Free Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

that don’t let in dissenting voices.
    Second, when politics goes online, people begin to talk about political action in terms of things they can do online. They are drawn to the idea that social change can happen by giving a “thumbs-up” or by subscribing to a group. The slow, hard work of politics—study, analysis, listening, trying to convince someone with a different point of view—these can get lost. The Internet is a good start, a place to bring people together. But politics continues in conversation and in relationships developed over time. I have said that technology gives us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Now I worry that it can also give us the illusion of progress without the demands of action.
    Third, digital communication makes surveillance easier. The corporations that provide us with the means to talk on the net (to text, email, and chat) take our online activity as data. They declare ownership of it and use it, usually to better sell things to us. And we now know that our government routinely makes a copy of our communications as well. The boundaries have blurred between private communication and routine surveillance, between private communication and its repackaging as a commodity. So, in addition to the question
What is intimacy without privacy?
I consider another:
What is democracy without privacy?
The Fourth Chair
    A nd I think of a “fourth chair.” I’ve said that when conversation got expansive, Thoreau took his guests into nature. I think of this as his fourth chair, his most philosophical one. These days, the way things have gotten philosophical causes us to confront how we have used technology to create a second nature, an artificial nature. For so long we have assumed that the conversations that matter are the conversations we have with other people. In recent years, this idea has been challenged by computer programs that seduce us not by their smarts but by their sociability. I explore proposals for new, more intimate conversations with “socially” competent machines—a development with the potential to change human nature itself. For me, our
fourth-chair conversations
are ones that Thoreau could not have envisaged: We are tempted to talk not only through machines but to them, with them.
    At first, we met Siri, a digital companion always ready to engage. But that was just the beginning. As I write these words, the media is full of stories about the launch of the first “home robots” who are there to be always-available “best friendly companions” by acting as though they understand what you are saying when they exchange pleasantries through the magic of simulated feelings . Have we forgotten what conversation is? What friendship is? Is talking to machines companionship or abandonment?
    We lose our words.
Intelligence
once meant more than what any artificial intelligence does. It used to include sensibility, sensitivity, awareness, discernment, reason, acumen, and wit. And yet we readily call machines intelligent now.
Affective
is another word that once meant a lot more than what any machine can deliver. Yet we have become used to describing machines that portray emotional states or can sense our emotional states as exemplars of “affective computing .” These new meanings become our new normal, and we forget other meanings. We have to struggle to recapture lost language, lost meanings, and perhaps, in time, lost experiences.
    At one conference I attended, the robots were called “caring machines,” and when I objected, I was told we were using this word not because the robots care but because they will take care of us. Caring is a behavior. It is a function, not a feeling . The conference participants seemed puzzled: Why did I care so much about semantics? What’s wrong with me?
    It is natural for words to change their meaning over time and with new