This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alda, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

The way the book brings together my life and my work is exactly on this theme.

It's about why we can't treat people as objects and why objects are different than people.

I try to describe the atmosphere that I work in at MIT, which is really to see people

and objects as interchangeable and in my view in inappropriate moments.

That Sherry Terkel, whose life work has been to challenge the technologists she works

among, to think hard about the way their inventions can threaten empathy.

Her challenge began with a book she wrote over 25 years ago called The Second Self.

She has a new book now, The Empathy Diaries of Memoir.

In it, she movingly and candidly weaves together events in her own life with the dawning understanding

of the way technology can weaken human connections.

Sherry, this is going to be so great because you know how fascinated I am with empathy.

Yes.

And your book is The Empathy Diaries, and it's such a clever and smart way to combine

empathy from your own life and empathy that you've studied the threat to empathy that

you've studied in our culture now.

So we go from you and your personal life to all of us in our cultural life in one book

and it's so poignant.

Thank you.

So what I love is how honest you are and that comes to a great extent, I guess, out of your

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