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Music For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.

If you're listening to this, you probably have a phone somewhere nearby. Think about that device for a second and ask yourself a question. Does it expand your horizons,

or does it contract them? For me, the answer is probably like a little bit of the

former that I use to justify way too much of the latter. Fredding over the relationship you have

with your phone is pretty common these days, but our little pocket computers are merely the

brightest stars in the constellation of technological innovations that surround us. After all,

humanity has been shaped by our relationship to tools since our ancestors first started breaking

stuff open with rocks. Vanessa Chang is the director of programs at Leonardo, the International

Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.

Her book is called The Body Digital, a brief history of humans and machines from cuckoo clocks to

chat GPT.

In it, she takes readers on a tour of our species' complex history with technology.

Vanessa recently sat down to chat about her work with Siam

Associate Books Editor Bree Kane. Here's their conversation. I wanted to start on something

that you say fairly early on in the book, which is something that we're all wrong about.

...