Member-only story
Why Machines Will Never Feel Empathy: A Q&A With MIT’s Sherry Turkle
The pathbreaking MIT professor on her new memoir, and the past, present, and future of our efforts to make technology feel human
In the fall of 1976, Sherry Turkle was recruited to the faculty of MIT to join what would soon become the program on Science, Technology, and Society — one of the nation’s first. After having written a book on French psychoanalysis — a “sociology of the sciences of the mind,” as she describes it — Turkle was fascinated with the cultural forces that shift our thought.
So when she encountered computers for the first time, she had one pressing question on her mind: How would these new machines change us?
Turkle has spent the last four decades investigating that question as aggressively and rigorously as anyone alive. She is the founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and the author of the influential books, The Second Self and Alone Together. Turkle has spent her career captivated by the transformative power of online identities and was an early critical voice cautioning that the machines that we had come to see as objects to use would eventually turn us into objects.
