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So, to learn to see what the doctor sees, the teleintern must
be able to control the direction each camera points and how
much each camera zooms in or out. After all, simply by
having a great deal of passive experience, by watching foot-
ball games on TV, for example, one can become competent at
following the ball and even predicting and interpreting the
plays. So one might well think that adding control of what the
camera focused on would enable the tele-student to acquire
an expert feel for any skill domain. In such an ideal distance-
learning setup, would anything required for learning still be
left out?
As we saw in Chapter 2, the learner becomes an expert by
reacting to specific situations, and taking to heart the results.
On the basis of sufficient such experience, the brain of the
beginner gradually comes to connect perception and action
so that, in a situation similar to one that has already been
experienced, the agent immediately makes a response similar
to the response that worked the last time the learner was in
that type of situation. But this requires that the learning situ-
ations in which one acquires a skill be sufficiently similar to
actual situations so that the responses one learns in training
carry over to the real world.
So, any form of telelearning, whether interactive or not,
must face a final challenge. Can telepresence reproduce the
sense of being in the situation so that what is learned transfers
to the real world? Experienced teachers and phenomeno-
logists agree that the answer is  no . To see in a stark and
extreme form the sort of embodied presence any attempt to
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transmit full presence cannot capture, it helps to take an
example from a physical sport like football.
Barry Lamb, Safeties Coach for the Brigham Young Uni-
versity Football Team and a former All-American linebacker
and defensive end at Santa Barbara Community College
(1973 74), reports the following:
Our players can learn a great deal by watching films, but only
to a point. It s hard to say exactly what it is that you can t learn
by watching film, but a good player learns to sense the overall
situation and to do things instinctively that just don t make
sense if you re only looking at what you can see on film. Most
game film, of course, is not taken from a player s perspective.
But even if you could correct for that, the depth of field is
never the same on film as it is in real life.22 That means that
you can t really learn to see the playing field in the right way,
or get a feel for the tempo of the game. In addition, there is
more to learning how to see a play develop than just having
your head or eyes pointed in the right direction. Our players
need to learn how to use their peripheral vision to get a feel
for what is going on around them, and what your peripheral
vision tells you makes you see what is going on in front of you
differently.23 Moreover, the emotions of the game change how
a player sees the field, and those aren t things that one can
get a feel for from the film.
Another way to see how the film is too sterile to teach
everything our players need to learn is by noticing that
opposing players aren t threatening on film in the same way
that they are in real life. The fact that there are eleven players
in front of you who want to hurt you really makes you see and
understand things differently.
In sum, learning to do the right thing, a thing that
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sometimes doesn t make sense, is something that can only
happen when a person experiences a present situation over
and over again, whether in practice or in real life.24
All this suggests that distance-learners looking at a surround
screen and hearing stereo sound would be able to develop a
degree of competence. Thus, an intern could become com-
petent at recognizing and, perhaps, even anticipating many of
the symptoms the doctor has pointed out, just as an avid TV
viewer can learn to recognize and anticipate many of the plays
on the footfall field. Furthermore, if the learner could view
the scene transmitted by cameras placed exactly where the
actual embodied learner would normally be placed, he might
even be able to become proficient. But such distance-learners
would still lack the experience that comes from responding
directly to the risky and perceptually rich situations that the
world presents. Without an experience of their embodied
successes and failures in actual situations, such learners would
not be able to acquire the ability of an expert or a master who
responds immediately to present situations in a masterful
way. So we must conclude that expertise cannot be acquired
in disembodied cyberspace. Distance-learning enthusiasts
notwithstanding, apprenticeship can only take place in the
shared situations of the home, the hospital, the playing field,
the laboratory, and the production sites of crafts. Distance-
apprenticeship is an oxymoron.
Once we see that there is a way of being directly present to
things and people that is denied by Descartes and all of mod-
ern philosophy, we see that there may well be basic limita-
tions on telepresence that go far beyond the problems of
distance teaching. Where the presence of people rather than
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objects is concerned, we sense a crucial difference between
those we have access to through our distance senses of hear-
ing, sight, etc. and the full-bodied presence that is literally
within arm s reach. This full-bodied presence is more than
the feeling that I am present at the site of a robot arm I am
controlling from a distance through real-time interaction.
Nor is it just a question of giving robots surface sensors so
that, through them as prostheses, we can touch other people
at a distance. Even the most gentle person robot interaction
would never be a caress, nor could one successfully use a
delicately controlled and touch-sensitive robot arm to give
one s kid a hug. Whatever hugs do for people, I m quite sure
telehugs won t do it. And any act of intimacy mediated by any
sort of robot prosthesis would surely be equally grotesque, if
not obscene. Even if our teletechnology goes beyond the
imagination of E. M. Forster so that eventually we can use
remote-controlled robotic arms and hands to touch other
people, I doubt that people could get a sense of how much to
trust each other even if they could stare into each other s eyes
on their respective screens, while, at the same time, using
their robot arms to shake each other s robotic hands.
Perhaps, one day, we will stop missing this kind of bodily
contact, and touching another person will be considered
rude or disgusting. E. M. Forster envisions such a future in his
story:
When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry [the
flight attendant] behaved barbarically  she put out her hand
to steady her.  How dare you! exclaimed the passenger,  you
forget yourself! The woman was confused, and apologized
for not having let her fall. People never touched one another.
The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.25
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For the time being, however, investment bankers know that in
order to get two CEOs to trust one another enough to merge
their companies, it is not sufficient that they have many tele-
conferences. They must live together for several days inter-
acting in a shared environment, and it is quite likely that they
will finally make their deal over dinner.26 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]