El yo digital : En qué nos estamos convirtiendo en la era del algoritmo

Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered mirror neurons, maintains that we recognize others because our bodies react to theirs. Someone smiles in front of us, and something within us smiles before we even realize it. It is an ancient capacity—observed even in fourteen-week-old twins in the womb—and it is the source of our ability to care about other people. Gallese asks what happens when that "other" is a machine. A machine does not react to us, and therein lies its very appeal: it is always available; it does not judge, contradict, or grow tired of us. The risk is not that it might deceive us, but that it accustoms us to frictionless interactions, causing us to lose patience with real people—who do contradict, do fail, and do get tired. This book discusses the culture of the image, the mobile phone as an extension of our skin, and platforms that capture our attention before we can even make a choice. It also addresses the artificial intelligences that now converse, offer advice, and provide companionship, as well as the people who have already begun to love them. Its thesis is that the digital realm has not separated us from our bodies but has begun to reshape them, and that a new way of being human is emerging from this process. There is no condemnation of technology here, nor nostalgia for the analog world, but rather something more challenging: a proposal to reclaim the capacity to feel through the body—the one thing no algorithm can give us.