An Early Computer Enthusiast Turns Jaundiced

Here's a bit from an interview with Sherry Turkle, an early enthusiast for computers and their possibilities:

Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, "transgressive," and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It's not that she's against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She's concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.

The argument represents a skeptical turn for a researcher who was one of the first humanities scholars to take human interactions with computers seriously as an area of study. Because she began her academic career at MIT, starting in 1976, she had an early look at the personal computer and the Internet and now a front-row seat for robotics. She's a Harvard-trained psychologist and sociologist and refers to herself as an "intimate ethnographer," looking at how people interact with their devices. "I'm fascinated by how technology changes the self," she says.

By the mid-90s, her largely enthusiastic explorations of online chat rooms and video games had landed her on the cover of Wired magazine, making her a celebrity among the geek set. Back then her main interest was how creating alter egos in virtual worlds helped people shape their identities, as captured in her seminal 1995 book, Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster).

She still believes in those benefits. But in recent years, she has spent more time documenting the drawbacks and hazards of technology in daily life. Warnings fill her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (Basic Books), out this month, which devotes roughly half of its pages to her studies of robots and the rest to information overload and the effects of social networks and other mainstream technologies. At points the prose seems designed to grab readers by the shoulders, shake them as if out of a dream, and shout: "Put down the BlackBerry—you're forgetting how to just be!"

"We talk about 'spending' hours on e-mail, but we, too, are being spent," Alone Together concludes. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, and yet we have allowed them to diminish us."

The interview is full of thoughtful material.

I'm not sold on her argument. If find people can be perfectly shallow and have "breakdowns" as often as any computer. And I'm not sure that there is a lot "there" in a good number of people. I don't find that most people have the time of day for a meaningful encounter. Most people I run into are purely into economic transactions or superficial social transaction. It isn't obvious to me that these go any deeper than an encounter with a half decent robot.

I'm more of an optimist about the future capabilities of machine. I think they can be programmed to achieve the level of social interaction which will pass as meaningful companionship. My bottom line: how many "friends" have you had that really didn't understand you and really weren't "there for you" at crucial points in your life? A machine may not be really sympatico down deep, but they are devoted and can show real interest in you and your needs. I think Sherry Turkle either has impossibly high quality friends, or she has let her thesis blind her to the real world.