No doomsday stuff here either, just a provocative question: is technology already “thinking” for us? In other words, how many decisions that get made every day are done not by active intention, but by passive reaction to an algorithm?

One of the crazy things is that technology appears to be affecting the way we interact. One of Sherry Turkle’s contentions in Reclaiming Conversation is that talking face-to-face, making eye contact and listening to vocal inflections is the primary way we develop empathy, and apparently without this practice we get rusty. I believe she mentions a study of kids at a summer camp, after one week without a phone their ability to identify the emotion on someone’s face in a photograph improved dramatically.