The iPad is a truly extraordinary way to share photos. Because it is so large, light, and responsive to the touch, the sensation of its use is akin to actually holding a photograph in your hand. And as technology advances to a level where products like the nano become banal, Apple might well produce a paper-thin, four-by-six computer that cycles through albums at a finger’s touch. At that point, the cybernetic will have come to approximate the real beyond the distinguishing capabilities of human perception­—The machines will win.

We need not invent the Matrix to recognize the danger. Imagine if the iPad became just advanced enough to function as a robust word processor, a publishing suite, a phone, a teleconferencer, a digital camera, and a high-definition video recorder. None of these innovations seems more than a half-decade away. With a device of that capacity, nearly all of the basic activities of human life could be encapsulated within a nine-inch screen.

Disney’s Wall-E provided a guess at how such a world would function—absorbed in his virtual life, no one would even be aware of the person next to him. But the film made the faulty assumption that people who never come into physical contact with one another would converse in the same manner as we who do.

Linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists often base their work on the belief that face-to-face interaction and gestural talk are essential to constructing and maintaining the values and norms of the collective society. Language, for example, is a fundamentally social phenomenon that each individual can claim for himself only at the moment of establishing his relation to another. That “other” cannot be an object, since the English “third person” is really just a solecism for “no person at all”—the absence of the responding individual with whom a discourse is constructed.

Hence the trouble with our slightly more advanced iPad. If all forms of interpersonal communication can take place through a computerized medium, then what guarantee do we have that the language we use to communicate is in fact constructed through intersubjective talk? How do we know that we are in fact speaking to another person through the iPad, as opposed to a computerized approximation of a person created by the computer using a library of previously-collected data about the range of facial features and expressions common to the human race?

The immediate rejoinder is that we know because we have previously seen the person to whom we now speak via video-chat, but suppose we had never seen that person. Perhaps we had been informed of that other person’s existence via an electronic message from an automatic outbox, and that “person’s” visage simply greets us when we press the “chat” button on our iPad screen.

The situation is not dissimilar to calling a corporation regarding a product dispute and receiving a phone-bank staffer who follows a scripted flowchart that connects types of complaints to specific responses. As we travel along a carefully designed flowchart, we naively assume that because we receive responses in fluid English, we are speaking to a live representative.

But when that representative proves unable to provide the sort of response our nuanced question requires, we become anxious and ask to speak to a supervisor with more “power” and a greater variability in response patterns. And if that supervisor proves too linguistically restricted, we find it easier to wonder if we might not have been better off trying to solve our problem via an automated, text-based chat room, thus avoiding speech altogether.

Some companies have already begun to provide such automated, online customer service. While the iPad has lustrous colors and a touchscreen that customer service lacks, both technologies, to varying degrees, try to transform social life into code. In both cases, life-representational technology risks disconnecting us from the inherent sociality that both builds up and reaffirms our use of language in the first place. With enough separation, we might be able to construct an entirely imagined world of speech and action without really speaking, relying only on a relatively limited textual lexicon. The language and relationships of our real lives would become almost nonexistent, while the talk and connections we engage in our virtual world would flourish.

The philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians may never ascertain whether “live” humans are merely brains in a vat chemically satiated by neurological stimuli until our mortal neurons give out—but that debate is immaterial for our purposes. The immediate future of the iPad presents an option: Should we or should we not acquiesce to the machine world budding before our “real” eyes, and in doing so, risk the existence of language. That artificial reality would be the Matrix, or the society of Surrogates, in which no one can achieve any logical clarity about what is going on. And the only way out is Wall-E, the robot: someone outside the system shutting down our screens, forcing us to talk.