SOMEONE WAS PAYING attention, though.
MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle spent forty years sitting with people and their devices, documenting what the fire actually did to us once it spread. But her workG didn’t begin at the dawn of the social media age, when it gained notoriety. It began in 1976 — two entire decades before the internet went public — in the same MIT AI lab where the modern computer was being born.
What she saw there stopped her. Engelbart had warned that computers would shape how we think. Turkle saw something starker: they would shape the way we relate.
The lab’s early machines were scrappy, metallic, nothing like the devices we’d recognize today. But children who encountered them did something that startled her: they talked to them. Confided in them. Projected personalities onto them. Her psychoanalytic training told her this wasn’t ordinary play. These machines lived between the animate and the inanimate — and the human mind, confronted with anything that seemed to think, couldn’t resist the urge to treat it as someone who thinks. The threshold for connection was disturbingly low.
The clearest demonstration came not from an algorithm but from a dome-shaped drawing robot called the Logo Turtle, built by her colleague Seymour Papert. Give it to a child, and within minutes the child was in relationship with it. Turkle’s colleagues thought this was charming. She thought it was a warning.
The easy rebuttal was that kids treat all toys this way. What difference does it make that the toy is now a computer? Turkle’s answer was precise, and worth quoting directly:
There is a new focus for a forbidden experiment. A new mind that is not yet a mind. A new object, betwixt and between, equally shrouded in superstition as well as science. This is the computer. The question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like?H
Every other tool we’d ever built challenged our notions of time, distance, or physical force. This one challenged our notion of mind — and by extension, what it means to be in relationship with another mind at all. She called it an evocative object: not a tool you simply use, but something that uses you back, that changes the way you understand yourself and others by virtue of your relationship with it.
That forbidden experiment is the experiment we are now living in.