Alone Together

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, 305 pages

In 1950, computer pioneer Alan Turing famously proposed a test to identify artificial intelligence - when a human can't tell a machine from another human, artificial intelligence has been attained.  Sherry Turkle's book shows two sides of progress towards this goal - increasingly manlike machines and increasingly mechanical men.  On the one hand, robot pets and toys are better and better at feigning emotions, while online bots are better and better at simulating communication.  On the other hand, new communications technologies, while greatly increasing opportunities for connection, have greatly reduced the depth of those connections.

Turkle, a professor at MIT, is certainly no Luddite.  She is, however, keenly aware of how technologies contain their own invisible ideologies, and how a culture of innovation is often blind to unintended consequences.  Much of the book is composed of material culled from years of research on the interactions between humans - especially children - and machines.  If her vision extends to a possible dystopia similar to Asimov's Solaria, where each person is isolated from every other by a cocoon of predictable, reliable robotics, it also encompasses the possibility that we might learn to control our technology instead of being controlled by it.