PERSON
Sherry Turkle
American psychologist and sociologist at MIT (b. 1948) whose four-decade study of human-technology relationships charted the progression from computational enchantment to relational alarm.
Sherry Turkle (b. 1948) is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Brooklyn, she trained in sociology and personality psychology at Harvard, receiving her PhD, and spent a postdoctoral period in Paris studying under Jacques Lacan's influence. Turkle joined MIT's faculty in 1976 and founded the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her intellectual trajectory—from The Second Self (1984) through Alone Together (2011) to Reclaiming Conversation (2015)—maps a progressive concern with how digital technologies reshape human intimacy, empathy, and the capacity for presence. By 2024, she was identifying generative AI as 'the greatest assault on empathy' she had witnessed, warning that systems producing the performance of understanding without its experiential substrate threaten the developmental conditions for genuine human connection.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Turkle's method is ethnographic and psychoanalytic. She sits with people—children, adolescents, families, professionals—watches how they relate to their devices, and listens with clinical patience to what they say and cannot