“Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world,” writes Sherry Turkle in her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. “The new machine that stands behind the flashing digital signal, unlike the clock, the telescope, or the train, is a machine that “thinks.” It challenges our notions not only of time and distance, but of mind.”

Because of my recent encounter with the incredible capabilities of AI, a science fiction turned everyday reality, I just couldn’t pass on the opportunity to read Sherry Turkle’s magnum opus on the subject of our intimate relationship with our gadgets, and how they alter the matrix our life. In the chapter titled “The Human Spirit in a Computer Culture,” Turkle notes that beyond our understanding of a computer as an analytical engine, lies a deeper level of its second nature as an evocative object, an object that fascinates, disturbs equanimity, and precipitates thought. Sherry Turkle writes:

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.

Stepping back and realizing that nowadays it’s practically impossible to go anywhere without a “mini-computer” called smartphone, one can’t help but wonder how dependent we’ve become on our devices, how much of our “self” we see in them. But computers are more than just screens onto which we project our personality. They have become a part of how a new generation is growing up. For adults and children who play computer games, who use the computer to manipulate words, information, and visual images, computers enter into the development of personality, identity, and even sexuality. Sherry Turkle writes:

Terrifed of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.

Experts have long argued, Turkle notes, whether or not computers will evolve into true “artificial intelligences,” themselves capable of self-sufficient, humanlike thought. But regardless of where the technology evolution might lead us in the future, in this present moment, computers already affect how we think and the way we construct the concepts of animate and inanimate, conscious and not conscious. Sherry Turkle writes:

Because they stand on the line between mind and not-mind, between life and not-life, computers excite reflection about the nature of mind and the nature of life. They provoke us to think about who we are. They challenge our ideas about what it is to be human, to think and feel. They present us with more than a challenge. They present us with an affront, because they hold up a new mirror in which mind is reflected as machine.

Indeed, as soon as we consider the very probable, almost palpable reality of true artificial intelligence, we face questions about what makes us “us.” Is there something in the depth of our being that AI can’t emulate, no matter how sophisticated it might be? Can intelligence without a living body ever really understand what it is to be human? Sherry Turkle writes:

No matter what a computer can do, human thought is something else. … We are born, we are nurtured by parents, we grow, we develop sexually, we become parents in our turn, we die. This cycle is what gives meaning to our lives. It brings us the knowledge that comes from understanding loss — from knowing that those we love will die and so will we. A being that is not born of a mother, that does not feel the vulnerability of childhood, a being that does not know sexuality or anticipate death, this being is alien. We may be machines, but it is our mortality that impels us to search for transcendence — in religion, history, art, the relationships in which we hope to live on.

Complement these insightful passages from The Second Self, a sobering read for our computer-addicted generation, with the writer, poet, and environmentalist Wendell Berry’s radical manifesto on why he won’t buy a computer, an ideal to which none of us can ever aspire.

“I selected the above title, quite obviously, for its shock value,” half-jokingly half-seriously writes Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) in his book Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, a vibrant collection of essays celebrating manifold ways we can harness the power of our imagination. “Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?”

Whether joking or serious, Ray Bradbury knows a thing or two about the craft of channeling our thoughts into the void of a blank piece of paper, and in the titular chapter of his book, he invites us to jump into the deep well of his literary knowledge about the value of perseverance, creativity, and the ability to fully express ourselves.

The three key words to unleashing our imaginative genius, Bradbury tells us, are WORK, RELAXATION, and DON’T THINK! “Impossible!” we say. “How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck?” Starting with work, Ray Bradbury writes:

Do you plan some sort of schedule for yourself starting as soon as you put down this article? Something like this. One thousand or two thousand words every day for the next twenty years. … You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. … Michelangelo’s, da Vinci’s, Tintoretto’s billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative…. A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count — with a living creature under his knife. An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. …

Work then, hard work, prepares the way for the first stages of relaxation, when one begins to approach what Orwell might call Not Think! As in learning to typewrite, a day comes when the single letters a-s-d-f and j-k-l-; give way to a flow of words.

As we enter the steady flow of our everyday writing routine, we should not look down or look back but keep on moving. We are in the midst of an unfolding process, one that fails only if we give up. Ray Bradbury writes:

There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process. … Tenseness results from not knowing or giving up trying to know. Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of dynamic relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do. The surgeon does not tell his scalpel what to do. Nor does the athlete advise his body. Suddenly, a natural rhythm is achieved. The body thinks for itself.

So again the three signs. Put them together any way you wish. WORK RELAXATION DON’T THINK. Once separated out. Now, all three together in a process. For if one works, one finally relaxes and stops thinking. True creation occurs then and only then.

Zen in the Art of Writing, a motivating jolt of energy for our creative lives, remains a treasure trove from cover to cover. Complement this particular portion with another deeply creative endeavor, that of spiritual journaling as taught by Christina Baldwin.

“The highest expression of empathy is accepting and nonjudgmental,” writes humanist psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) in his book A Way of Being. “It is impossible to be accurately perceptive of another’s inner world if you have formed an evaluative opinion of that person.”

One of the founders of the person-centered approach in psychology and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Carl Rogers dedicated his whole life to changing the rigid and impersonal field of psychology which at the time treated people as objects of study rather than human beings. He made it his life’s mission to make it vital for therapists to strip self-protective professional masks and roles, to relate genuinely to patients, and to use empathy to enter their private worlds. He believed that “what is true in a relationship between therapist and client may well be true for a marriage, a family, a school, an administration, a relationship between cultures and countries.” In this eloquent and lucid passage on empathy, we can see his far-reaching vision and a full depth of his insight into the heart of human connection.

EMPATHY AS A WAY OF BEING
by Carl Rogers

An empathic way of being with another person … means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments; it means sensing meanings of which he or she is scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover totally unconscious feelings, since this would be too threatening. It includes communicating your sensings of the person’s world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which he or she is fearful. It means frequently checking with the person as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive.

You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world. By pointing to the possible meanings in the flow of another person’s experiencing, you help the other to focus on this useful type of referent, to experience the meanings more fully, and to move forward in the experiencing. To be with another in this way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another’s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish. Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong — yet also a subtle and gentle — way of being.

Complement this particular portion of A Way of Being, a luminous guide into the mind of one of the most humane psychologists of the twentieth century, with another powerful way of connecting with others through the power of on-the-spot compassion practice taught by an American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.

“Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self,” wrote Sherry Turkle while reflecting on how computers affect our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. “And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.”

When the tragic events of 2020 forced everyone around the world to stay home, our computers were the only safe window to the outside world, our ways of connecting to friends, family, and loved ones. And even though we’re now in the process of slow recovery and human contact is not limited to digital screens and video calls, the issue of our excessive use of technology is not going away but might be more pressing than ever before. We should always re-examine our increasing reliance on computers and gadgets that have become an indispensable part of everyday life.

Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934), an American writer, poet, farmer, and devoted nature conservationist, offers us a refreshing view on this issue in his 1987 essay titled Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, which still resonates with the same force as it did three decades ago. It offers us a perspective that challenges technological fundamentalism so prevalent in our digital age.

At the beginning of his essay, Wendell Berry writes that several people had told him he could greatly improve things by buying a computer. But for him, it’s out of the question, and he gives several reasons for why it is so. The first one is that using a computer is the same as being dependent on strip-mined coal and energy corporations that are involved in the active destruction of nature. Berry writes:

I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

Another reason, Wendell Berry points out, is that he doesn’t believe that computer, as opposed to pen and paper, can make anyone’s writing better:

When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

If a computer were to replace pen and paper, then it would have to adhere to a different set of innovation standards. Wendell Berry writes:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, an illuminating read for our technology-obsessed generation, sparked much controversy at the time of its publishing and includes five letters of criticism and Berry’s ingenious responses to those letters. Also included is his follow-up essay expanding on many of his original points titled Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.