Artificial Intimacy: Sherry Turkle on Who We Become When We Talk to Machines

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle

 

Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment.

 

Who — or, more chillingly, what — do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle never quite says, but the implication is of a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, but there’s nobody really home. Which is exactly what Turkle says the chatbot is. A machine trying, without much success, to be human.

 

A chatbot has no stake in the real, Turkle explains. It can’t love, for example, because that kind of empathy requires us to be enclosed in a body and have a fear of death. The increasing ubiquity of bots mimicking humans represents an emergency for humans, she warns. It explains both our epidemic of loneliness and today’s culture of apocalyptic fear about the future of our species. Just as artificial intimacy is a misnomer, so it turns us into impossible creatures. Like those unicorns beloved by the very Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are supplying us with these artificial creatures.

 

Further Reading:

 

•       Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle (Little, Brown Spark, September 29, 2026), with blurbs from Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Franzen.

•       Turkle appears on Keen On in 2011 to talk about being alone together.

•       Alone Together (2011), Reclaiming Conversation (2015) and The Empathy Diaries (2021) — the earlier books, all discussed on this show.

•       Turkle’s recent Boston Globe op-ed arguing that AI has brought us to a state of emergency.

•       Simulation and Its Discontents (2009) — her earlier study of what simulation does to how we think, the title borrowed from Freud.

•       Earlier this week on Keen On: Richard Socher on why AI will unlock a new scientific renaissance, and the weekly editorial on who really governs AI — the optimists’ side of this argument.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Simulated Love Is Never Love. Turkle’s definition of the real thing: natural intimacy depends on human empathy, which requires someone who has lived a life, lived in a body, known pain and the fear of death, known passion and connection, and knows what it is to be little and grow up. A program has none of that, and no stake in the real. Her