Sherry Turkle
30 Oct 2021 - 30 Jul 2023
- author of The Empathy Diaries and The Second Self (among others). She's had a long career at MIT as a professor in science and technology studies (STS) and a long-time student of the culture and practices surrounding technology. As an ethnographer of those cultures she has a role as something of a professional outsider and a reputation as a "killjoy" (her term, from the Epilog of The Empathy Diaries); the Skyler White to the bad-boy Heisenbergs of high technology.
- I think I should have paid her work more attention when I was doing my dissertation; she was one of the few people around thinking deeply about questions I was interested in. The Second Self had a whole chapter on how children apply animistic frames to computers. Which I did cite at least:
- Programming with Agents - 3.3 Animacy and Computation
Computers, as marginal objects on the boundary between the physical and the psychological, force thinking about matter, life, and mind. Children use them to build theories about the animate and the inanimate and to develop their ideas about thought itself (Turkle 1984, p31).
- From https://www.facebook.com/sherry.turkle/posts/10161030936598626
One of my great allies at MIT, from my earliest days, was Professor Joseph Weizenbaum , an early critic of instrumental reasoning and where it led, an early critic of where Artificial Intelligence unexamined in its premises could lead us. I write about our relationship in my memoir, The Empathy Diaries. He felt betrayed when I married an AI scientist. He thought it would influence my thinking, assuming that my interest in studying children and the Logo language, was not born of intellectual curiosity but due to my love for Seymour Papert. He was wrong. I was both in love with Seymour and in love with the question: “How does programming change the way we think?”