Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

If you’re listening to this, you probably have a phone somewhere nearby. Think about that device and ask yourself a question: Does it expand your horizons, or does it contract them? For me the answer is probably a little bit of the former that I use to justify way too much of the latter.

Fretting over the relationship you have with your phone is pretty common these days, but our little pocket computers are merely the brightest stars in the constellation of technological innovations that surround us. Humanity has been shaped by our relationship to tools since our ancestors first started breaking stuff open with rocks.

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Vanessa Chang is the director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Her book is called The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT. In it, she takes readers on a tour of our species’s complex history with technology.

Vanessa recently chatted about her work with SciAm associate books editor Bri Kane. Here’s their conversation.

Bri Kane: I wanted to start on something that you say fairly early on in the book, which is something that we’re all wrong about. [Laughs.] There’s these assumptions that our technology doesn’t affect us—our corporeal, physical bodies—in this way, and this assumption is incorrect. You say it’s a pretty foundational assumption about technological development but that of course our technologies are affecting our physical bodies.

So I wanted to ask you—I mean, you break this book down into body parts. What is it that is affecting our bodies so much, and what is the body part you personally are most concerned about right now?

Vanessa Chang: This is the kind of foundational claim of my book, right, that even though technologies really want to disappear, or we want them to disappear and not affect our bodies, they’re kind of this ongoing evolution of technologies. And I think I’m worried, but I’m also excited, I think, about some of the changes that are happening with us.

And, you know, perhaps I’ll start with talking about our hands because that’s where the book begins. And I think it’s where people think a lot about where we interface with technologies—think about our smartphones, the way we are kind of constantly interfacing with them.

And I always like to talk about the technology of writing, right, because it’s something that, particularly now, when we’re texting all the time or we’re using voice text and all of that, we don’t really consider handwriting something that’s a technology. But it’s absolutely a fundamental technology. It was transformative.

You know, I’ll talk about our hands but also our minds in kind of really major ways. Did you have to do cursive classes when you were in school? [Laughs.]

Kane: I did. My mother has beautiful penmanship. Unfortunately, I inherited my father’s penmanship. [Laughs.]

Chang: [Laughs.]

Kane: And so some may say it’s legible, but others may disagree there. [Laughs.]

Chang: Yeah, my, my father’s a doctor. He’s absolutely illegible. I can’t read it at all. And my mother, too, has beautiful penmanship. But think about in school learning how to write. At first it feels kind of like drawing because you’re just making shapes—they don’t have meaning. And you have to train your body in particular ways and your hands so that you can make shapes that are legible.

And so it’s not just about getting letters onto a page; it’s about choreography, right, and training your body and your movement and your hands in ways that you can put these letters and these words together. And eventually, that becomes second nature. And you kind of have to be disciplined to do that.

And I think of that as really kind of continuous with all kinds of writing, right? When you’re learning how to type it’s something you have to learn how to do, right? You have to be disciplined. You have to be disciplined by the shape of the keyboard. If you think about it, the QWERTY keyboard is, you know, not the most ergonomic format, but it’s still in our smartphones. Why do we even have it there? Because it’s something that’s trained our bodies and choreographed our movements in such particular ways that, you know, it continues to do so.

So what am I worried about? I’m worried that the ways technologies shape our embodiment in, like, our hands is really generative, right? It’s—it disciplines us. But it also allows us to write. It allows us to communicate with each other. It allows us, in a way, to create words that can persist beyond when we die because you can put something on paper and then it lives. That’s incredible. It allows us to write poetry, to make art.

That kind of discipline now, in the context of the technologies that we’re using, because the technologies are so proprietary, because they’re designed by major companies, we’re kind of getting, you know, choreographed in these repetitive ways and in ways that are very brand-oriented as well. I use an iPhone. My partner has a Samsung. I’m just absolutely useless when I turn his phone on, right?

It is in those moments when I realize how much I’m trained within a particular kind of lexicon of movement and gestures, right, the technology. And I think you can really expand that into thinking about the ways different kinds of technologies now are conscripting and training our bodies in service of, well, maybe it’s hitting that “buy” button another time, right?

Kane: Yeah, I mean, I think you bringing up cursive is really interesting to me. It’s a part of the book that I really stuck on for a moment there because it made me think about how ubiquitous technology is. We don’t see it. Like you’re saying, we don’t think of writing as technology, but it is. We think of the printing press as technology. But there was something before that.

And I thought also, you mention at one point in the book War of the Worlds and The Twilight Zone, which I’m a huge fan of, and you talk about how these reflect a deep cultural fascination with how new communication technologies were warping time and space. And I thought the way that you discussed the microphone as a technology and how the recorded voice of someone really freaked people out—I, I mean, the recording, being able to listen to music so much further away from the musician than just off the stage, was really existential to people, and it immediately brought up these really big questions about authenticity to people, which I thought is interesting because that’s still kind of what we’re dealing with now. I mean, I can get sucked into my iPhone, as you’re saying, and all the sparkly apps on there for hours and not realize it and not realize that my hand is cramping up, even.

But so what were the concerns that people had very early on that your research showed you? Like, what is the technology that was the oldest that seemed to bring up these really big existential questions that we’re still trying to answer?

Chang: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think different moments have triggered different kinds of concerns. I’ve organized the book kind of along a broad trajectory of craft, you know, the kind of primordial engagement of our hands and our bodies with the world and the material world; to clockwork, so early kinds of automation—the cuckoo clock, for example; and then code. And I see that trajectory.

And I think the clockwork era is where a lot of these kinds of anxieties really start to get rehearsed, you know? There are people building kind of proto-robots, like, these automatons, that are mimicking writing, or they’re mimicking music, or they looked like the natural world, like birds, and they’re triggering these feelings. People talk about the “uncanny valley,” right, when they see, like, 3D imagery or AI kind of imagery. But these kind of Renaissance-era automatons were very uncanny as well, right?

And there were these ideas, this kind of excitement, but also this anxiety and this kind of feeling of being unnerved by how close these machines were to life but yet so far away, right? Like, there’s something really, really wrong with them. And tied up in that, the anxiety that it’s not just that they mimicked life, but that they were displacing human activity and human creativity, right?

So, one, there’s automatons and, like, robots that looked like humans, but there are also automated operations. So one of the, one of the early technologies I talk about in the book is the Jacquard loom, which is—it’s a machine that’s attached to a loom to—you know, which people use to weave on. And it’s—kind of uses punch cards to automate designs. And before the Jacquard machine making complicated designs on looms was really complicated. It required a lot of people and a lot of expertise and, you know, a few different people at the loom.

And this automated that, and you can kind of draw a line from that, in part because the model of the Jacquard loom can be traced in the punch cards to early computation—so, too, though, with the displacement of the artisans and the kind of craftspeople who were using the loom at the time. So I think these anxieties and this threat to creativity comes hand in hand and always has been.

Kane: Yeah, I mean, as soon as you mention the Jacquard loom, my brain starts screaming about Ada Lovelace immediately—a patron saint in my house, at least. I mean, her work was really foundational, and there’s a lot of computing that we do now that is just, very simply, built off of her foundation. We really haven’t reinvented the wheel that much since her.

But I wanna ask you about that uncanny valley because that was something that you talked about in the book quite a bit and I thought was really interesting. We, late last year, had a feature article about griefbots and how these AI bots can really help people as they’re grieving in talking to loved ones or just talking through some of their grief. And I have to say, I love that idea. I love someone else being able to experience that in their grief.

But the idea of me having deceased and then becoming a bot to help someone else grieve me, I’m inside the uncanny valley. I’m not having fun. I’m getting really freaked out. Because I like the idea of a hologram—I want to hold Princess Leia in my hand and have her say I’m her only hope, right—but I don’t actually want someone to have a hologram of me. That seems to be the uncanny valley that we still haven’t quite gotten out of with this technology. It’s really fun until it gets really serious.

Chang: Yeah, I mean, I think this notion of the griefbot’s a really interesting one in the context of, like, the product, right, and particularly the way in which AI’s being used to kind of leverage human feeling into products, right, in a way that actually displaces human connection.

Whether it’s, like, a griefbot or erotic AI, there are people out there you could talk to or kind of work through your feelings. But that’s painful, and it’s kind of sometimes hideous, and having a body is wonderful and kind of horrible, and when you see someone who’s been transformed into a hologram, maybe it kind of displaces the kind of pain of dying and the kind of messiness of what a death might have been.

And I see that kind of, of a piece, with erotic AI. You can go out and, you know, find someone to love, but they’ll die and they’ll get old and all of these human things that, you know, are connected to having a body. You know, they’re just inevitable. But a griefbot doesn’t have a body, a hologram doesn’t have a body, and they don’t age, and they don’t die. And so there’s this kind of rhetoric of connection, you know, and this rhetoric that, like, “Oh, well, you don’t have to feel that loss,” or “You, you can work through it.” But what—there is a cost to that, right? And the cost is kind of working through the challenge of, like, actual human connection.

Kane: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a real lure to being understood. One thing that you talk about in the book is your Spotify playlist, right, that “daylist” where Spotify just happens to know exactly the right song for you to listen to on your morning commute. And you’ve never been so understood than the day that Spotify gets it absolutely right, and you’re like, “This is it. This is the song I needed to catch the train.”

And then after reading this book, now whenever this happens I have this wave of, “Oh, no, my 1s and 0s have been—they know me better than I know myself. What’s going on here?” I mean, it’s very exciting, until I start to really think about it, and then I get a little bit worried. And I think that is one of the most interesting problems and questions that we’re still dealing with this technology, that I think your book really is unafraid to kind of swim into those waters and point out how weird it is and how we’re all fish swimming around in it and we’re all wet. [Laughs.]

Chang: Yeah.

Kane: And we just have to know that.

Chang: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m not a Luddite; I love technology. I just, you know, want more people to be engaged in making those technologies so they reflect what matters to us more.

It’s interesting you bring up what I was writing about Spotify ’cause I, I love it, too, you know? The song comes on, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s great. I actually really like that.” It does feel good to be known, and even in my acknowledgments I was like, “Thanks, algorithmic curator. It really helped when I was writing to kinda get on that.” And what was really, I think, striking when I was doing a bit of research—Spotify versus Tidal—and I was getting lost in some Reddit boards, people were like, “You know, Tidal just knows me better,” or “Spotify knows me better.” People seem mostly okay with that, right? They’re okay with being known in that way. But you’re paying a price, and the price is, your listening habits are kind of up for grabs.

And what that can lead to, I think, is homogenization, right? And it’s homogenization for your listening ear, and you get kind of more of the same, perhaps, of what it is you like, and you don’t get challenged. And it could also, depending on how it’s deployed, lead to kind of the homogenization of culture. People think, “All right, well, you know, people like—this many downloads of this kind of song. Well, we can make more of that.” I mean, that’s been happening a long time. There are these, like, hitmakers that all the pop stars work with and these producers. So they kind of already—these are existing tensions there.

I think working with data is, I think, very interesting, and I think there’s a lot—’cause in my day job I work with media artists and people kind of doing art and science work. And there’s people who make data art and who kind of use data in really interesting ways, right? And I think that’s what maybe needs to happen in here. It’s okay to be known, but who is it who’s getting that data, and what are they doing with it, and how is it connecting you to other people? Or maybe it’s not, and if it isn’t, then that’s a choice you have to make and accept.

Kane: One thing you mention in the book is this concept of design justice. And you mention the late Alice Wong’s essay “I Still Have a Voice,” which I think is a beautiful essay, and I highly recommend our listeners to read it. And she discusses the benefits and the serious downsides of text-to-speech, specifically given how Anglocentric a lot of these text-to-speech programs are. So I wanted to ask you about that essay and why you chose to include it and [how] this can inform our larger understanding of how these technologies are benefiting us while also creating different new obstacles for us.

Chang: Yeah, for sure. Disability has a big role to play in my writing. It’s really been thinking about disability and the way in which disabled people and creatives work with technology and show how technology has certain kinds of assumptions had everything to do with, like, informing my own thinking about the assumptions that technologies make about the bodies who use them.

And so, you know, Alice Wong’s essay is not the only disability-related text or example in the book. But I think what her essay really does is kind of show that these technologies—like, text-to-speech has incredible benefit, right? Like, if you can’t speak anymore, for whatever reason, then you can have a voice, if that’s something that you choose. But then there’s a real disjunction between the voice that you might be used to and the voice that you think of as connected to your own body and what’s out there. You know, you call it Anglocentric. She’s like, “Yeah”—I mean, in that essay, she talks about Chinglish and the kinds of culturally attuned terms that she uses with her own family that are really kind of reflective of who she is but also of the kind of social world she’s embedded in.

And so having that kind of gap and showing that failure, I think, is really important, right, in talking about technology ’cause it shows that, like, people who are using technologies, who need them, should be involved in the design for them. That’s what design justice is, right, that design—technologies are designed with assumptions about the abilities of people who use them, the gender of people who use them, the age, the culture, the language, the capacity.

Captioning, for example, is another common technology for people who might be hard of hearing. And there’s real shortcomings with captioning technology for people who are not native speakers or people who grew up deaf and who might have a deaf accent. You know, they’re ironically the ones who might need to use captioning more, but they aren’t represented in it. So it’s not really working for them.

You know, and then design justice, I think, is also thinking culturally. One of the things that really struck me when I was thinking about interfaces and technologies in this book is digitally disadvantaged languages, right?

Kane: Yes, you mentioned that. And yet the QWERTY keyboard does not have Chinese characters. And it can be quite difficult to kind of recreate that phonically using the letters that you have.

I thought that was also a really interesting example, and one that, honestly, just reminded me of my own [Laughs] Anglocentric vision on technology that is like, “Yeah, right, not every language uses these letters. How are they also on the same Internet that I am?” Well, they must have figured something out. They adapted it to themselves instead of the technology adapting to them as a user, which then, exactly as you’re saying, just goes right back to design justice. If they had been a part of the design team, someone would’ve said, “Hey, remember all the Chinese speakers in the world? They may wanna use this one day, too.” [Laughs.]

Chang: Although there was a Chinese typewriter prototype in the middle of the 20th century—actually, it was very recently discovered. It’s now at Stanford.

Kane: Have you seen it?

Chang: I have not. I’ve seen pictures of it.

Kane: Well, I hope you get to go visit soon.

The chapter about design justice really reminded me of Caroline Criado-Perez’s work Invisible Women, and you have a section of the book that kind of touches on the same point, which is that design justice goes all the way down to how our cities are built: How big are the sidewalks, and what are the crosswalks like? And do they fit a stroller? Do they fit a wheelchair? What is the, quote, unquote, “ideal body,” as you say, that this city has been designed for, that this technology has been designed for? Can you talk to me about that, how this design-justice concept goes all the way from our keyboards to the city streets?

Chang: Cities are really interesting insofar as, you know, they’re supposed to reflect and be for people, right? They’re supposed to be for people moving through them. Sometimes they’re, you know, less for people who walk and sometimes they’re more for cars. Cities embody all kinds of choices, right, about who’s going to use, who’s going to use the environment.

So one of my favorite examples is actually of this group called the Rolling Quads in Berkeley in the ’70s. And they were a group of wheelchair users in Berkeley who protested and kind of created their own curb cuts. So curb cuts are, if you’re not familiar, these little tiny ramps in the curb that mean that you don’t have to step onto the curb; you can roll onto a curb. And if you don’t have a curb cut and you’re a wheelchair user or you have a stroller or you are riding a bike, it’s not accessible. You actually cannot use the environment. It resists you moving through it, which means you actually can’t fully participate in the environment as a citizen of that city.

So the Rolling Quads poured concrete in some areas of Berkeley to create their own kind of renegade curb cuts and eventually took demands to the Berkeley City Council to make curb cuts for them. That launched the world’s first [widespread] curb-cut program, and it’s since kind of expanded nationally. And that means that anyone who needs that can actually use the city.

You know, there are all other—kinds of other design choices in a city that kind of reflect that. I saw a wonderful video of a world that was designed to be fully accessible. The telephone booths were a bit lower, and nobody spoke; everyone was using sign language, right? It was a disability-centered world.

And it was just such an interesting pivot because someone watching that would be like, “Oh, oh, right. Like, this is not designed for me,” right? “This is not designed for my body. I assume that because I can walk and I can talk and I can read, you know, language and particular signs”—this is the thing about technologies wanting to be invisible. We don’t notice them when they’re invisible because they’re made for us. But if they’re not made for us, then suddenly, that resistance is clear. And if you can’t move through environment—if you can’t read the signs, if you can’t cross the street, if the crosswalk timer is too fast for you—you can’t be in the world. These are kind of fundamental questions of rights and kind of participation of people.

I think we need to make really conscientious choices about what values we want to have and are encoded in our technology and how we’re allowing them to actually shape the world around us.

Kane: Thank you so much, Vanessa.

Chang: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. You can find more of SciAm’s book coverage on our website. If there’s a new release you think we should talk about on the show, let us know with an email to ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. Our weekly news roundup will be back on Monday.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.

For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!