Technology is the architect of our intimacies. We are human because language makes us so. And yet, we now contemplate a world where from our earliest years we talk to smart machines. Machines have no friendship to offer, and yet we persist in the desire for conversation, companionship, and even communion with the inanimate. What does that do to who we are as humans? What do we forget when we talk to machines? How can we remember ourselves?
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Professor Turkle writes on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on culture and therapy, mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics.
Website: www.sherryturkle.com
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Audrey Borowski is a research fellow with the Desirable Digitalisation project, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cambridge that investigates how to design AI and other digital technologies in responsible ways. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant is forthcoming with Princeton University Press: press.princeton.edu/books/har...