`Author:` Sherry Turkle ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes [The Guardian Review](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/30/alone-together-sherry-turkle-review) - humanity is nearing a "robotic moment". We already filter companionship through machines; the next stage, she says, is to accept machines as companions. Soon, robots will be employed in "caring" roles, entertaining children or nursing the elderly, filling gaps in the social fabric left where the threads of community have frayed. - can humanity transform the way it communicates without altering, at some level, what it means to be human? - The average American teenager sends thousands of text messages every month, and spends hours each day on Instant Messenger, MySpace and Facebook. (Email, Turkle reports, is considered old-fashioned by most under-25s.) None of these things existed a generation ago. Adults are matching the pace of digitisation set by their children, eking out proxy lives on blogs, in multi-player games and chatrooms. Millions of us appear to find simulations of life more alluring than life. We are training ourselves to fear a world unmediated by computers. - Turkle is not a luddite, nor is Alone Together a salvo in some analogue counter-reformation. But it does add to a growing body of cyber-sceptic literature: recent examples include Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, warning that our cognitive faculties decay as we skim distractedly from one webpage to another, and Evgeny Morozov's TheNet Delusion, which rebuts fashionable notions of the web as a tool for advancing democracy. These are correctives to what Turkle calls the "heroic narrative" of the internet – the effusions of digital evangelists who confuse technological advance with human progress. - In Turkle's observations, the difference between playing with a doll and playing with a robot is the difference between pretence and [[belief]]. Even when a replica behaves implausibly, we compensate, filling the gaps in its repertoire with imagined feelings. Turkle calls this "the Eliza effect", after an early experiment in intelligent software. Students were asked to converse with Eliza, probing its capacity to imitate human chat. Instead of exposing the program's weaknesses, everyone pandered to its strengths. They wanted the computer to be lifelike and manipulated the test to help it succeed. - Western civilisation was probably on a trajectory of atomisation, loneliness and narcissism before the invention of the internet. But that does not invalidate the diagnosis. The robotic moment is not a point in history but a threshold in ethics. It is the decision we make to put our faith in [[technology]] as the antidote to human frailty, when acceptance of frailty is what makes us human. > [!info] > ## Highlights `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`