The Anthropologist and the Computer Scientist

I have spent most of my career being skeptical of technology’s role in human development. So, I did not expect to find one of the most hopeful things I have read in years inside a story about chatbots.

Then I paid attention to what a computer scientist was saying. He was describing how his field teaches students to interview the people who will use the technology they are building. Over the decades, he said, the process had lost everything human about it. “We just extract data from them,” he admitted.

His name is Arvind Satyanarayan, and he might never have seen that problem if he hadn’t become good friends with Graham Jones, an anthropologist who studies communication. Jones had the opposite problem. He could teach students to analyze conversations with precision, but that analysis never got built into anything. His work stayed mostly on the page.

The two of them met years ago while co-advising a doctoral student. Working together, they became close enough to finish each other's sentences. And then they asked a question I wish more people were asking: What would it take to make tools with technology that actually help people? Really help them. The kind of help that changes how a person moves through the world and their lives.

Two Professors, One Classroom

Satyanarayan and Jones built a class at MIT called Humane User Experience Design, and the premise is simple and radical at the same time. They teach computer science students to use methods from linguistic anthropology, the study of how people actually talk to each other, how conversations work, what social rules shape the way we communicate, and they ask those students to design chatbots with all of that knowledge woven in.

I want you to think about what that means. Most chatbots are designed to keep you engaged and coming back for more. The measure of success is time spent, attention captured, or clicks generated.

These students were charged with something completely different. They were asked to design chatbots that help the people using them improve themselves, chatbots whose purpose is to be a social guide rather than an addictive escape. The goal was human growth over blind engagement.

I think about this the way I think about the history of medicine and medical cures. When medicines that could benefit people were first discovered, some of them helped and some of them hurt. But we did not ban medicine. We built an architecture to study it, and we learned to distinguish what was effective from what was dangerous. We developed safety protocols, dosing guidelines, and longitudinal research. We did experiment and try things out. We did take certain risks and over time learned how to constrain them. We did the hard, careful, human work of making something powerful into something trustworthy.

That's what this class is doing with chatbots. And what the students designed is worth seeing.

Technology for Humans

One team in the class created a chatbot called Pond, designed to help college graduates navigate the transition to independent adult life. I love this project because it addresses a moment I have seen over and over in my clinical work: a young person leaves the structured, high-proximity world of school and suddenly has to figure out how to be an adult without the guardrails. They do this best, if they become part of a community. One extraordinary example of this is a non-profit called Posse, founded by the brilliant Deborah Bial, which helps students form communities when they transition from high school to college.

Pond was designed to tell the truth. It gives honest guidance: how to set boundaries with a difficult landlord, how to start conversations in unfamiliar social settings, how to build skills through practice. It includes a role-playing mode where you rehearse hard conversations before you have them. When you have built the skill, you graduate from the topic. The metaphor is captured in the name itself: you are learning to swim on your own.

Another team created News Nest, a chatbot that uses ten colorful bird characters to help young people engage with credible news. Each bird covers a different beat, from science to sports to business, and every source and its political leaning is visible. The team deliberately chose birds over human avatars to create a buffer against the emotional manipulation that drives most news platforms. News Nest was designed to prevent mindless doomscrolling and to teach one of the most important human skills—the skill of discernment.

These students did this work because they were taught to think about technology the way an anthropologist thinks about human interaction: with genuine care for the person on the other end.

A Hidden Assumption

I need to say something that might make some people uncomfortable.

In nearly everything I read about technology and learning, there is a buried assumption: that the pure human version was always better. That before screens arrived, teachers knew how to form relationships with every student. That classrooms were places of personalized attention and emotional attunement. That we had it figured out, and technology just ruined it.

We did not have it figured out.

Teachers were never systematically trained to build deep positive developmental relationships with students. They were never fully prepared or equipped to personalize learning in a class of thirty-five or more. We did not have this knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century, and we did not prepare educators for these roles. The result was what you would expect. Some children could navigate the system, and many could not.

I have enormous respect for teachers. But the nostalgia for something we never had is getting in the way of the future. If we keep measuring technology against an idealized past that never existed, we will miss the chance to build and progress to something better.

I want to be clear that chatbots will never replace human relationships. But in the right circumstances, they might be able to do something that humans, in the systems we built, were never equipped to do consistently: meet a young person exactly where they are and help them take the next steps in their lives.

What Brain Science Shows

Jones and Satyanarayan brought two entirely different disciplines together and discovered that the combination produced something neither could have made alone. That is a beautiful story about two friends. It is also how the human brain actually works.

Our brains are interdisciplinary by design. When we solve a complex problem, we draw on memory, emotion, pattern recognition, social reasoning, and sensory experience all at once. The best thinking happens at the intersections.

There is a reason for that. The brain cannot store its own fuel. Unlike your muscles, which can hold reserves of energy, the brain depends entirely on blood delivering oxygen and glucose in real time. And one of the most reliable ways to increase that blood flow is through human connection.

So, the same biology that makes interdisciplinary thinking work is the biology that drives creativity, and both make human connection essential. Oxytocin, the hormone that drives trust and social bonding, also drives blood perfusion to the brain, delivering the nutrition that neural circuits need to grow. Connection is not just an interpersonal event; it is a biological event. Full stop.

When a chatbot is designed with an understanding of how humans actually communicate, what social genres shape our conversations, what rapport requires, what trust feels like, it is being designed in partnership with our biology. That alone changes everything about what a chatbot could do.

What This Could Mean

Right now, somewhere, a 22-year-old is sitting in an apartment trying to figure out how to tell a landlord to stop asking personal questions. A 19-year-old is scrolling through headlines designed to make her angry. A college junior is wondering whether anyone has ever felt this lost during their first semester away from home. These are the people Jones and Satyanarayan had in mind when they created this class. And these are the people their students had in mind when they sat down to design.

I have spent thirty years translating the science of human development for the people who build systems. Most of the time, I am trying to convince them that the science matters; that human connection is biological; that development is not fixed; that talent is not rare; that the environments we build shape who people become.

This is the first time I have seen a classroom where those ideas were already the starting point. A classroom where students began with the question “what does this person need?” and designed from there. That is what gives me hope. Two professors who think completely differently from each other decided to make something together, and their students are already building technology that takes human development seriously.

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If this story reminded me of anything, it is that the best ideas usually start with people who have different ideas about how the world works deciding to sit down together and create it. And you do not need to start a class at an elite university to do that. You just need to be willing to let someone else's way of thinking change yours.

Here are some ways to start.

1. Challenge the nostalgia. The next time you hear someone say things were better before technology, ask yourself: better for whom? The systems we had before were failing most people. What would it look like to build something that actually works?

2. Look for the unlikely pairing. An anthropologist and a computer scientist made something neither could have imagined alone. Where in your own life or work could you bring together two ways of thinking that don’t usually sit in the same room? That intersection is where the most important ideas live.

3. Ask a young person what they wish technology could help them with. What they actually wish it could do. You might be surprised. And you might learn something about what “helpful” really means to the people we say we are trying to serve.

As always, if these ideas resonate with you, I’d love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it. Please leave your comments below. And if you want to go deeper into the science of how we become who we become, please subscribe.

Thank you for being here.

—Pam

Photo by Mizuno K