Byting Back

By J.D. Reed

THE SECOND SELF: COMPUTERS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT by Sherry Turkle Simon & Schuster; 362 pages; $17.95

When a talking electronic game chides a child of six for a wrong answer, she talks back to it. "My God," says her mother, "she treats that thing like a person. Do you suppose she thinks that people are machines?" She may indeed, according to Author Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. sociologist and psychologist. And as this study makes clear, that little girl is part of a cultural upheaval.

Bookstore shelves sag under the weight of volumes quantifying what computers will do for our math, medicine and management, but The Second Self explores a broader futurescape. Like the telescope, which forced man to accept a less exalted position in creation, says Turkle, the computer is challenging the manner in which we think about our ourselves. "The question," she writes, "is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like?"

To find out, Turkle became the Margaret Mead of silicon. During six years of study, she interviewed more than 400 computer users (about half of them children), lived in the subculture of virtuoso programmers, called hackers, asked electronic questions on home-user telephone networks and explored the wizardry of M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In a series of vivid vignettes, she reports the various ways the computer "brings philosophy into everyday life."

Because hand-held electronic games are "smart" and talk back, children grant them a new existence, somewhere between the living and the inanimate. Alice, 5, thinks batteries are "like their food."

Robert, 8, believes they are intelligent because they cheat. What then, Turkle asked, is special about people if it is not thinking? Feelings, children concluded.

Although Turkle suggests that computers have positive qualities--they teach math to the unscientific, for instance--addiction to them is a way to avoid human emotion. Jarish, 12, is a loner who relentlessly plays video games because, unlike people, they obey strict rules. "You walk out of the arcade," he says, "and it's ... nothing that you can control." Arthur, 34, bought a computer to speed up his architectural business, but spends hours at the console, "poking" and "peeking" into programs, an experience he likens to a sexual kick. Says he: "Sometimes I feel guilty when I do it for too long."

Many home-computer owners believed they had bought a tool to simplify their lives. Others discovered that programming could become an end in itself.

Hackers, says Turkle, are social misfits who construct digital Utopias, hang out in pancake houses and admire the recursive art of M.C. Escher. At M.I.T their nerdy abdication from society is "sport death"--programming for up to 30 hours without sleep before "crashing." Alex, a dedicated hacker, describes it as feeling "totally telepathic with the computer."

Artificial-intelligence theorists play more potent games. Teaching machines to play chess or ask questions like a psychotherapist's is only the beginning.

M.I.T.'s Edward Fredkin, for instance, believes not only that machines will eventually think better than the best human minds but that "we'll be enormously happier once our niche has limits to it." What of people? David, 12: "They will be the ones who will love each other, have families and... go to church."

Like a proper social scientist, Turkle seems to pass no judgment on the mind-machine debate she so cogently portrays.

But she is, after all, human, and hence can feel awe at the computer's potential.

It is becoming, she says, "what sex was to the Victorians--threat and obsession, taboo and fascination."No printout could convey a clearer or more readable forecast. --By J.D. Reed