Word: humanize
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Politicians aren't supposed to like journalists. We tend to be speed bumps in their otherwise smooth road to being thought of as flawless human beings. Most politicians, like Gore, deal with this by treating each article as a new transaction, a bloodless negotiation between professionals that leaves nothing personal behind. Bush, however, treats each story like a new credit or debit in his family ledger. It's all personal, especially since the 1988 presidential campaign, when Junior acted as the loyalty enforcer. The Bushes fed hot dogs and lemonade to the reporters at Kennebunkport, even took a special...
...told aides in his Detroit hotel room last Thursday morning, as he read his political obituaries in the papers, "this is when you find out who your friends are." The polls were so tight it was getting harder to breathe; Republican wise men in Washington were calling for a human sacrifice. But this is the same team that saw Bush through his two races for Governor and helped him dig out from the New Hampshire avalanche. It would be unthinkable for him to abandon them now. In fact, Bush is making his own target list, of all those supposed allies...
...early days of the computer age, while her colleagues were building faster microchips and experimenting with artificial intelligence, M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle was asking what the tech revolution meant for the people caught up in it. In her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, she explored such questions as whether hackers were victims of stunted emotional development. In Life on the Screen, she pondered whether a sexual assault of one player by another in an online game is in any way a "real" rape...
Turkle's early studies of computer life focused on how people's identities were reflected back at them by their computer screens. But as technology has got more interactive, she has become increasingly interested in the bonds people form with robotic dogs, animatronic toys and other machines with human-like qualities. "The relationships are emotional," she says. "A machine that says 'I love you,' that makes eye contact, pushes our evolutionary buttons...
Right now Turkle is especially intrigued by the complex interactions children have with Furbies, the fuzzy high-tech toys that speak (in "Furbish"), learn words that are spoken to it and respond to being held. Is "Furby love" different from "human love," she wants to know--and how? The hardware Turkle cares about is humanity's own hard drive. "The question for me isn't what the computer does," she says, "but what the computer does...