In a real-time face-to-face conversation, Desirée Holman and Sherry Turkle, founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self and an expert on sociable robotics, consider the meanings and possibilities of virtual existence.

Sherry Turkle is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She is the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995, 1997) and Simulation and Its Discontents (2009), among other titles. As a pioneering thinker on the social and psychological effects of technology, she is a featured media commentator and has appeared on Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.