With the development of technology, personal relationships seem to have been weakened, as people are increasingly occupied with their cell phones. Some people believe that technology does not free people. Instead, it imprisons people into the cages of convenience. The thriving artificial intelligence is bringing people emotional support previously generated from human-to-human interactions only. However, this human-robot relationship is being criticized for the lack of “authenticity”. This essay will discuss the positive and negative implications of new ways of connections, through an analysis of two articles. In “Alone Together” by Sherry Turkle, the author believes that new ways of connections bring negative effects in human relationships and diminish the authenticity of intimacy. In “The World and Other Places” by Jeanette Winterson, the author believes that the ways people interact with the world defines a person from the childhood, and changes can bring loss and confusion to some people. Changing the ways people connect with each other can bring family members closer to each other, and extend the scope of intimacy to non-human objects, but it can also deprive the intimacy established by the previous ways of connection.

The environment is able to both limit and shape people’s connection with each other. Intimate relationships in a family have profound influences in a child. As a child from a poor family, the narrator of “The World and Other Places” found himself constantly limited by the physical world. However, poverty helped the family to find new ways to connect with each other. “Then my sister gave us each a blind-fold. We put it on, and sat quietly, dreaming, imagining, while one of us started talking about the strange place we were visiting. (Winterson 283).” While the children did not get to experience the real India, France, and Egypt, what they did experience was the genuine joy for family members to be together and dream together. The fake scenes and the lack of authenticity became even contributive to the boy’s ambitions. If the family were rich enough to travel around the world but without the games and fun, the intimacy would be completely lost and the boy would hardly be motivated to go and see the world in the future.

New ways of connecting with each other bring family members closer by offering them more opportunities to interact with each other. The convenience brought by technology is bringing people closer than before, by reducing the physical distance between them. Some feel that technology has taken away the authenticity in the intimacy that they once felt. However, they have failed to find reasons in themselves. In the article by Turkle, an example of Ellen and her grandmother is used to demonstrate the detrimental effects of technology on intimate human relationships. In this case, Ellen felt guilty to be multitasking while Skyping with her grandmother: “Ellen felt guilty and confused: she knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen, another task among multitasks (Turkle 23).” Multitasking was simply a choice, as Ellen was fully capable of not doing it and concentrating on her grandmother while chatting with her. Blaming technology for her own choice doesn’t diminish the increased opportunity of intimacy brought by technology.

Different ways of connections show that authenticity of intimacy exists not only in humans only, but also in objects. Being a grown up and a pilot who has realized his childhood dreams, the model airplane the boy made when he was little still carried his hopes and dreams. Even if the dreams are realized and the hopes were gone, the emotions were still genuine: “What hopes they carried. More than the altar at church. More than a good school report. In the secret places, under the fuselage, stuck to the tail-fin, I had hidden my hopes (Winterson 285).” Objects that are remote and emotionless to some can bring others to tears. This is not because of any special quality of the objects, but people’s special memories with the objects. In this sense, the authenticity of a wedding ring and an AI robot is not that different. Clearly, the mother and the son had similar emotions towards the model airplane. Sharing emotions on non-human objects hardly hinders the emotions between human beings.

New technology is helping humans to establish and extend intimacy to artificial intelligence. Since the entire experience of emotional AI is to mimic the best part of the human relationship, it should be considered as genuine as the relationship between humans. Once developed to a certain height, by taking only the best part from the relationship, the robots can serve as teachers, as humans would unconsciously imitate the robots’ behaviors, preparing themselves to become more emotional competent persons. Just as people find emotional support from their pets, which are considered no threat or competition to human relationships, robots and AI should not, either. In the example of the authentic turtle in