PERSON
Sherry Turkle
The MIT psychologist who has spent four decades watching humans relate to their machines—from hopeful enchantment with the computer as a second self to urgent alarm about AI creative tools that make presence itself the hardest thing to give.
Sherry Turkle arrived at MIT in the late 1970s as a psychologist trained in the psychoanalytic tradition, sat down with children and computers, and saw something that filled her with hope: the machine was functioning as an
evocative object, a surface onto which children projected their deepest questions about what it means to think, to be alive, to have a self. She called the computer a “second self” and spent a decade documenting its power as a mirror for human self-understanding. Then, slowly and with characteristic intellectual honesty, the mirror cracked. The tools grew more powerful, and their power did not produce richer self-understanding. It produced thinner connection that passed for richer connection, and loneliness that felt like sociability, and the erosion of conversation—that most human of activities—by the controlled, editable, frictionless alternatives that screens offered.
Alone Together (2011) and
Reclaiming Conversation (2015) made the case that the screen was the enemy of the depth of