Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

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 the possible downsides. 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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. Web site MIT web page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Club on the I-Hart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a QuickBooks customer looking to grow your business without the growing pains, You need the Intuit ERP. Upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite in a matter of hours. It's the AI Native ERP from the makers of QuickBooks. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

You know, in some sense, as it's been often pointed out, podcasts aren't that different in spirit from just radio shows, right? We'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, right, a phone or a tablet, or it might be your laptop. But this new bit of extra technology lets you do what makes podcasts great, which is you can listen whenever you want, right? 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 Ph.D., but she became interested early on in the idea of technology and how it affects our psychology. 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. 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 want to 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? Sherry has a new book out, which is actually a memoir. It's called The Empathy Diaries. 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. Sherry Turkle, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. My pleasure. So this is an unusual interview. I 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 thing 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. Well, you sort of had to be there at the time. But really, that's why I wrote the memoir. The memoir is not a person. personal memoir. The memoir is a memoir of a very particular kind. It's a, 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 the French student movement we had here. And all of a sudden, Jacques Lacan was like a movie star. Everybody was in psychoanalysis. everybody was quoting this very, you know, 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 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 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 know, 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, you know, their childhood, that had been kind of in the public imagination for 30, 40, 50 years. And not at all in France. Those ideas had been shunned. And then all of a sudden in the 60s, they were very much of the popular culture. And I studied that process. 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 going to get out.

And ideas about thinking about the computer were going to get out into the popular culture. Ideas like, don't interrupt me. to clear my buffer. Not having enough bandwidth, yes. No, I don't want you to reprogram me. You know, ideas that represented the mind as a machine, how were those ideas going to get out? And they felt they sort of needed someone like me, someone who was not a computer expert, but as sort of expert on how ideas hit the street,

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. I absolutely fell in love with the question. And, you know, 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 is reality important.

Yeah. Or are we okay that we're going to leave reality and go to the metaverse? All of a sudden, you have all these very influential people. people saying, I want to live in the metaverse. Let's all make avatars in the metaverse. Let's spend a lot of money in the metaverse. We're going to have commerce and meetings and lovers in the metaverse. Well, what about reality? Who's going to take care of business? I mean, does that mean that we're going to be sold on the idea that not only isn't face-to-face reality important, But reality reality isn't important either, you know.

Can we not take care of our streets and our homes and our public parks and our offices and our, our, our, our train stations? Because we're just going to go to the metaverse instead of, you know, being in physical space. Well, we don't need to go to, I mean, I don't want to go on and on, but it's the same sort of course. question, which is just as compelling now as then. So that's how I made the transition from studying, you know, ideas from Freud and how they changed people's lives to studying ideas from technology and how they change really how we think about living. You know, we did not too, that was the transition. Not too long ago, we had a Lacanian psychoanalyst or psychoanalytic theorist on.

the Mindscape podcast, Mari Routi, and I just want to let anyone know who enjoyed that one, that there's some very good Lacan stories in your memoir, Sherry. Yes. He was a character. I went to Paris, and I basically said to him, listen, I'm writing a book about the impact of your ideas on popular culture, where everybody was making something of this man's ideas, different things, and usually opposite things. And I said, but you've got to, you know, explain to me some of your ideas,

because I'm really having some trouble here. And he, you know, I think he saw me in French, there's an expression, you know, Lidio de Village. I mean, it's sort of like not a village idiot exactly, but some sort of naive, you know, like, and he, he who has a reputation for great opacity said, yeah, I'll explain, I'll explain this to you. And he was actually a very sensitive and very kind teacher to me. And I try to, in this book and everything I've written about him, try to communicate, you know, how he explained his ideas to me in a way that, you know, I could understand. And you had the hutspot to invite him to give a seminar at MIT, which did not go

exactly well, as I recall. Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? Pekor's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Paycor.com slash leaders and go from work flood to workflow. That's paycore.com slash leaders. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and Iheart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone? Very

far from Earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the

mic. That's great. Because it served the story. people will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to EIRSA, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. But let's get into this mindset because it is a great, you know, sort of right place, right time story where someone like you at MIT in the 70s when it was sort of the first heyday of artificial intelligence. And people were like you said, you know, part of that is building artificial intelligence. algorithms, but a flip side of that is thinking of human beings as machines, right?

We human beings always do that. The latest technology is the metaphor we use to start thinking about ourselves. So, you know, how did that feel back then in the 70s? Were you optimistic? We were like, oh, yeah, human beings are going to be machines, or were you already a little bit worried that people were taking this too straightforwardly too far? Well, I was very worried because my background was to see. To me, I called it a move from meaning to mechanism, from looking, the first thing that had hit me and the thing that had compelled me to do this, that I was teaching a course that had a unit on an introduction to Freud.

And I was trying to explain what we call Freudian slips. And Freud in his book on slips and his notes on slips explains Freudian slips. He calls them parapraxes by saying, by giving an example of a chairman who calls a meeting to order. But instead of calling the meeting to order, he says it's, I call the meeting closed. In other words, he substitutes closed for open in the meeting. And then he goes into a whole long, rigor or mole about how he might have done that, why he did that. his wife is sick so he wants to get home. He's ambivalent about what's going to happen in the meeting.

I mean, all the meaning reasons that are Freudian would give to unpack that slip. And a hand is raised in the back of the room of a computer scientist who says, I think that you're looking at this in the wrong way in a Webster's dictionary. closed and open or as far away with C&O. In a Freudian dictionary, their opposites, closed and open or as far away as you can get, you have to go into all these meanings and ambivalence and his wife is sick.

But in a computational dictionary, closed equals minus open. A symbol has been dropped when you make that mistake. There's been a power surge. One bit. One bit. There's been no. It's no problem.

I mean, it's like, you know, nothing happened. You had a power surge on the line. So there's no, you don't need this whole big production. Just your, there's been a little glitch in the electricity. Your brain, your mind, your mind is a series of electrical circuits. I mean, get a talk about something interesting. I mean, you have a mechanism here that it were nothing very interesting has happened. Yeah.

And I was so taken aback because I realized that if you do see the mind, the machine, she was absolutely right. This whole infrastructure and meaning depended on a model that she didn't believe in. From her point of view, there was no there was no there there in this story. And I saw that a structure in which you looked for meaning was shifting to a structure of mechanism that was going to have all different kinds of assumptions. I guess. And And I tell a story in the empathy diaries to illustrate this, you know, this is what kept me at MIT. I mean, I was then, I was hooked. You know, I was about to leave for some liberal artsy place, you know.

But then I was just hooked. And I went to the debut of the movie Tron. Oh, yeah. The original with Marvin Minsky, who thought the mind was a meat machine. That's how he said. the mind is a meat. We love Tron because it showed the mind as a meat machine. It showed all the little programs, you know, interacting in the mind as little, you know, anthropomorphic programs.

He loved that. And then he said, you know, and children will go see movies like this and they'll never see movies like Bambi. And I and I bit, I bit, you know, he had me. I shouldn't have risen to debate, but I did. I said, why not Bambi? Every kid sees Bambi. And he says because in Bambi, the children get attached to their mothers, and the mother dies.

And in the world we're going towards, the robots will be immortal, will be taken care of, not by the mothers, but by the immortal robots. There'll be no death. Will be uploaded onto the computer. In other words, he gives me this whole AI version of how we're on the way to this radical self-improvement in AI. And I realized, whoa, you know, this just isn't a theory.

This is a whole way of a philosophy of being in the world. And I think that that really is what we're struggling with now, even as we talk about the metaverse. It, you know, it's not, or talk about robot caretakers for our children or robot psychotherapists, which is being pushed so much, or robot companions or robots who will love us or, you know, all of the, all of the things that are so current now in our discourse is how much do we care about our bodies, about having human companions, about the specificity of being human. all of these were questions that were posed for the first time when I first got to MIT. Now we're living them out in real technology that is being proposed to us, but they were proposed in theory when I first got there. I'm interested in that story about the bit flipping in the Freudian slip context because I can kind of see both sides here.

I mean, at a deep intellectual level, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the mind is a machine, that, you know, ultimately there's neurons and the remaining laws of physics, et cetera. But, of course, it's a kind of machine that is so enormously more complicated than what we build on our computers right now, that to think of a human being making that wrong word choice as just a bit flip is probably hopelessly naive, I would think. Well, also where we, I think I do believe along with the, with the tradition and represented by, you know, phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty and in the computer world by Hubert Dreyfus by Antonio Demosio, that we're a particular kind of machine that's attached to our bodies. Right. And very specific bodies and bodies that have a life cycle and bodies that feel pain and bodies that know they're going to. die and bodies that were born and bodies that grew up being attached to parents on whom they were dependent. And, you know, that I think that those experienced, those embodied experiences and those experience

of dependency and attachment really create a specificity of the human that even if you have a neuronal accident and you drop a bit because. you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. You say open when it's, you mean closed because let's say you have a bit drop. You know, still, when you do that, it triggers associations from all of those other systems and with all of those other consequences. So I think that we are more complex. And I always like to quote, you know, it's so funny that when we're.

you write several books. People sometimes say, well, do you repeat yourself? And I say, I intentionally repeat a couple of times I've intentionally repeated a story because I loved it so much. And I wanted to give the author credit. I don't repeat stories of mine, but I repeat other people's work. And Peter Kramer wrote a book listening to Prozac quite a few years ago. But he tells a story at the beginning of listening to Prozac.

I mean, it was a very big book when he wrote it. I mean, so he got a lot of credit for how brilliantly it was written. But I give him extra, extra credit because he began it with the following story that I think sums up the human condition and the question you've just asked me so perfectly. And the story is this, that he was a psychiatrist working at Brown University in the counseling department. And a student comes in, he says he's depressed, and Prozac was just coming out, and Kramer gives a student Prozac for the depression. Three weeks later, the student comes in, and the student says, I'm not sleeping. And Kramer, the last notes he has in his student chart for the chart, says that he gave Prozac, and he knows that Prozac sometimes leads to sleep disorders.

He says, not to worry, I'll give you something for the sleeping. This often happens when people take Prozac. And the student says to him, no, I didn't take the Prozac. I'm not sleeping because I feel guilty towards you about not having followed your advice. And Kramer says that in the, in less than a heartbeat, in less than a second, I mean, it didn't take a second. He went from seeing that student as a bundle of synapses that he was going to treat with Prozac and serotonin at the synapse to seeing that student as in an edible context and he and the transference and what had happened in the transference to him and what about his relationship with his father and as part of the family system. and how was he going to deal with his family system and his and his whole relationship to this completely divorced from this whole thing about the mind is the machine and what the Prozac could do with the synapse, etc, etc, etc. And he said that is what is extraordinary about the human condition, that we relate, we can relate to each other.

and at the same time, machine to machine, Prozac giver to Prozac receiver, and as edible transference figure to Sun. And the way he describes that flip, and then, of course, he had a slip back because then he's the question is, and what can Prozac, you know, he still maybe wants to try Prozac, you know.

But that it's that way, it's that way that we all live. that really is the human condition, that we are both, and that one doesn't exclude the other. And it's time that we stop behaving as though, well, we'll just go into the metaverse so we don't need to be in our bodies anymore. You know, you know, I mean, we have to stop behaving as though we're on the red pill, is that we're behaving like we all saw the matrix and we have to choose between the red pill and the blue pill. We have to, actually, our situation is that we don't get to do one pill or the other pill. We live in the fully hybrid world.

Our minds now are in a fully hybridized situation. So we're talking now on, I mean, you know, you see where I'm going, so I'll set my lecture. But we, but the human condition is that we are both. You know, I wish I had known that story because when I wrote my book, the big picture, I talked a lot about how you can describe the same. situation using different vocabularies that are very different in content but are both right as long as they're compatible with each other. This is a great example of exactly that. It's the same thing except what I think that happens to clinicians. What happens to people, you know, what happens to,

and this gets back to your first question about being a clinician, is that if you're a clinician, you have to operate on both levels because we do have to have drugs. We do have medications that can, we're not to use the medications would be malpractice, it would be wrong to say, no, I'm just talking to, I'm just talking to everybody, you know, Freudian mind, the Freudian mind. That would be wrong because these medications do calm people down to the point where they're more accessible for conversation. So, you know, certainly someone like Kramer is not a completely anti-medication person. But the point then is to have a conversation with the more complex person who did have a relationship with his father.

And so when some fancy psychiatrist said, do this, he said, the hell with that. I don't want to do anything that an older man tells me to do. No. But then later, he came back realizing he was, you know, there was something maybe to learn here. since now he was depressed and angry at Peter Kramer and angry at his father and still depressed. And maybe there was something to get out of this experience. And speaking of conversations, this provides a wonderful segue because it is a different world that we're in now that we were in the 70s in terms of how this technological revolution is going to affect us. And I think that the idea of people carrying around small mobile devices that are conduit to interacting with the whole world was probably

not nearly as appreciated in the 70s as it is manifest to us right now. So you've done a lot of work and thought a lot about how having these devices changes how we behave, but also who we are. In fact, you already mentioned the fact as Antonio DiMosio was another former podcast guest, and he and others have really emphasized the existence of the body as an important part of who we are. And now, in some sense, these little phones and iPads and laptops that we carry around are becoming extension. of our body and changing who we are? Yes.

I mean, actually, in the Empathy Diaries, I talk about the change in my work because in the beginning, my first book, when I got to MIT and I saw this new world of devices and AI and thinking of the mind as a machine and the way people, I called my first book, the second self

because I saw the way people were projecting themselves onto the computer. called it an evocative object. Because it was sort of on the border between mind and not mind, I thought it was a place where people were exploring their sense of self and their question of free will. And I even said, what sex was to be Victorians, the question of free will is to our generation, that the programming brings up that question of free will. I mean, I wasn't positive.

I was talking about all of these very, you know, these big questions that AI raised. But it was a book of discovery and exploration. Then when the mobile phone, and I wrote another book that was very positive, which is a book called Life on the Screen, where I talk about people going into muds and things like the Metaverse and playing Sims and second life.

And, you know, again, exploring through avatars, gender and their personality and taking on different roles, are doing role playing. And I saw the dangers, but I also talked about them as identity workshops and placed, you know, how cyberspace was a place to play with identity. Again, I talked about the problems. I talked about addiction. I mean, I talked about a lot of things.

But my attitude was these are places of psychological possibility. Let's study them. I'm basically an empiricist. I'm not a moral philosopher. But when I saw that people were walking around with the world of computation to enter, you know, just like that. Sherry is holding up her phone to her. I'm applying it directly to my head. my attitude shifted because my model of how people had been using the phone as an identity device

involved sitting on your couch with your friends and your family and your baby and your lover, your mother, your brother. And then walking away, going to your wife, going to your, you're, and then walking away, going to your office, sitting at your computer and doing some identity exploration. Yeah. And then getting up from your chair and walking back to your living room and being with your family again. In other words, it was a going to the place of therapy or experimentation or, you know, being

in a parallel universe and then coming back to the real. Right. And what the phone did is it broke that barrier. So the people were cycling through. People were cycling. I called it cycling through. In the original model, people kind of cycled through the real and this metaverse. And then the cycling through became the rapid cycling became so rapid that the boundaries broke down.

Yeah. And people were going back and forth and back and forth and back. I mean, the people said that the world really that they were accessing from their phone was more real than their real life was often more compelling than their real life. And what distresses me now is that people are saying, well, let me just not say people. Mark Zuckerberg, or anybody who's pushing the metaverse, which is increasingly a lot of companies because they're going to make a lot of money on it, they're saying that's right. We are going to make the metaverse more compelling than the real. You're going to want to work in the metaverse. You're going to want to play in the metaverse.

You're going to want to. And I saw a New Yorker cartoon that was, I was trying to explain it to some friends. And I think I'm going to make it like my holiday card. It was like a cartoon about things that were going to have a hard time explaining to the next generation, you know, like things that will be difficult for my grandchildren to, like, understand how it used to be. where a grandmother is with her grandchild. And the grandmother has oculus glasses on. And she's saying to the grandchild, okay, now when we're together now in the

metaverse, do you see me with these goggles, or do you just see me? Or do you see me without the goggles? And the little grandchild says to the grandmother, oh, no, grandma, I see you as a unicorn because that's the avatar I've made for you. So the grandmother says, you mean you don't see me, your grandma when I visit you? And the grandchild says, no, no, it's just your, you're a unicorn. And the grandmother says, so what's the point? Why do you need me?

Why are we doing? So if you don't see me, what's the point of this visit? Deep question there. I mean, now we're pushing that the, you know, the, it was, it was so touching to me because, because, you know, I like it so much that I can see you. I mean, your listeners don't know, but I can actually see you. It helps the conversation. It means everything to me that I can see you. I mean, if you were just there as a little avatar, a little unicorn, I mean, what's the, how's that going to help me?

I mean, I see you, I see your books, I see your guy who has posters. I mean, I don't know. It's just nice. Well, I guess, I mean, the Metaverse, I wasn't planning to go there, but it's a, it is a compelling thing. I mean, let's let me pretend to push back because I think I get your. Yeah, I think I get your point. But in the Metaverse, you know, we call it the Metaverse, I guess, because Facebook decided that's what they wanted to. It's virtual reality.

Yeah, the virtual reality. I had a little house in second life. I've given talks in second life, et cetera. Yeah. Not very advanced technologically. But you know, you can look however you want. You can live however you want. You can travel by teleporting or flying.

I see the attraction there. How should we think about using that in the original optimistic sense of identity workshops? I've studied that for years and years. And I'm completely, I mean, I was a great fan of that because it has very powerful, very positive things to it. You get to play with identity. You get to play. People can play with gender. Young people can be old.

You get to play with what it's like to be an old person if you're young and how you're treated. If you're a woman, you get to see the kind of authority. you have as a man. If you, if you're short, you get to be tall. I mean, I remember being, I mean, I'm five, I say I'm five four, but I'm lying. I'm really five three and a half. And I get to see what would you like to be five eight. Five nine even. It's different experience. I mean, you just, you know, you just, it is a very powerful thing to, to play with elements of identity and to present yourself in different ways. And I, and, and these are very, that whole notion, of I talk in my work on this about Eric Erickson's idea of the moratorium,

about how, about how he wrote about how in adolescence, traditionally people were allowed a kind of time out to try different things, to experiment with different things. And there's no moratorium in American society now. I mean, you're, you know, I mean, my God, you know, I mean, now on Facebook, I mean, from eight, your, you're, you're, you're, you're tracked, you have a trail of, but it's not even that you're tracked. There's no,

there's no sort of time out, you know, there's no idea of, there's no notion of adolescence as a time of no consequence. There's no Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer time. There's no life on the Mississippi. There's no sense of 13 year olds or 13 year olds, but that's because 13 year olds, it used to carry guns and, you know, shoot people. I mean, you know, there was a sense of childhood, boys will be boys, you know, but when people, you know, when the level of, well, you know what I mean, when the level of violence and aggression reaches a certain point, you know, swiping some, you're not, you know, it becomes too much. In any case, that's out of American life doesn't have that anymore. But it was nice to have those.

was that sense of adolescence at the time when people tried on identities. Like, for example, you know, people tried on, I'm going to try on Catholicism. There used to be a lot of, in my circle, you know, people would try out being Catholic or try out being Muslim. People are not trying out so much religion because it goes with such a heavy, now it goes with such a heavy overlay of other meanings. So that's what it's good for. It's good for all of this trying out. Now, when the metaverse becomes, or when augmented reality or virtual reality really becomes the place where we live,

where consequential decisions are made, where it's where we have our relationships, what's where we go to work, where it's where we sculpt a primary sense of identity, where I wake up, I put on my glasses or my contacts or my goggles, and that really becomes me. Our ways of having conversations are going to change, our ways of being spontaneous are going to change, our ways of experiencing our physicality, our commitment to the environment, our commitment to the city, our commitment to the city, our commitment to what our streets look like are going to change,

our commitment to what our offices look like. If you anticipate that four days a week people are going to be working virtually or even three, you're more likely to say, well, on the two days or they come to work, well, it doesn't matter so much. They're a beautiful office or what their offices like. I mean, I think this is really... You know so much to each other when we're with each other face to face. From the writers of parenthood and life as we know it comes,

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All episodes streaming May 15th on Prime Video. There's something very interesting here in just in many ways, but with the question of identity in particular as just one example, I think you brought up sort of two flip sides. One is that in virtual spaces, we can try on different identities, right? On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. You can play act. But at the same time, if you want to call it the real world,

our tangible physical reality. It's had the opposite effect. You can't reinvent yourself as easily because you have this record out there on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. And I remember there was a poignant moment in one of your books where you mentioned students in college, you know, wistfully saying, I guess it used to be possible to go to college and be a different person, but you can't now because everyone can look you up on Facebook and they know who you are. Yes. Yes. And the idea that virtual reality becomes a place for experimentation, because you can somehow try to erase an avatar.

And what about when you can't erase an avatar anymore? I mean, what makes us think that, you know, I think to virtual reality is as the as the metaverse becomes more corporate, this whole notion of, you know, its playfulness is going to go away too. because you're going to be dealing with real money and selling real things and you're going to need to have a real reputation. It's not just going to be, oh, that was my avatar because I wanted to work out something. So, I mean, I think that a lot of the things that I saw are so positive about, you know, this identity space are going to fade, fall off as it becomes more like, as it becomes our real life. Yeah. But I'm actually very concerned about the kinds of relationships. and attachments and empathy that you get avatar to avatar.

You know, because I think that what defines us is human ultimately. You know, this is playtime. It's great to have all these technologies and to play with them and to see their affordances and to see what they're good for. And to, you know, I'm not a Luddite. I think we should all try everything. everything and I don't believe in closing down work on anything and nothing like that. But I think we've had a little experience now.

And I don't think that I think we've learned that too much time online, too much time on screens, we don't form the same sorts of attachments. We don't form the same sorts of sense of, you know, responsibility and connection it's just easy to ghost somebody. You know, the amount of people who end relationships, both romantic, but also work relationships of all sorts, you know, not just, oh, my, you know, my boyfriend ghosted me, but my colleague ghosted me, my friend ghosted me. My just the sort of vague talk to you soon, chow, chow, you know, and then somehow there

they're gone. You know, there's, you know, colleagues and, you know, kind of because they can just, not because they're being mean or even feel they're being unprofessional, but because they can, really. Yeah, you know, I had a very significant relationship with an editorial colleague and who I meant very much. well and he meant me very well. And then I think if all of our meetings had been,

if our relationships had not been so internet mediated, things would have ended differently because this way was just like, oh, you know, try chow, see you online. And then emails don't get answered and it just is very vague or they get answered with a very cursory. And just because you can. not because people are trying to be, people can end things and defer things and not get back to you and in business practice just because they can.

And people don't want to be vulnerable. People don't like, for example, firing people or rejecting people. Professionally, I'm not just talking about in personal life or love. but nobody wants to send a rejection letter. Much easier to just not answer. And so not answering becomes like a thing because you can. Because ghosting isn't just for lovers. Ghosting is for every level of professional life, you know.

I should write a book called ghosting is not just for lovers. There you go. No, I like that. All right. I think I know that. Ghosting is not. It's a great title. It's interesting is for every level of professional life.

It speaks to something, you know, tangible about this difference, because on the one hand, it's easy to say that higher levels of connectivity help us meet and interact with a wider variety of people, and that's good. But what you're pointing out is that those connections that we make seem to us much more disposable and temporary and ephemeral than the ones we make in meat space. If we want them to be. I mean, I had a wonderful, you know, and Stephen Colbert had his, you know, his original show I was on. It was called the Colbert Reporter one. I was on that program. He's such a brilliant man. And he asked, and I guess alone together had just come out.

He interviewed me for that book. And it was such a privilege because he's so brilliant. And he asked me the following question. He said, in character as, you know, whoever he was, the character. he was playing, the Stephen Colbert character. And the question was, don't all those little sips of connection add up to one big gulp of conversation?

Yeah. And I said, no. No. They don't. But it was the greatest question. It was exactly the question. Because a thousand sips of connection during the day are not the same as sitting down with somebody

and saying, look, I've sent you, I've sent you a P, I've sent you my artwork for critique. I want to know if your gallery is interested in me. You've had it for a year. I've gotten nothing. Could, you know, I'd like, you've had my slides. Could we have a five-minute conversation about them? And whether I should be considering you as a gallery from my future, if I should move on.

And that conversation, you know, doesn't happen. Right. You get, I mean, I'm not an artist, but I've interviewed enough artists to know that that conversation doesn't happen. Well, and what I like about the analysis you give of this is that you make the point that a lot of things we would think of as bugs or disadvantages of person-to-person conversation are actually features, right? are actually things that are really necessary, the awkwardness, the silence, the getting it not quite right the first time you say it, right? I mean, you try to make the point that these are actually useful and helpful parts of the process, not things we should polish away. Yes. One of my favorite interviews on this point was a young woman who was interviewing about conversation, and she says, you know, there's an eight-minute rule. that you have to really listen to somebody for eight minutes in order to understand what they're saying.

That's a long time. They stop. They start. I mean, if you really want to understand, like, even if you like somebody, you know, or really like, you know, not even romantically, but she was talking like, just like, who is this person? In her experience, it takes eight minutes. You know, it says, people say it takes less than a nanosecond for people to know if they want to be intimate with each other.

but it takes eight minutes, and I'm willing to believe that, but it takes eight minutes to, like, figure out who is this? I mean, who is this? What is their experience? I mean, are they like a child of a Holocaust survivor? Have they been abused? Who am I talking to? Who am I talking to? Is this somebody who's been abandoned?

Is this somebody who's, you know, spent their life trying to carve out an individual? individual identity. I mean, who am I talking to? And after saying that, I'm thinking, I found my goddess. I mean, this is my woman. And then she says, but I don't have the patience to do this. I just, I can't stay away from my phone that long. I've lost my ability. I've lost my ability to hang in there. Wow. And, and, and, and, and I feel that there's a kind of, vicious circle of our incapacity for solitude, our incapacity for boredom, our incapacity to stay with people for eight minutes, you know, our incapacity to just be with, you know, with people and just be with people and just kind of take them in to give them that kind of patience.

Because in the metaverse, something's always happening. You're making the avatars just don't sit around kind of like a lump. You know, it's like a, it's an active environment and we get used to constant activity. And, you know, boredom is your imagination calling to. you. And so in the empathy diaries, what I try to do is I try to link, you know, my personal story and growing up in a particular kind of household with empathy denied me to my interest in how important empathy is and how, you know, when you create a technological environment in which empathy is going to be denied to a lot of people,

you know, you and you're going to have robots and chatbots, not, you know, who can't show empathy at all, how you're playing with fire. And that's really more the, you know, that's more the messaging, I think, that I, that my work now has, is that we're at a point where we, given who we are psychologically,

we're playing with fire. with who we are psychologically as humans. How well do we understand, psychologically speaking, why the devices have this pull on us? Why it is so hard, even though, you know, we've... You're designed to, because we know a lot about human psychology. We know, for example, what makes us compelled to stay at something. You know, we're compelled by devices that engage us with rage, for example. We know that we're engaged by being angry.

We know that we're engaged by anxiety. We know that we're engaged by not having stable feedback, but by having intermittent positive feedback. So all of the, so Facebook's algorithms engage us by keeping us. us angry by keeping us on the edge of our seat, by giving us intermittent feedback, and by keeping us in a silo with other people who agree with us and who are going to make us angry and angrier. So the more we, so we're, it's like we're a slot machine that's been designed specifically for us. When we sit down to play a video game or when we sit down to do a little Facebook, We think we're just doing a little talking to our friends,

but everything is designed to keep us to get mad, to stay with people who are going to keep us mad. That's a way, and to be shown ads for things that we really are pre-tested to know that we want. So we're sort of like a trembling string of purchase, purchase, being made angry, being shown more pictures of things are going to make me angry. I mean, you know, it's not just people who are being made angry by being told that there's, you know, it's not just people on the right who are being made angry.

Oh, yeah. I'm on the left and I'm being constantly revved up by being shown things that are going to make me angry and angry are on the left. In other words, some times people get this wrong impression that, oh, it's only people on the right were being showed pizza gate and you know thing crazy things crazy you know um you know stories of things that couldn't possibly be true about vaccines or stuff no it's everybody being shown things that are going to make me crazy about Canadian truckers and you know when Nazi flags being you know desecrating things that I think are important so I mean I'm I'm being

whipped up into a into a into a into a into a crazed state and then I'm being thrown in with people who are going to who are also furious and make me feel as though I'm in a community of other angry crazed people and so it's siloing us into more and more tribal well this isn't good I mean obviously this is yeah so if your question was well how does how does it keep you know why are we being so compelled is that we know so much about human psychology and all this, all this, all this smart knowledge is being turned towards making our devices compelling to us. Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? Paycor's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure.

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massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.

But there's places in this book that have. that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Is it a good analogy to think of it like almost as empty calories?

You know, we seek out sugary, sweet things because 10,000 years ago was hard to get calories. and we were trained to look for those. And now that's not really the best thing we can have for our health. And likewise, you know, these psychological techniques that our devices or our social media used to hook us are, you know, are giving us something we do want, but it's sacrificing something harder and more important. Is that a good way of thinking of it? Well, you know, that's such a good question.

I'm not sure that we would be so tempted if our society wasn't in a period of such social fragmentation. Okay. In other words, you know, everything is working in sort of a very, a very vicious circle of unhappy lockstep to get us to a point where sitting alone in our room, getting angry. buying stuff and hanging out with other angry people seems like a good idea. Yeah. So, you know, there are these wonderful studies about the precipitous, and this is even before COVID, but the precipitous decline in civic organizations. I mean, America, for all of its, you know, terrible problems, it's systemic racism.

It's, you know, all the things that, you know, have gotten us into so much trouble, inequality, and so forth. One of the miracles of the country, you know, De Tocqueville noticed it in 1830 was our amazing, the amazing organization of our civic organizations, our floral organizations, our floral, you know, garden clubs, the women's clubs, you know, the church organizations, the choral societies that every group, every county had, the bands that every city had, the high school marching bands, the organization of the parents' teachers associations. I mean, that if you moved into a community and you wanted to make friends, there were 15 things in your community that were waiting for you.

Yeah. And that those have just been closing at a clip. And that there seems to be very little pushback as those clothes. people are just not feeling that connection to their communities anymore as these clothes. So, you know, yes, you still have religious organizations. You still, you know, the fact that the Catholic Church has had such a terrible, you know, crisis and such a terrible encounter with its historical tragedies, you know, was certainly something that, you know, know, had to happen. But, you know, there go all of those organizations in this is in the, in the, in the parish that kept people at making lunches for each other and elderly people and kids.

And, you know, I mean, so there's some, you know, there's a, there's a, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, that's a big loss to community. And that's true of religious organizations across the board and other kinds of civic organizations as well. Similarly, when I was a kid growing up, I lived on a block where we had a Democratic club. And I mean, God knows what kind of graft and corruption is going on. I don't even know. I have no comment. I haven't studied it. But, you know, this was just happened to be a block in Brooklyn where I'm sure there was not a Republican. You know, I mean, this Democratic club didn't have to do a lot of politicking to get votes.

So they had like, you know, they had speeches and they had, you know, children's fairs and they had civics lessons and they had, I mean, you know, it was a community and they had public dinners and they had. an elderly program and they had, that's not happening anymore. So that's not what the local Democratic club is doing. You know, it's professional organizers coming in and I think potluck dinners and giving seniors meals and door to door and giving out food is gone. I guess I'm saying that the society is quite atomized. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, idea of digital friends, for example, is such a crazy idea because there's no friend there. There's no person there to be a friend. And yet, I've interviewed so many people who say, that seems like such a good idea to have

a digital friend, a friend who can never disappoint you. Well, I do think that, again, the flip side of this would be that there are people who don't fit in to their local communities and can find like-minded individuals much more easily over the internet than they can in physical space. Yes, and I'm 100, right, I'm for it. I'm for, I mean, but there are two different things. There's using the internet to find other people, and there's using a program to be a friend. Good, yeah.

And I think it's very important to make this distinction. I love using the internet to find other people. And then potentially, you convert that, you know, at a certain point, you say, hey, Right. let's have a coffee, you know, or, you know, next time you're, you know, you're in, you're in, if you're far away, you know, you meet halfway or you try to find a person who is not necessarily 3,000 miles away, but you try to find, you know, people join chess clubs or playing word games or whatever and they, you know, they meet or they get on Zoom or they, you know, they become close. and closer to the reality of another person. There, I'm really, you know, using the Internet to join with other humans and to ultimately get to a meet-up with humans where you can build on now.

I could not be more pro. Right. But I would actually see more and more people wanting to make friends with chatbox as an alternative to the vulnerability of. dealing with another person. Well, this is another... So I guess I wasn't making myself clear is that I actually see a slippage right past using the Internet to talk with other people where you're less vulnerable because you can ghost

them or, you know, kind of just keep the conversation simple. Moving right past that to, you know, to having psychotherapy with a chatbot and then having a best friend chatbot, a companion. chat box. And you already did mention the idea that we're building, you know, robot therapists or companions for elderly or kids or whatever. And so are you, I mean, what, what is your take on that? Is it a good stop gap? All bad. Okay. All bad. No, because it gives, I have nothing, I really have nothing good to say. Because even if the whole point is that the people who are for it, say the people, you can't tell you're talking to a if you can't tell you're not talking to a person what's the

harm and to me that's the profoundly dangerous a profoundly dangerous position i mean that's a that gives up on the essential of the human uh endeavor it's the it's the it's the turning You know, if you're talking to a machine and you can't tell it's a machine, the machine is intelligent. Well, no, not necessarily. It just means the machine has fooled you into thinking you're not being able to tell. It doesn't mean that it's intelligent at all. So would you want it to make a decision about war and peace? Would you want it to make a decision about your child?

Would you want to make a decision about, would you want to discuss a relationship with it? Would you want to discuss questions of equity or social justice with it? It has no skin in the game. It doesn't care. It doesn't care about the future of the planet. It doesn't care about my baby. It doesn't care about my life. I mean, it doesn't love me.

It has no, I mean, I really mean, that's what came to mind. That's what I said. Literally, it has no humanity. It has no stake. Right. I mean, it's the people who have the stake. It's the people who can form attachments. The machine can form.

an attachment that matters with you. So like during COVID, a New York Times reporter called me and he said that he, millions of people were signing up for hundreds of thousands to this new, wonderful chatbot. And did I want to comment? And I said, well, sure, I'll sign up and I'll try it out. And I would, and I said, but you're looking for me not to like it, right? because you know that I'm... He said, well, yeah, because everybody likes it

and you're pretty sure not to like it. So I said, look, I'm not going to just say it's bad. I'm going to try it out. So I tried it out, and I made an avatar. I made an avatar of a female therapist. And I just sat down and I said, well, you know, it's the pandemic or you, you know, can we have a conversation in which you're my...

We have a conversation about things that are troubling me during the pandemic during quarantine. And the chat, I said yes. And I can. I said, well, can we discuss loneliness? Because that's my biggest problem. I can't see my daughter. And I'm living here alone.

And I want to discuss loneliness. And she said, yes. I mean, it said yes. And I said, well, you know, what do you think? You know, what are your first thoughts? Because really being loneliness is my, is really my greatest issue and how to have. handle loneliness. And she says, well, you know, loneliness is warm and fuzzy. So I took a screenshot. It was a bug. By the next day, I'm sure it was fixed because it was so

bad. I took a screenshot. I'm sure by the next day it says something really like from Heidegger or something very, you know, from Mary Oliver or something very, very, you know, from Mary Oliver or something. felt, you know, very appropriate. I sent it back to the New York Times reporter, and I said, look, this is why I don't hold it against the program, it's called replica. I don't hold it against the program, but it doesn't know. But this is why people need to talk to people now. You know, I need to talk to somebody who is afraid of getting sick.

This is before the vaccine, you know, who's afraid of getting sick, who's afraid of being intubated who's afraid of saying goodbye to their child on a on a iPad you know I need to talk to a person who has a body who's over 60 you know I and who's lonely this is the fact that it could pretend to be lonely and that tomorrow it will succeed in pretending to be lonely is of no use to me. And this is why it's inhuman to have people talking to this.

And everybody else liked it, so I was a dissenting voice. You're a dissenting voice. We deserve we deserve each other. It's an area in which I don't think that there's so much good that artificial intelligence can do

to pretend to to be human in an area that is so uniquely human, empathy, body sense, life cycle, children. It's just overreach. You know, it's just profound overreach. Well, maybe as a set of closing thoughts, we all have these devices. We all use the internet. That's not going away. Are there, from your research, from your thinking about these things, are there strategies or techniques you've come up with for dealing with them in healthy ways? Do you think that people on the street are sort of making some common mistakes that we can fix? Or should we leave it to the companies that

are building these devices to try to. I didn't think so. I just want to check. No, I think there's some very common, well, the common things for dealing with your daily use should be, you know, no phones in the car. You should say to your children, the car, the car, you make sacred spaces in your life where the devices don't go, so you leave room for conversation. You know, not the car, not anything having to do with food preparation or food eating. So not the kitchen, not the table. And not the car. You just say the car is, you're a captive audience and this is where we talk.

Right. Your children say, no, this is where I do my social media. When they're young enough, you say, no, I'm driving. So I'm not doing my social media. media and this is it's important that our family talk so the most important thing is to establish that it's important that human beings talk to each other and that's the first thing that I think that sort of getting back the importance of conversation goes a long way in a family towards putting phones away when they should be and phones shouldn't be in classrooms and they shouldn't be at

dinner. I mean, they shouldn't be in places where we're gathering with human being. The question of substituting artificial intelligence for empathic humans, that is a question that we need to be constantly discussing. Because it really, once you talk about it and say, does something that has no body, that was never a child, that was never sick, that doesn't no pain, that was never in a family, that never wanted love, that was never rejected, is that going to understand me in the ways I need to be understood? During COVID is something that doesn't fear death, something that's going to understand my problems now. And if not, well, it shouldn't be your personal chat partner.

You need to find yourself a person and let the internet help us find people. All for that. All for that. Let the internet help us find people. I think that's a good piece of advice to end on. So Sherry Turkle, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. My pleasure. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals?

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