Author: Priya Parker
Link to Video Here
I hosted a Substack Live with Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist and psychologist whose crucial new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, came out last week.
I read an advance copy over the summer and have been waiting eagerly for the book to finally be in the world. It is now here. And you should devour it.
Turkle has taught at MIT for 40 years. She has studied our relationships with robots since the 80s, including how children interacted with the first line of robot toys from Japan. She is a developmental psychologist and has written a book that takes the stages of human development from childhood to adolescence to love and work and death and breaks down what happens to us when we outsource these stages to and with machines, instead of each other. Artificial Intimacy puts into words something I’ve been intuiting but didn’t have the language or training for about what happens when we outsource human conversation to machines. The TLDR? We diminish our ability to form secure attachment with other humans.
I’m sharing our full conversation above, free for everyone to watch.
Four insights about who we become when we talk to machines and how to protect human connection, with Sherry Turkle
1. “Social media came after our attention, but chatbots come after our capacity for attachment.” Turkle has spent decades studying how children form relationships with technology. Children learn how to be with other people by encountering other people’s feelings, needs, and limits. A chatbot, on the other hand, is designed to mirror and affirm us. It doesn’t have needs of its own. It can’t genuinely empathize with us or participate in the give-and-take of a human relationship. And unlike a conversation with a machine, a conversation with another person is unpredictable. We have to listen, respond, sometimes say the wrong thing, and try again. It’s how we learn to be with one another. As she told me on the Live, “Social media came after our attention, but chatbots come after our capacity for attachment.”
2. “Intimacy without vulnerability is not intimacy at all.” Turkle tells the story of a woman who began using ChatGPT to write love letters to her boyfriend. The letters may have been beautiful, but Turkle asks what happens when we stop doing the work of figuring out what we actually want to say to someone we love. The process of trying to express ourselves, however imperfectly, is part of how we discover what we feel. Human beings have bad days. They misunderstand us. They need things from us. That’s not a design flaw. That’s what it means to be in relationship.
3. We can’t cure loneliness with the technology that’s making us lonelier. Turkle lays out a troubling cycle in her new book: technology dazzles us, erodes some of our capacity for human connection, and then a new technology arrives promising to solve that problem. When the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis, AI companies quickly offered chatbots as companions for older people, isolated people, and children who needed more attention. But Turkle asks us to question that premise. If what we’re missing is human care and connection, can a machine that only simulates care really provide the answer?
4. Relying on machines instead of humans is de-skilling us relationally. De-skilling is reversible. But we now have to understand, practice, and protect what makes us human. When we outsource the difficult parts of being human to machines, we risk losing the ability to do them ourselves. Turkle told the story of a nurse who used to go out with her colleagues after work. When Facebook first came on the scene, she began skipping hanging out with her colleagues and would head home to spend time on Facebook instead. Over time, those in-person friendships fell away. She became more lonely. She’d moved from friendship to friending. And friending, no matter what Mark Zuckerberg wants us to think, is not a replacement for friendship. But the good news is that we can rebuild these skills. Gathering and disagreeing and listening and staying in relationship are all things we get better at by doing. When I asked Turkle how to begin re-skilling, her answer was simple: “Make a friend. Choose a person.”
Turkle is not against AI. She spoke about its extraordinary potential to help researchers find treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she says AI has a lane. We should not make it the whole road.
