Sherry Turkle, photographed in 2009. Image: jeanbaptisteparis / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
Sherry Turkle has spent more than 40 years studying how people bond with machines, and she has never sounded this worried. Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, published on Tuesday by Little, Brown, argues that AI chatbots acting as our friends, therapists and partners are quietly teaching us to avoid the hard parts of being human.
Turkle, a professor at MIT, puts it in one line on her own website: “If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence now comes for something deeper: our capacity for attachment.”
“Pretend empathy”
The book looks at chatbots that speak to us in a human voice and offer themselves as best friends, lovers and psychotherapists. When we accept those roles, Turkle argues, we settle for “the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love,” according to her publisher.
In an interview published by MIT to mark the launch, she was blunt about what the machines actually offer:
What a chatbot does is offer pretend empathy.
Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Artificial Intimacy
The problem, she says, is that it feels better than the real thing. “Chatbots always agree with us and affirm us. They always offer us their full, undivided attention.” People who get used to that start to lose the skills real relationships need. “We’re de-skilling ourselves as relational beings,” she told MIT.
Children have the most to lose
Turkle traces the effect across a whole life, from childhood to parenthood, work and love. Children, she argues, are most at risk, because they are still learning what trust is:
Children can’t learn trust from a device that not only lies but doesn’t know when it lies.
Sherry Turkle, to MIT
It’s the same fear Prince Harry raised last week when he said AI chatbots are more dangerous to children than social media because “it wants your attachment.”
For adults, her publisher says, the book warns that these machines teach us “to avoid risk, sidestep difficult conversations, deny grief, and relinquish skills that make us human: empathy, resilience, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.” Turkle’s answer is that friction is the point. “Everything in the life cycle is about facing up to friction and fears,” she said.
Out the same week as always-on AI companions
The timing is pointed. The book landed on the same day OpenAI unveiled dots, its always-on AI agents, days after Meta launched its Muse agent. The companies are betting people want more AI in their relationships. Turkle is betting they will come to regret it.
The book already has admirers among well-known critics of big tech. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, calls Turkle “the most qualified member of Team Humanity to call us back to our senses, and to each other,” in praise quoted on her website. She says she wants it to start something bigger: “I want to be part of a movement pushing back.”
Why it matters
Turkle isn’t a newcomer to tech scepticism. Her earlier books, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, shaped a decade of debate about smartphones and social media. With AI companies now selling chatbots as friends and helpers you never switch off, her argument that we’re trading real relationships for easy ones is likely to become one of the defining critiques of the AI age.
Sources: Little, Brown (Hachette Book Group): Artificial Intimacy (primary), Sherry Turkle’s website, MIT News
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