At the Canberra Institute of Technology Bruce campus, students can now purchase uniforms, snacks and meals in cashless stores without staff. Students present their debit cards - often by using their phones - as they enter. Then a ceiling of cameras observes their every move.
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None of the customers needs to make eye contact with anyone else before leaving the shop with their purchases, and an automatic deduction from their bank account.
Everything they've done has been recorded and filed.
"It's really weird," one student told me. "Why would anyone want this?" asked another.
This ACT retail experiment is apparently the first in the Southern Hemisphere and comes at a time of increasing levels of loneliness globally and here and in Australia. Since 2001, the proportion of young Australians describing themselves as "lonely" in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey has climbed from 18.5 per cent to 26.6 per cent.
Almost every week there's a new story about how digital technology is degrading the quality of human relationships and our ability to be with people. Surveillance tech and mobile phones have thinned time and our capacities for trust, deeper connections and relational complexity.
Students are less likely to meet a checkout operator or a tutor. And by interacting with their phones rather than people, especially by interacting with pornography, some are losing their ability to be with people.
Even children are less likely to interact with human beings. Telethon Kids research in Western Australia out this week showed screen exposure is cutting the number of times three-year-olds talk with their parents.
There are certainly no known benefits of exposure to screens for infants and toddlers, and plenty of potential problems: among them language delays and attachment issues.
For children, gaining the language and confidence to converse with others is the bedrock of development.
Addictive-by-design devices work against this. They generate hostility and tiredness in ways that make it harder to negotiate and resolve problems and human conflict.
And yet we are inching closer to a future dependent not just on voice-activated technologies, but a new class of 'digital companions' who are easy to be with because they are not people.
That these Siri-like machines will appear to care when other people do not, will make their users even worse at dealing with real people.
It is in this context that I welcomed, along with many others, this year's ACT government ban on smartphones from first to last bell in public primary and high schools (although it took too long compared with other jurisdictions). Students have been liberated to yarn and play in their breaks.
One principal told me with relief students were looking up at teachers, rather than down and distracted by mobile screens in their hands.
Newborn babies instinctively gaze at human faces for good reasons. Looking builds trust, triggers deep parental love, and helps new arrivals develop the skills they will need to survive in a social world.
Babies talk with their body language and babble. As children, they go on to ask of questions and learn about the world while learning about people. Teens are no less in need of real-world connections, although they are more likely to want to escape.
Human conversations are more complicated than a Siri-like game of catch with one person tossing a ball and the other tossing it back. The best conversations are more listening than talking with feeling, silence, patience and no quick judgements.
In a world full of apparently urgent, often meaningless communication, real communication with real people is one of the most radical and hopeful things we can do.
- Toni Hassan is a Canberra-based associate with the Centre for Responsible Technology at the Australia Institute and author of Families in the Digital Age (Hybrid Press).
