Relationship Between Human Beings and Individual Perception of Machine Development

Relational Authenticity
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Understanding the complex relationship between human beings is one of the most significant aims of technology. Despite the inception of "sentient" machines through time, current technologies still fail to understand, comprehend, and replicate individuals' relationships and emotions when dealing with one another. In line with this, the author of this paper would like to focus on understanding this complex interaction in relation to the individual perception of the development of machines. Notably, the author would like to focus on Turkle's (2007) article entitled Authenticity in the Age of Digital Companions. The succeeding sections would also include a reflection of the author's experiences while growing in a "technologically advanced" society, wherein human-machine interaction and companionship are becoming commonplace. All in all, it is the author's belief that while machine-to-human interaction is inevitable, the world is still a long way before the complex interactions between machines and individuals can be replicated. 
Machine-to-Human Interaction
           One of the main points that Turkle emphasized was the idea of "relational authenticity." Specifically, he noted that despite the age wherein individuals tend to have an inevitable and day-to-day interaction with highly sophisticated machines, the authentic relationship between humans, which is based on emotions, circumstances, and even humanity, could still not be replaced by robots and machines. If there is one thing that must be noted with Turkle's article, it is that her analysis was conducted more than 13 years ago in the year 2007. From that period in time, technology has advanced in unprecedented states with the development of social media, digital networks, and machine learning, to name a few. Nevertheless, despite the advances in technologies, it is clear that the same is still far from achieving what Turkle calls relational Authenticity. 
           One of the main points that illustrate this is Turkle's reference to the Eliza program. She noted that despite the advancement of the program, the software itself is still short of having the authentic and genuine capability of understanding and empathizing with the individual's experiences. Specifically, she noted that despite the pre-programmed responses that address an individual's queries, machines cannot replace humans because they do not aim and cannot fully understand human emotions but instead focus on merely satisfying the individual's needs based on a pre-programmed metric. Today, this idea still holds true. Despite advances in machine learning that tailors its responses to an individual's needs while also learning fr...