For most of the last 50 years, technology knew its place. We all spent a lot of time with technology—we drove to work, flew on airplanes, used telephones and computers, and cooked with microwaves. But even five years ago, technology seemed external, a servant. These days, what’s so striking is not only technology’s ubiquity but also its intimacy.
On the Internet, people create imaginary identities in virtual worlds and spend hours playing out parallel lives. Children bond with artificial pets that ask for their care and affection. A new generation contemplates a life of wearable computing, finding it natural to think of their eyeglasses as screen monitors, their bodies as elements of cyborg selves. Filmmakers reflect our anxieties about these developments, present and imminent. In Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, human beings become addicted to a technology that shows video images of their dreams. In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers paint a future in which people are plugged into a virtual reality game. In Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, a woman struggles with her feelings for David, a robot child who has been programmed to love her.
Today, we are not yet faced with humanoid robots that demand our affection or with parallel universes as developed as the Matrix. Yet we’re increasingly preoccupied with the virtual realities we now experience. People in chat rooms blur the boundaries between their on-line and off-line lives, and there is every indication that the future will include robots that seem to express feelings and moods. What will it mean to people when their primary daily companion is a robotic dog? Or to a hospital patient when her health care attendant is built in the form of a robot nurse? Both as consumers and as businesspeople, we need to take a closer look at the psychological effects of the technologies we’re using today and of the innovations just around the corner.
Indeed, the smartest people in the field of technology are already doing just that. MIT and Cal Tech, providers of much of the intellectual capital for today’s high-tech business, have been turning to research that examines what technology does to us as well as what it does for us. To probe these questions further, HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu met with Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Turkle is widely considered one of the most distinguished scholars in the area of how technology influences human identity.
Few people are as well qualified as Turkle to understand what happens when mind meets machine. Trained as a sociologist and psychologist, she has spent more than 20 years closely observing how people interact with and relate to computers and other high-tech products. The author of two groundbreaking books on people’s relationship to computers—The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet—Turkle is currently working on the third book, with the working title Intimate Machines, in what she calls her “computational trilogy.” At her home in Boston, she spoke with Coutu about the psychological dynamics between people and technology in an age when technology is increasingly redefining what it means to be human.
You’re at the frontier of research being done on computers and their effects on society. What has changed in the past few decades?
To be in computing in 1980, you had to be a computer scientist. But if you’re an architect now, you’re in computing. Physicians are in computing. Businesspeople are certainly in computing. In a way, we’re all in computing; that’s just inevitable. And this means that the power of the computer—with its gifts of simulation and visualization—to change our habits of thought extends across the culture.