Even before the pandemic lockdowns made technology a primary means of interacting with colleagues, friends and family, technology was changing the way we conduct our personal lives. Debora L. Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, former president of Barnard College and of Lincoln Center, and the author of Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), talks about what her research shows about where we're going as these trends continue.
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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Technology is helping people navigate through the coronavirus, Sierra, zoom and other platforms help people work from home, and visit with loved ones. My kid and probably yours did virtual classes in the spring. The fall is still a matter of hot debate as we know. We'll talk about that in our next segment this hour. Rideshares instead of subways, treatment and vaccine and rapid test research are in full swing and offer technology-based hope.
We've even been able to turn our little radio station into mobile studios, like from my dining alcove table, so we can bring you this show. Changes in technology affect way more than that.
In her new book, Work Mate Marry Love, author and senior associate dean of the Harvard business school online, Debora Spar argues that who we marry, how we have children, and how we think about love and romance and even sex have always been driven by technology. Debora Spar, author of Work Mate Marry Love, joins us now. Dean Spar, welcome to WNYC.
Debora Spar: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Brian: Your book begins with the development of the plow. Why the plow?
Debora: Well, I know that's a plow sounds completely old-fashioned right now, but the plow, and more broadly, developed agriculture was really the first great technological revolution that we humans went through. It changed everything about how we live and who we are.
Brian: In ways such as?
Debora: Well, one of the things I talk about in the book is that marriage as we think of it now, we think of it as a natural or traditional marriage, didn't really exist until the creation of the plow. These structures that we've grown up with now, monogamous marriage, the nuclear family are not in fact, something that we humans have done forever. They are results of this particular technology and the technological revolution that surrounded it.
Brian: From settling down into agricultural societies from Hunter-gatherers. Is that basically what you're talking about?
Debora: Exactly. If you look at the broad sweep of human history, we've spent most of our time on this planet as hunters and gatherers and we found our food and we walked, we migrated every day really, and then everything changes once agriculture comes along. Obviously, you get towns and villages once you have agriculture, but you also get private property. People need to own land, they need to own implements, and they need to make sure that the things they now have, the stuff they've acquired gets passed down to their children. It's not a very romantic view of marriage, but that's essentially what marriage is. It's a way to preserve a family's property from one generation to the next. If you read. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Brian: No, no, you go ahead.
Debora: If you read the Old Testament with this lens on you see it as this genealogical document: so-and-so was the son of so-and-so, it was really important to keep track of who belonged to whom and that's really what marriage is and that's why marriage grows up and becomes an institution only after societies have developed agriculture and the tools around it.
Brian: That led to establishing the social norm of women playing their primary role as mothers?
Debora: Yes, because again, if you go back and think about this transition. Before the start of agriculture, children weren't really much use. They had to be carried, they attracted animals, they couldn't walk very much. Once you get agriculture, you need a labor force to work the fields, and there were only two ways to get that labor force.
You could either steal other people, which is why tragically slavery emerges as an institution as agriculture develops or you can produce those children on your own. Women become valuable, not so much for their ability to produce food, which is what they did back in the hunting-gathering stage, but women become valuable because the society needs them to produce children.
It's an interesting little twist because you might've thought that when women become valuable for their labor abilities, women would have gotten the power, but in pretty much every society, it went the other way. The men of the society used women's fertility and controlled women's fertility in order to make sure that the children were born and that was known whose children they were. If you think about the traditional wedding ceremony through this somewhat unromantic or deeply unromantic lens, think about what the wording is. The father gives his daughter away, swears that she's a virgin and promises that she will remain loyal to her new husband for the rest of her life. That's the union that comes out of this move to agriculture.
Brian: I see related to that, in the book you say out of that came the idea of "legitimate or illegitimate births."
Debora: Yes, absolutely. That's something that's stayed with us for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. That is, like I say in the book, the only children who were legitimate were those who were created in wedlock, everyone else was a bastard. Those rules didn't really start to change until the 20th century.
Brian: Now we're in the exact opposite in most of society, in terms of the economic value of children as compared to the height of the agriculture era. Of course, we still have agriculture, we still have food but now it's like agribusiness. It's not a whole society of family farms in so many countries and so children who used to be an economic necessity almost for a family to continue to work the land have become economic liabilities in urban and suburban cultures.
Debora: That's absolutely right. You really see that shift start to occur around the world second great technological revolution, which was the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. That's where you actually see women and children moving off the farms, everybody's moves off the farm and then getting kicked out of the factories.
The men become the breadwinner winning workforce and women and children are those who stay home and have a sentimental value, but are no longer in the paid labor force. Sadly today, as any of us with children know that their economic value is not very high, so we have created a sentimental value to replace that, which is of course very high, but a very different kinds of value.
Brian: Right. Having kids in today's world really becomes a lifestyle choice, even though some people are revolted by that notion, in a certain very practical way that's what it is.
Debora: No, that is, and that too is in large part a result of technology because the reason people can decide whether or not to have children is largely due to having access to contraception. Once upon a time, not so long time long ago--
Brian: More technology, go ahead.
Debora: More technology, exactly. I think we tend not to think of the pill is as technology, but I would argue it's one of the most important technologies of the 20th century. Once upon a time, women had babies whenever mother nature said they should, which was five or six or seven babies or more over the course of their lifetime. Now of course, fertility rates have plummeted. In the United States now many, many people are choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons and totally legitimate choice, but it's something that you wouldn't have seen 100 years ago.
Brian: It's also a tragedy of the common situation, which is to say, what makes sense in practical economic terms for an individual becomes tragic in economic terms for the society when the country and the world and various countries become too weighted in age toward older people. Right?
Debora: Exactly and you're seeing that probably most markedly in Japan, where the population is no longer being reproduced at anything like the certain necessary rate. Japan is really grappling with a generation of elderly people who have still younger people to take care of them. One of the other things I talk about in the book is the way in which Japan and other countries are now using robots to assist in care of the elderly. We're allowing the robots into our lives to take care of what were once deeply human functions.
Brian: Listeners, I don't know if anybody has a question or a story to tell maybe about your-- How long is your family tree folks? Does it go back before agriculture? Maybe you could talk about your own family's development here. I'm kidding, but if you have a question for Debora Spar, author of Work Mate, Mary Love, we have a few minutes for a few 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Would you say that human values or ethics have been more shaped by technology or developed in reaction to technology's impact and social norms in ways that technology horrified people?
Debora: Yes. I think the two things are always evolving together and they're so intertwined it's really hard to pull them apart, but if you think about the pill, for example, as it's become more available and ubiquitous, for the most part, people's attitudes towards contraception have evolved accordingly. It just becomes normal. If you think about what's happened with in vitro fertilization, when the first 'test-tube' baby was born, the world was kind of horrified. Every magazine had sort of the same cover of this poor baby squashed inside a test tube, and now it's become almost completely commonplace. People use these technologies if they can afford them and they need them and really no one's horrified by them anymore.
One of the things I talk about in the book, and it's a tough argument to make, but I think you can trace a link between the acceptance of same-sex marriage and the growth of technologies of assisted reproduction. One of the reasons why same-sex couples won the right to marry was based on arguments along what's called the interest of the child. In other words, once these couples had children, then the court said that they could be married because it was in the best interest of the children.
I argue there that it was actually technology that enabled, particularly gay men, to have babies or to acquire babies. Then once they had those families, the law changed accordingly. It's kind of a backward to causality from what most people think, but I think it's, again, they moved in tandem in these very complicated ways.
Brian: I think Peter in Fairlawn wants to push back on this idea that it would be in a lot of adults individual economic interests not to have kids. Peter, you're on WNYC. Thanks so much for calling in.
Peter: Hey, second time, long time. Anyway, I love this thing. I read a book called, I think it was homo or sapiens rather and some of these things were in there and I just loved it and I love this topic, it's so interesting. I want to point out one of the things that kids also help with their elderly parents. I have friends as we're getting older, and my brother, for instance, doesn't have kids. One day it's nice to have your kids taking care of you. That to me is beneficial also with kids. It's not like you have the kids take care of you in 50 years, but still, the ones that don't have kids, I don't know what the hell they're going to do when they're 84 and can barely walk.
Brian: Those aside-- Go ahead, professor.
Debora: Clearly, that lack of people to take care of their elderly relatives is going to become a societal problem, is increasingly becoming a problem. I certainly don't want to say that people have children only because they're making a logical calculation. I have to raise them myself and I don't remember running the numbers before I had them. I think there is a connection and we see it between what the dominant technologies are and how people shape their families accordingly. Those trends are just going to continue and we are going to have to start worrying, I think, in this country that we're not going to have enough children to do both the work that we need done, and more importantly, to just continue with humanity, because clearly we're all, or most of us are biologically programmed at some level to want to procreate. That's what we do.
Brian: I think Natalie in Manhattan wants to follow up on that. Natalie, you're on WNYC. Hi there.
Natalie: Hello. I never once heard you mention the word maternal instinct, which is rather shocking as a very come lately mother who had no interest in having children and then when it grabbed me that I wanted to have a child, it's one of the most intense desires and feelings I ever had in my life. What do you have to say about maternal instinct?
Debora: I think it's there but not for everybody. As I said, as a species, we seem biologically programmed to want to reproduce ourselves. That's what we are built to do. What I'm arguing though, is that technology shapes the way in which those instincts are developed. A hundred years ago that maternal instinct manifests itself in women having six, seven, eight children. Now that same instinct may be there but it's being reflected in one child or maybe two children and those children, that sounds like it may be true in your case, are coming later in life. They may be coming outside of a marital union. They may be showing up in a same-sex relationship. They may be for a single mom rather than someone who's been married. The instinct is there, the reproduction is there, but it's manifest in very different ways. I think it's important to point that out.
Brian: Looking to the future, a threat that we face, according to your book, is the deeply asymmetrical way in which digital technologies are likely to be used, your words and the social inequities that are almost certain to be perpetuated as a result. What do you have in mind?
Debora: I have to say, when I look out into the short-term future, I'm really, really worried that many of the technologies coming out right now are going to have the first effect of worsening the inequities that we already see around us. Certainly, if you think about access to reproductive medicine, access to the assistive robot, access even to higher quality bandwidth, all of those things are going to go to the rich people first and later, if ever, to a poor people. Even if you think about it within the confines of this country, much less going global.
I think we're already seeing, and we all know this, widening inequities in this country. I really, really worry about what happens as these inequities continue. Just to give you one example, one of the technologies that people are quite excited about is driverless cars. Isn't that cool? Isn't that wonderful? Yes, but if we get driverless cars and driverless trucks, millions and millions of working class jobs are going to be gone and it's not like those folks are going to be retrained to be computer programmers. That's just illogical to imagine. If you look at the unemployment we have right now, if you multiply that many fold, I think we're going to find ourselves in a very, very scary set of situations.
Brian: Does anything in your research then make you want to slow technological invention or speed it up in any ways? Or is it more a question of inventors are going to invent, nobody can control the pace of that, but we have to set up the rules to minimize inequities.
Debora: Yes, that's exactly what I would say. The history of technology is pretty clear. It doesn't stop. With the partial exception of the nuclear weapons although even there, I would say they were invented as a deterrent, but once we invent things, we embrace them and we develop them and we use them and in this country, for sure we commercialize them.
I think it would be illogical to say, "Let's slow technology down." Instead, as you said, I think we need to be, and that's why it really what's the central argument of this book. If we agree or even half-agree that technology is moving in certain directions, we need to get out in front of it. We need to think about what are the kinds of rules we want to place around it. Example of where we didn't do that is social media. When social media and Facebook and all these other firms first invented this universe, the general sense was, "Let's not put any rules around it. Let the market develop." Now I think we're seeing in retrospect, a certain degree of regret and saying, 'Gee, we should've put some privacy controls on this. We probably should have thought about some content issues."
I'm not a fan of very heavy regulation but if you look at things like robots, if you look at things like assistive reproductive technologies, there's wonderful things they can do and there's also bad things they can do. I think we have a moral and legal responsibility to say, "If these robots are coming, maybe we want to make sure that we don't build them in such a way that they become detrimental to the society we want to see."
Brian: Renee in the Bronx is reacting to your use of the word robots. Let's see what she has to say, Renee, you're on WNYC. Hello there?
Renee: Thank you so much and thank you and I appreciate your program and you so much. My point is I'm 82 years old and I'm thinking about this idea of robots. It sounds to me that if robots are going to be helping people, I'd like you to expand on what are you talking about when you mean robots? I can't think of being served by an inanimate being rather than a caretaker or a family member. I'd like her to explain what she means by robot.
Brian: It's not Rosie from The Jetsons, right? It's something else.
Debora: No, that's right. Renee, thanks for the question, it's a very important one. One of my favorite robots these days, and these are all early stage, is a robot named PARO, was developed in Japan specifically to assist older people and particularly older people suffering dementia. If you look at PARO, it doesn't look anything like Rosie the robot, it looks like a small stuffed seal, and in fact, the creator made it a seal because people don't-- Have never actually interacted with a real seal so it feels less awkward.
PARO doesn't do very much, but what he does is they bring him to people in nursing homes and what all, and they just interact with him and they stroke his head and he moves his head a little bit and they pat him under the chin and his eyelashes wag, so he's not doing much, but having spent some time just kind of watching this, I was blown away because these old people are getting joy from him. They have sad lives, they don't have many people to take care of them, so they interact with this robot and it's like having a puppy or kitten, it's not taking care of their bodily functions, but it's giving them some measure of joy.
I think that's where we'll start and we're already seeing this in this country as well. It's not your robotic daughter, but it's something that's helping, not so much with physical care but with emotional care. Would I rather have a human being taking care of me in my old age? Yes, but I think, especially given the demographic shifts we were talking about earlier, not everybody is going to have a child who's there to take care of them, and so PARO the Seal provides some kind of emotional support.
Brian: On PARO the Seal, we leave it, with Deborah Spar, S-P-A-R, author now of Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny. You can hear more about the book at virtual readings, that is she's going to be doing some virtual readings. There's one tonight, hosted by the Harvard Bookstore via zoom@harvard.com/event, virtual event. Debora Spar, you'll find @harvard.com/event. She's a Harvard business school dean. The next reading will be September 22nd at six o'clock and will be hosted by Northshire Bookstore via Zoom, so you can check those out if you want to hear more from Deborah Spar. Dean Spar, thank you so much. Good talk.
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