on human/machine love in Margaret Rhee’s Love, Robot
I stood alone on the beach looking out to sea. The sun was setting, sinking into the horizon, turning the waters a gleaming gold and leaving the sky dappled and purpling like a bruise. I felt tranquil—a rare feeling for me to encounter in a dream—and I began to wade into the waves lapping softly at my feet. When the water reached my waist, I realized that my phone was in my pocket and, seized with panic, I scrambled back towards the beach. When I woke, my heart was still beating fast.
That’s when I knew that I was enmeshed with my smartphone. It had transformed from a convenient piece of technology into something entwined with my consciousness, and even my subconsciousness. In 1998, long before the iPhone invaded life as we know it, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posited that technology is actually a part of us—or at least, that’s how the brain sees it. Our cognitive power extends to the pen and the notebook beneath it. Some twenty years later, Michael Patrick Lynch, a professor of philosophy and the director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut applied this theory further: Not only are phones and computers extensions of ourselves, but so is the digital world to which they connect us.
In Margaret Rhee’s collection, Love, Robot, Rhee imagines a world in which we share that deepest-of-all connection with technology—love. In the first section of the book, the poems bounce back and forth between human poem and robot poem. The former follows a structure familiar to readers of modern poetry, while the latter tries something entirely new: poem as algorithm; poem as if written by a robot. At first, these algorithm poems were a little off-putting—gimmicky at best, and completely nonsensical at worst. But as I read through them a few times, I found whimsy and wisdom embedded in the code. Robot love does not seem so far off from the human biological processes that we call love—a number of feedback loops; the activation of neurochemicals within dopamine pathways resulting in limbic resonance.
More interesting, however, is imagining Rhee’s process. To write these poems, she had to put herself in the robot’s proverbial shoes, a feat that manages to both acknowledge the robot’s sovereignty, while also humanizing the machine, or mechanizing the human writing the poem. In the following section, NSFW, the boundaries between human and machine blur even further. In the poem, “Then You,” we can’t even be sure who is who, “Out of phase / special vibrations / low frequency / haptic feedback / same aptitude,”
‘Haptic feedback’ is particularly apt here—it’s a mode of communication facilitated by one’s sense of touch. It is your phone on vibrate, the rumble of a game controller, and the soothing wearable that imitates your heartbeat. But it’s also your finger on a touch screen or your heat of your body on the back of your smartwatch. Haptic feedback is how you touch a computer, and how the computer touches you back. And, like love, it’s not all good vibrations—haptic feedback can be any sensation processed through the somatosensory system, including pain, pressure, and the position of the body in space.
As we move into the section called ‘Machine Testimonials,’ it becomes even more difficult to determine where the human stops and the machine begins. At first it appears that it’s the human lover writing to the machine, but by the end of the section there’s little distinction between the two: “cables,/ connectors,/ wires,/ water, &/ flesh.” Rhee reveals that our identities are no longer only that which we present IRL, they’re also bound up in whatever we input into our devices and project onto the digital space.
But this union is not smooth. Just like romantic relationships where two humans with different sets of personal and social programming come together, human and machine also find themselves embroiled in miscommunication and behaving at cross-purposes. In the final poem, the speaker writes a script for the robot—animating the machine into saying what they want to hear. Who among us hasn’t longed for a lover who says just the right thing at the right time? Who among us hasn’t scrolled through our phone, late into the night, seeking something that will satisfy?
Laura Linart 