DiscoverPossibly related to Interview with The Human League on Huffduffer186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity – Sean Carroll
186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity – Sean Carroll

186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity – Sean Carroll

Update: 2022-03-01
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Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconnected devices. There are obvious benefits to this — it lets us text our friends, listen to podcasts, and not get lost in strange cities. But as it changes how we interact with other people, it’s important to consider unintended side effects. Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and writer who specializes in the relationship between humans and their technology. She makes the case for not forgetting about empathy, conversation, and even the occasional imperfection in how we present ourselves to the world.

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Sherry Turkle received her Ph.D. in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University. She is currently Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, the Harvard Centennial Medal, and she was named “Woman of the Year” by Ms. Magazine. Her new book is The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir.

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0:00:00 .5 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. In some sense, as it’s been often pointed out, podcasts aren’t that different in spirit from just radio shows. Right? You’ve had shows on the radio for a very long time, but of course there’s also a difference and a lot of the difference between good old-fashioned radio shows and newfangled podcasts is the device by which you are receiving this podcast. It could be a portable device, a phone or a tablet, or it might be your laptop, but this new bit of extra technology lets you do what makes podcast great, which is you can listen whenever you want. It’s not like a radio show, you have to wait for that time. You can pause it, you can skip through the parts you find interesting and so forth. It’s a tiny change, maybe, but it’s an important one that has been made possible by this bit of technology, these devices we carry around with us, and it’s just one example about how these devices have really been transforming our lives and arguably even ourselves, who we are. We identify with and use our devices in ways that really hit who we are deep down, and maybe the world’s leading expert in this phenomenon is today’s guest, Sherry Turkle. Sherry is a professor at MIT who started out studying psychology and has a degree in psychology, that’s her PhD, but she became interested early on in the idea of technology and how it affects our psychology.

0:01:31 .3 SC: So she got a job at MIT, founding a new way of thinking about the relationship between human psychology and machines and technology, right at the beginning of artificial intelligence and the personal computer revolution and so forth. And even though she was initially quite optimistic about how we can use technology to make the human experience a better one, these days she finds herself, I think I would accurately say, more often pointing out the worries that we should have, not that she’s anti-technology in any way, but there are ways in which the technology sometimes moves ahead of our ability to understand what is going on. We all know how devices are extremely seductive. We can’t put down our phones. The young generation we have right now is growing up in a very different environment than older generations did because of how they relate to technology and to each other. It’s something where, in some sense, the art of conversation, of spontaneity of not knowing exactly what you wanna say and therefore spitting something out and maybe it’s not exactly right and you have to edit, that’s a kind of art form, or even just sitting in silence that you don’t need to face up to when you have this technological mediation. How does that change who we are, who we want to be, who we present ourselves as to the rest of the world?

0:02:52 .9 SC: Sherry has a new book out, which is actually a memoir, it’s called The Empathy Diary: A Memoir is the subtitle, and the idea of writing a memoir is because she does have this interesting intellectual place where she’s sitting, and she wanted to try to explain how she got there through her personal story, and The Empathy Diaries is an appropriate title because she wants to emphasize the importance of empathy and personal connection in an age where machines dominate our communication so strongly. I say all this, of course, knowing perfectly well that I am recording this podcast on just such a bit of technology and you are listening to it on just such a bit of technology. So again, not anti-technology here, but this is exactly the kind of situation where we shouldn’t let our enthusiasms run away without thinking about it, being cognitive, really trying to understand where we’re going rather than just racing willy-nilly from one shiny object to another. That’s what this podcast is trying to get us in the mood to do, so let’s go.

[music]

0:04:10 .8 SC: Sherry Turkle, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:14 .5 Sherry Turkle: My pleasure.

0:04:16 .6 SC: So this is an unusual interview. I’ve interviewed plenty of people who have books out, but you have a memoir out, which is a little bit of a departure, but I think it works well because we can use some of your biography to get into some of the substantive things that you’ve done over the years in technology and communication and so forth, so explain to the audience how you had a career path of becoming a psychologist and a clinical psychiatrist, I guess, and ended up at MIT thinking about technology.

0:04:45 .1 ST: Well, you sort of had to be there at the time.

[laughter]

0:04:51 .6 ST: But really, that’s why I wrote the memoir. The memoir is not a personal memoir. The memoir is a memoir of a very particular kind. It’s a memoir that tries to integrate… It’s in the spirit of the question you just asked, because it tries to integrate my personal story and how I ended up doing the work that I do. So it answers that very question. I went to MIT because I wanted to have a place to finish a book I was writing about how intellectual ideas get into the public space and sort of hit the street after they’ve been in the seminar room. So my case study was actually the popularization of French psychoanalysis in the years after 1968. There was this very esoteric guy named Jacques Lacan, hardly anybody read him, very hard to read, very opaque. And then there were these may events kind of parallel to front student movement we had here, and all of a sudden Jacques Lacan was like a movie star.

[chuckle]

0:06:23 .2 ST: Everybody was in psychoanalysis. Everybody was quoting this very… Hardly understanding him, I guess. But psychoanalytic ideas were really in the popular culture in a very big way, and I was fascinated by this question of how ideas that are in academia…

0:06:43 .7 ST: Really become part of public discourse, in particular, ideas about thinking about the self, because that really influences therapeutic practice. That’s what my thesis was, that’s what all my study had been about, was about how really, in a culture, you can only help people to get better from what’s troubling them if you use the ideas that are in the culture, you need to use the ideas that are popular in the culture, to get through to people and explain their troubles to them in the metaphors that they can understand. So in American society, Freudian ideas, talking to people about their repression, or their Oedipus complex, or their childhood, that had been kind of in the public imagination for 30, 40, 50 years.

0:07:47 .4 SC: Sure.

0:07:48 .5 ST: And not at all in France, those ideas have been shunned, and then all of a sudden in the 60s, they were very much in the popular culture. And I said it got processed. And I went to MIT because there was a dean there who thought this work was very, very relevant to thinking about how artificial intelligence was gonna get out, and ideas about thinking about the computer were going to get out into the popular culture. Ideas like “Don’t interrupt me, I need to clear my buffer.”

0:08:26 .4 SC: [laughter] Not having enough bandwidth, yes.

0:08:29 .4 ST: “No, I don’t want you to reprogram me.” Ideas that represented the mind as a machine, how are those ideas going to get out? And they felt they sort of needed someone like me, someone who was not a computer expert, but a sort of expert on how ideas hit the street.

0:08:54 .8 SC: Yeah.

0:08:57 .6 ST: Move from the classroom and the laboratory into the culture, to think about the new ideas of computers and artificial intelligence. And I was writing up my dissertation as a book, and I said, “That sounds interesting”, and I sort of went to see, and I absolutely fell in love with the question.

0:09:19 .9 SC: Right.

0:09:21 .1 ST: I absolutely fell in love with the question, and 40 more years later, I’m just as much in love with this question of how, for example, these ideas about the metaverse now, are going to change our ideas about thinking about, “is reality important?”

0:09:40 .3 SC: Yeah.

0:09:43 .6 ST: Or “are we okay that we’re gonna leave reality and go to the metaverse?” All of a sudden you have all these very influential people saying “I wanna live in the metaverse, let’s all make avatars in the metaverse, let’s spend a lot of money in the metaverse, let’s have commerce, and meetings, and lovers in the metaverse.” Well, what about reality? [laughter] Who’s gonna take care of business? Does that mean that we’re gonna be sold on the idea that not only isn’t face-to-face reality important, but reality reality isn’t important either? Can we not take care of our streets, and our homes, and our
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186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity – Sean Carroll

186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity – Sean Carroll