The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

Turkle developed her ideas about the social impact of technology through thinking about the liminal, or transitional, moments in technological development. Modern computers are unrecognizable compared to the number-crunching machines of the 19th century, which were so heavy and large that they required rooms to be housed in.

The social need for increasingly advanced information-processing machines has shaped the development of modern digital technologies. In 1936, English computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing created a model of a universal machine constructed to solve algorithms. This was shaped by the urgent need for machines with military calculations and code-cracking capabilities during World War II. Turing invented a field called machine learning, where machines can analyze patterns in data and store programs, an essential aspect of artificial intelligence (AI). Founded as an academic discipline in 1956, AI refers to a set of technologies that enable computers to mimic human intelligence.

Turkle examines the culture of technology. She portrays the evolution of people’s interactions with “intimate machines.” In 1976, Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled the revolutionary Apple I personal computer at MIT, allowing individuals to purchase machines on the mass market for personal use. In The Empathy Diaries, Turkle marks this as a point of departure from machine transparency, as the computer did not require users to understand its mechanism to use and control it.