Computers, as marginal objects on the boundary between the physical and the psychological, force thinking about matter, life, and mind. Children use them to build theories about the animate and the inanimate and to develop their ideas about thought itself (Turkle 1984, p31).
One of my great allies at MIT, from my earliest days, was Professor Joseph Weizenbaum , an early critic of instrumental reasoning and where it led, an early critic of where Artificial Intelligence unexamined in its premises could lead us. I write about our relationship in my memoir, The Empathy Diaries. He felt betrayed when I married an AI scientist. He thought it would influence my thinking, assuming that my interest in studying children and the Logo language, was not born of intellectual curiosity but due to my love for Seymour Papert. He was wrong. I was both in love with Seymour and in love with the question: “How does programming change the way we think?”