About “Cyberintimacies”
Sherry Turkle, a leading scholar in the study of human psychology, is the distinguished lecturer of the 2007 Koehn Colloquium, a program of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Professor Turkle has applied her skill to the inquiry of human interaction with technologies and the changing perceptions of human-machine relationships. Recent years have seen the development of computational entities – Turkle calls them relational artifacts – some of them are software agents and some of them are robots – that present themselves as having states of mind that are affected by their interactions with human beings. These are objects designed to impress not so much through their “smarts” as through their sociability, their capacity to draw people into cyberintimacy.
This presentation comments on their emerging role in our psychological, spiritual and moral lives. They are poised to be the new “uncanny” in the culture of computing – something known of old and long familiar – yet become strangely unfamiliar. As uncanny objects, they are evocative. They compel us to ask such questions as, “What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with machines?” And more generally, “What is a relationship?”
Download/Stream Audio and Watch the Video at:
http://aaa.uoregon.edu/podcast/index.cfm?mode=koehn&id=39