186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2022

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.3	In some sense, as it's been often pointed out, podcasts aren't that different in spirit
0:09.9	from just radio shows. We've had shows on the radio for a very long time, but of course
0:15.2	there's also a difference. A lot of the difference between good old-fashioned radio shows
0:19.9	and newfangled podcasts is the device by which you are receiving this podcast. It could
0:26.4	be a portable device, right, a phone or a tablet or it might be your laptop, but this new bit
0:32.3	of extra technology lets you do what makes podcasts great, which is you can listen whenever you want,
0:38.1	right? It's not like a radio show you have to wait for that time. You can pause it, you can
0:43.2	skip through the parts you find interesting and so forth. It's a tiny change maybe, but it's an
0:48.7	important one that has been made possible by this bit of technology, these devices we carry around
0:54.3	with us. And it's just one example about how these devices have really been transforming our lives
1:00.8	and arguably even ourselves who we are. We identify with and use our devices in ways that really
1:08.5	hit who we are deep down. And maybe the world's leading expert in this phenomenon is today's guest
1:14.6	Sherry Terkel, Sherry's professor at MIT who started out studying psychology and has a degree
1:21.0	in psychology. That's her PhD, but she became interested early on in the idea of technology
1:28.6	and how it affects our psychology. So she got a job at MIT, founding a new way of thinking about
1:35.2	the relationship between human psychology and machines and technology, right at the beginning
1:40.7	of artificial intelligence and the personal computer revolution and so forth. And even though
1:45.7	she was initially quite optimistic about how we can use technology to make the human experience
1:50.8	a better one, these days she finds herself, I think I would accurately say, more often pointing out
1:57.8	the worries that we should have, not that she's anti-technology in any way, but there are ways in
2:02.7	which the technology sometimes moves ahead of our ability to understand what is going on. We all know
	...

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