Alone Together
Authors: Sherry Turkle
Table of Contents
ALSO BY SHERRY TURKLE
Psychoanalytic Politics
The Second Self
Life on the Screen
Evocative Objects (Ed.)
Falling for Science (Ed.)
The Inner History of Devices (Ed.)
Simulation and Its Discontents
The Second Self
Life on the Screen
Evocative Objects (Ed.)
Falling for Science (Ed.)
The Inner History of Devices (Ed.)
Simulation and Its Discontents
TO REBECCA
My letter to you, with love
“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”
—Plato,
The Republic
The Republic
“I’m done with smart machines. I want a machine that’s attentive to my needs. Where are the sensitive machines?”
—Tweet available at dig_natRT @tigoe via @ramonapringle
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Turning points
T
hirty years ago, when I joined the faculty at MIT to study computer culture, the world retained a certain innocence. Children played tic-tac-toe with their electronic toys, video game missiles took on invading asteroids, and “intelligent” programs could hold up their end of a serious chess match. The first home computers were being bought by people called hobbyists. The people who bought or built them experimented with programming, often making their own simple games. No one knew to what further uses home computers might be put. The intellectual buzz in the still-young field of artificial intelligence was over programs that could recognize simple shapes and manipulate blocks. AI scientists debated whether machines of the future would have their smarts programmed into them or whether intelligence might emerge from simple instructions written into machine hardware, just as neurobiologists currently imagine that intelligence and reflective self-consciousness emerge from the relatively simple architecture and activity of the human brain.
hirty years ago, when I joined the faculty at MIT to study computer culture, the world retained a certain innocence. Children played tic-tac-toe with their electronic toys, video game missiles took on invading asteroids, and “intelligent” programs could hold up their end of a serious chess match. The first home computers were being bought by people called hobbyists. The people who bought or built them experimented with programming, often making their own simple games. No one knew to what further uses home computers might be put. The intellectual buzz in the still-young field of artificial intelligence was over programs that could recognize simple shapes and manipulate blocks. AI scientists debated whether machines of the future would have their smarts programmed into them or whether intelligence might emerge from simple instructions written into machine hardware, just as neurobiologists currently imagine that intelligence and reflective self-consciousness emerge from the relatively simple architecture and activity of the human brain.
Now I was among them and, like any anthropologist, something of a stranger in a strange land. I had just spent several years in Paris studying how psychoanalytic ideas had spread into everyday life in France—how people were picking up and trying on this new language for thinking about the self. I had come to MIT because I sensed that something similar was happening with the language of computers. Computational metaphors, such as “debugging” and “programming,” were starting to be used to think about politics, education, social life, and—most central to the analogy with psychoanalysis—about the self. While my computer science colleagues were immersed in getting computers to do ingenious things, I had other concerns. How were computers changing us as people? My colleagues often objected, insisting that computers were “just tools.” But I was certain that the “just” in that sentence was deceiving. We are shaped by our tools. And now, the computer, a machine on the border of becoming a mind, was changing and shaping us.
As a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, I wanted to explore what I have called the “inner history of devices.”
1
Discovering an inner history requires listening—and often not to the first story told. Much is learned from the tossed-off aside, the comment made when the interview is “officially” over. To do my work, I adopted an ethnographic and clinical style of research as I lived in worlds new to me. But instead of spending hundreds of hours in simple dwellings, as an anthropologist in a traditional setting would do, listening to the local lore, I lurked around computer science departments, home computer hobbyist clubs, and junior high school computer laboratories. I asked questions of scientists, home computer owners, and children, but mostly I listened to how they talked and watched how they behaved among their new “thinking” machines.
1
Discovering an inner history requires listening—and often not to the first story told. Much is learned from the tossed-off aside, the comment made when the interview is “officially” over. To do my work, I adopted an ethnographic and clinical style of research as I lived in worlds new to me. But instead of spending hundreds of hours in simple dwellings, as an anthropologist in a traditional setting would do, listening to the local lore, I lurked around computer science departments, home computer hobbyist clubs, and junior high school computer laboratories. I asked questions of scientists, home computer owners, and children, but mostly I listened to how they talked and watched how they behaved among their new “thinking” machines.
I heard computers provoke erudite conversations. Perhaps, people wondered, the human mind is just a programmed machine, much like a computer. Perhaps if the mind is a program, free will is an illusion. Most strikingly, these conversations occurred not just in seminar rooms. They were taking place around kitchen tables and in playrooms. Computers brought philosophy into everyday life; in particular, they turned children into philosophers. In the presence of their simple electronic games—games that played tic-tac-toe or challenged them in spelling—children asked if computers were alive, if they had different ways of thinking from people, and what, in the age of smart machines, was special about being a person.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I witnessed a moment when we were confronted with machines that invited us to think differently about
human
thought, memory, and understanding. The computer was an evocative object that provoked self-reflection. For me, this was captured in a conversation I had with thirteen-year-old Deborah in the early 1980s. After a year of studying programming, Deborah said that, when working with the computer, “there’s a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind.” Once this was achieved, you could see yourself “differently.”
2
Face-to-“face” with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine. In 1984, thinking about Deborah (and in homage as well to Simone de Beauvoir), I called my first book on computers and people
The Second Self.
human
thought, memory, and understanding. The computer was an evocative object that provoked self-reflection. For me, this was captured in a conversation I had with thirteen-year-old Deborah in the early 1980s. After a year of studying programming, Deborah said that, when working with the computer, “there’s a little piece of your mind and now it’s a little piece of the computer’s mind.” Once this was achieved, you could see yourself “differently.”
2
Face-to-“face” with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine. In 1984, thinking about Deborah (and in homage as well to Simone de Beauvoir), I called my first book on computers and people
The Second Self.
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