence (2001), a project started just before his death and eventually brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg. It’s a dystopian nightmare. In the film intelligent “mechas” (mechanical robots) are generally nicer than the humans who created them. In pleasant Haddonfield New Jersey, of all places, they are shot on sight for sport.
Watson wikipedia.org
Fantasies of machine intelligence have lately given way to IBM’s “Big Blue” and “Watson,” mega-computers with amazing memories and—with Watson—a stunning speech recognition capability that is filtering down to all kinds of devices. If we can talk to machines, aren’t we well on our way to singularity?
For one answer consider the Turing Test, the challenge laid down by the World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. A variation of it has been turned into a recurring world competitions. The challenge is to construct a “chatterbot” that can pass for a human in blind side-by-side “conversations” that include real people. For artificial intelligence engineers, the trick is to fool a panel of questioners at least 30 percent of the time over 25 minutes. According to the BBC, a recent winner was a computer from the University of Reading in the U.K. It passed itself off as a Ukrainian teen (“Eugene Goostman”) speaking English as a second language.
Machines Lack a Self
In actual fact, humans have nothing to fear. Most measures of “human like” intelligence such as the Turing Test use the wrong yardsticks. These computers are never embodied. The rich information of non-verbal communication is not present, nor can it be. Proximate human features are not enough. For example, Watson’s “face” in its famous Jeopardy challenge a few years ago was a set of cheesy electric lights. Moreover, these smart machines tend to be asked questions that we would ask of Siri or other informational databases. What they “know” is often defined as a set of facts, not feelings. And, of course, these machines lack what we so readily reveal in our conversations with others: that we have a sense of self, that we have an accumulated biography of life experiences that shape our reactions and dispositions, and that we want to be understood.
Just the issue of selfhood should remind us of the special status that comes from living through dialogue with others. A sense of self is complicated, but it includes the critical ability to be aware of another’s awareness of who we are. If this sounds confusing, it isn’t. This process is central to all but the most perfunctory communication transactions. As we address others we are usually “reading” their responses in light of what we believe they already have discerned about us. We triangulate between our perceptions of who we are, who they are, and what they are thinking about our behavior. This all happens in a flash, forming what is sometimes called “emotional intelligence.” It’s an ongoing form of self-monitoring that functions to oil the complex relationships. Put this sequence together, and you get a transaction that is full of feedback loops that involve estimates if intention and interest, and—frequently—a general desire born in empathy to protect the feelings of the other.
It’s an understatement to say these transactions are not the stuff of machine-based intelligence, and probably never can be. We are not computers. As Walter Isaacson reminds us in his recent book, The Innovators, we are carbon based creatures with chemical and electrical impulses that mix to create unique and idiosyncratic individuals. This is when the organ of the brain becomes so much more: the biographical homeland of an experience-saturated mind. With us there is no central processor. We are not silicon-based. There are the nearly infinite forms of consciousness in a brain with 100-billion neurons with 100-trillion connections. And because we often “think” in ordinary language, we are so much more—and sometimes less—than an encyclopedia on two legs.
[My confidence in 2015 that we have nothing to fear from Artificial Intelligence may look distinctly antique in light of the warnings now coming from A.I. researchers. Even Elon Musk is calling for a moratorium in the implementation of dense generative language systems that can replicate the words, sounds and images of humans. Maybe the confidence expressed in the piece below is a tad high. And my examples are dated. But let me take a minority view and argue that most of the claims made below still hold. We can now surely pass off good fakes. Humans have always had a knack for that. But it remains true that machines and software lack a self. What is essential to the human experience is our natural impulse to interpret others. This capacity has no meaningful counterpart in machine-generated language; machines lack the features of human character that always give our thoughts tendencies. We are interpreters more than recorders of our world.