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

What happens when machines become part of our relationships?

And what happens to us when we start conversing with machines?

In this episode of Me:chine Dialogues, Tracey Follows speaks with Sherry Turkle, MIT professor, psychologist and one of the world’s most influential thinkers on technology, identity and human relationships.

For more than four decades, Sherry has studied what our relationships with technologies reveal about us — from computers and virtual worlds to smartphones, social media, robots and now artificial intelligence. Her books include The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation.

Her new book, Artificial Intimacy, takes that work into the age of relational AI: a world in which machines do not simply provide information or perform tasks, but listen, respond, remember and increasingly present themselves as companions.

The question is no longer simply whether machines can imitate intimacy.

It is what happens to us when we begin to experience them as intimate.

In this conversation, Tracey and Sherry explore the shift from an attention economy to an attachment economy — and why artificial companionship raises questions that go much deeper than whether AI appears empathetic or convincing.

They discuss the importance of friction, vulnerability and reciprocity in human relationships; why being perfectly understood may not be the same as being genuinely known; and what can happen when machines offer the appearance of relationship without the demands that relationships with other people place upon us.

The conversation also moves into the questions at the heart of Me:chine:

If a machine remembers us, reflects us back to ourselves, advises us, comforts us or presents us with versions of who we might become, where exactly is the self located?

And how much of selfhood depends upon encountering something — or someone — who is genuinely other than us, and can experience the arc of life?

Tracey and Sherry explore self-continuity, possible and future selves, the cultural differences that shape how we imagine human–machine relationships, and what agency might mean as identity becomes increasingly distributed across people, platforms and intelligent systems..

Me:chine Dialogues is a special series from The Future of You exploring identity, agency and synthetic systems — where the machinable and unmachinable selves meet.

Sherry Turkle’s work has occupied this territory for decades.

And as machines become more conversational, more agentic and more emotionally available, the question becomes increasingly urgent:

What kind of selves are we becoming in relationship with them?

Explore more of Sherry Turkle’s work:
→ Artificial Intimacy
→ Sherry Turkle at MIT

Explore more of Tracey’s work:
→ Me:chine World and essays: me-chine.com
→ Podcast archive: The Future of You
→ System & Self: futuremade.group

About Tracey Follows
Tracey Follows is a futurist working at the intersection of philosophy, technology and futurology, specialising in identity, agency and the relationship between systems and selves.

Her work includes System & Self, Database Self and Me:chine — exploring what happens as machines increasingly participate in the making of the self.

Her central premise: “Every future is written between the system and the self.”

Music
“A New Day (intro)” performed by Skott
Licensed courtesy of Cosmos Music, Safari Riot
Licensed courtesy of Downtown Music UK Limited, Safari Riot Publishing, Sony Music Publishing

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:04

They listen. They remember. They reassure us. But there's a problem. They don't care. If the intimacy with AI feels real to us, does it really matter? As my guest today puts it, that there is nobody home. And if machines can perform, empathy, friendship, even love convincingly enough, what happens to the human beings who learn to accept the performance? My guest today has been asking questions like these for more than 40 years, often long before the rest of us realised that we needed to ask them. Sherry Turkle is the Abbey Rockefeller Mosey Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. And founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. For more than four decades, through books that include The Second Self, Life on the Screen, Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and now Artificial Intimacy, she has studied not simply what technology can do, but what living with technology does to us. I first connected with Sherry in 2020 when I was writing The Future of View. Six years later I finally get to have this conversation. Let me tell you, it was worth the wait. Her new book asks something profoundly urgent. Social media competed for our attention. Artificial intelligence is beginning to compete for our attachment. So what happens when machines begin to occupy the roles of friends, therapists, confidants, even lovers? Little by little do we start taking people out of the equation? When the machine is easier, more available and more agreeable, will the world that was once populated by difficult, demanding, imperfect human beings begin to feel increasingly depeopled? What happens to us then? Sherry Turkle, welcome to Mechin Dialogues on the Future of You. Delighted. I'm so chuffed to be speaking to you. I've followed your work for years. I think the first book of yours I read was Um Alone Together, which was what what year was that? 2011. Gosh, 2011. And so prescient it was, of course.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

I I say I was prescient, but it's very sad that I was prescient.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Yes. Well, that's the Cassandra complex, isn't it? Unfortunately. But when I first read that book, I'd done a degree in philosophy and then technology, and it was your work that first sort of brought those two things together for me at a human level, because everything else had been at a kind of organisational level or policy level. And just going back through your back catalogue, as as we just have in the intro, what do you think has surprised you over that huge body of work? Is there something that has stood out for you as being really consistent or something you think we all missed and has really surprised you? What do you think has happened thematically?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Well, as I look back, it's interesting that you bring up Alone Together because that's a moment of inflection for me. Because in Alone Together, I spend the first half of the book describing a new kind of object that has me concerned. And it essentially, I call it a relational artifact. The Tamagotchis, the eyebows, the Furby's. I don't know if your readers will remember all of these things, but these were these were little robot-y things that said, take care of me, I love you, teach me. And I thought that was really different from all of the much more static and smart computer objects that we'd had previously. And I worked on these objects for years. I mean, I am I am the queen of the Tabagatchi, you know, I've given Furbies to hundreds of Cambridge school children. But I discovered that the uh that the key to it was that we nurture what we love, but we love what we nurture. And as soon as computational objects said, I I love you, take care of me, we were willing to see them really as though they were ready for companionship. And I was very alarmed. And because of all the reasons that I now talk about in artificial intimacy, I think it is very dangerous to make that kind of connection. And so just to round this up, I wrote a book about that alarm. I developed a psychology of why, and then the objects fell off the map because they broke, they really didn't talk to you, they were very limited. And I kind and I say that I kind of intellectually exhaled and turned my attention to social media, which at the time was the more toxic presence. But now it's all come roaring back with Chat GPT, these objects that say, I am your person, I love you, talk to me. The thing that interests me in my work, how I was right, but I took my eye off that ball game until Chat GPT kind of came, made it come roaring back. Whereas in fact, had I to do it again, I think I would have said, the objects aren't ready, but what I've learned is that we as people are ready to love machines that say they love us. So, in other words, I stepped back because the technology was breaking and it wasn't a breakout technology. And then when it came roaring back in a way the world was unprepared, people weren't saying, Oh, let's look at that 2011 book, you know. But I went, then we'll understand the toxic psychology of these objects. For me, it was a point of inflection because I remember saying, Oh, thank God. You know, thank God. Because they were very dangerous. And then they've come back with a vengeance because, of course, these new objects don't just say I love you, they say, be I'll be your person, you know, and forget your parents, forget your girlfriend, your spouse, you know, I'm better than all of those guys.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yes, that's how you open the book, isn't it? I am your person. And also you talking about that, the relational object or artifact, I mean, is it the AI or is it the smartphone? Because what's really interesting about what you just said about the Tamagotchas that kind of couldn't deliver on it, but over time, of course, the smartphone kind of does. And if I look at the cover, which I wanted to ask you about anyway, the cover of the book, because it's it's just brilliant. I think it's Armida and Ronaldo, isn't it? And she's looking in the enchanted mirror. And of course, the enchanted mirror has been replaced by the modern day enchanted mirror, which is the smartphone. So talk me through that idea on the on the front cover, because it really does express something very profound.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Well, she has a gorgeous guy at her back who looks like he's like ready. What I what I love about the cover is that she has, you know, she has real life passion available. And instead, she sort of thinks she has something better on the screen. Just the other day, somebody I was talking to somebody saying, well, all those lonely older people in their in their apartments, I mean, why shouldn't they have somebody to talk to? That's not what I'm finding. I'm finding that people who have people in their lives are turning to the chatbots instead. And that that's in a way the more interesting discovery of artificial intimacy. That I'm not writing about a bunch of loners who were wandering around of only somebody would talk to me. You know, no, I'm I'm writing about people who really are giving up their other options because they think that they have a better one here. And so that's what I love about the cover. I mean, here's this woman who that other option is right at she is ready to kiss her neck. And those are the people who were turning away from other people. So I love the cover for that.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Yeah, I I agree with you. I think it says a lot, it communicates a lot about relationships, which of course is everything you're talking about. It's a very sort of self-enclosed, self-referential world that's being created, isn't it? So so tell me about your thesis. I've obviously read the book, but for listeners and viewers, what is the thesis? This move from attention to attachment, and exactly as you say, the distraction it's it's creating amongst just normal everyday people to the detriment of their human relationships?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Well, I think there are two main theses. The first one is that the a chatbot, you know, I consider it a kind of marvel. I mean, I'm not here to put down chatbots in terms of their technical, I mean, it's a marvel. Because they're such a marvel and it's so easy to get smitten with them, you can forget that they can do something that really is dangerous, which is that they cause people to feel that pretend empathy, which is all they can offer, is empathy enough. And that's really what I found in my research is that people were saying the pretend empathy of the chatbot, you know, I'll take it. I'll take it. And when you do that, you sort of in the same moment start to define empathy as what a chatbot can offer, which is really nothing. You know, the chatbot, an empathic person cares if you commit suicide. When you put down your chat, the chat bot doesn't care if you turn away to commit suicide or cook pasta. It's indifferent. So there is nobody there to be empathic. But the second thing it does is like a pincer movement. I think the word is in military, is that as it's helping you define empathy down, it's also making it that you look at the people in your life and you're saying, Oh, they're difficult. The chatbot is easier, the chatbot is easier. I'm gonna go with the chatbot because the people have friction, the people give you pushback, you know, when you say something to a chat bot, it says, Oh, you're so great, you're so wonderful, you're the best. If if if your partner comes home and says to you, oh darling, I I took out the trash, you know, you're likely to say, Oh, that's nice, but you know, now could you just uh you know make sure the uh the oven is hot and cooking dinner and you know the the the toilet got overrun because you're just looking to. I mean, it was it's not like, oh my God, thank you for taking it. You know, it people are people. And so that that double thing that happens is what I want people to look out for. That when you use a chat bot, you define empathy down into what a chat bot can do, and then you define people down because they're not giving you the sort of unconditional wonder, the wonder of you treatment that the chatbot is. I would say that's how I see the double threat. Then for children, there's a triple threat. Because as you alluded to, they are trying to discover for the first time what it is to be in a relationship. And if they are learning that from a chatbot, they're they're not they're not learning it because there is no relationship with a chatbot.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, very early on in the book, you talk about your granddaughter. I don't know if you can just briefly tell people that story because it really does bring that to life.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

So I'm I'm during COVID. I started this project during the COVID years, and so I've been at it like a while. And um, I was with my um daughter and grandson and their young baby on Cape Cod. And we're looking at this beautiful one-year-old, sort of trying to put on her hat, frustrated that she kind of can't get the hat on her head, but loving this beautiful white hat and knowing that it's her hat. You know, it's like a moment when you know that your body extends to this object that really is yours. It's a very specific developmental moment. It was like watching the unfolding of a flower. And I watched it, I filmed it, and then I talked to my daughter and and uh son-in-law about it, and we had all seen something like that, and we all kind of touched hands almost across the table, because it was it was like something we shared about this child's unfolding. And because I was studying what I'm studying, I asked Chat GPT about it, and it gave me like this bullet point list of the developmental milestones neurologically, yada yada, that this might mean. In other words, it knew what I was talking about, but it really didn't care. I mean, the everything that was important to a person, to a grandmother, to a grandmother's heart or parents' heart, was not covered in its bullet points. And I think that that's that's the thing I want people to keep in mind is that it's not that Chat GPT doesn't know a ton of stuff that might be useful to you or helpful or good for it, but it it doesn't know what you necessarily need as a human who's raising another human who's in relationship to other humans. So that's that's kind of what I make of it.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Yeah, isn't that because it's got a kind of secondhand knowledge? Because you make the point that it can't experience these things, it doesn't have a lived experience, so like across the arc of life, I think you you phrase it as. And so that's why it's so interesting you open up on your tiny little granddaughter, sort of meeting this kind of resistance, but collaboration with the hat, and she's negotiating it, I assume, and sort of it's building her character because she's got some agency and so she's working it out for herself. And then when we are in discussion or conversation with let's call it a chatbot, we we've kind of outsourced our agency, but it can't it doesn't have any experience either. So it's really quite a strange faux relationship, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Yes, it is a faux relationship. I call it a pretend relationship because it's acting as though it were a caring person, and you are kind of seduced because it is such a marvel, into acting as though you're talking to a caring person, but you're not. You're not. And and you have to keep that in mind.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

This is one of the reasons I know a lot of people are um very keen on talking about social robots, chatbots, AI, helping aged people, particularly in cases of dementia. Oh, I am tired of that argument.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Oh, I'm so glad you say that. I am so I and and the thing they say is there are no people for those jobs. And you know what? If you took the money from one or two data centers, but let's just say one data center, and you poured that into elder care, into the community, into senior centers, the elderly situation would look much, much better. Similarly, just to anticipate you, people are smitten with the idea that these things are going to be our therapists. Not because they should be, because there, again, there are no people for these jobs. If you took another data center and you poured that into training, a cadre of psychotherapists, people would be in those jobs. And similarly for teachers, there are no people for these jobs. We need the AIs. Well, put some money there. In other words, you you empty out the institutions that could be helpful, and then you say, oh my God, only technology will help. But of course, we don't have any money for the non-technology solutions. Oh, only technology can help. And then you fund these things obscenely. So I'm very um, you know, I really think that that argument needs to be nipped off in the bud. Well, you've just done that. Right. I, you know, well, because I I I I was so good at it because I, you know, this began in as soon as I wrote Alone Together, everybody was saying, Oh, I love those robots for the elderly. That solves their crisis. They can sit alone in their homes and talk to the robots. So I feel like I've been I've been practicing for this answer for like, you know, decades.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

You completely validated on that. What annoys me about it is that if we accept that it's a a sort of faux relationship, it's not really care. Uh and it's fine to serve up to old people who might have Alzheimer's. That's what really grates on me. Almost as if, well, it'll do kind of thing. Um, it might make us feel better about it, but it's not going to serve them because that's not the kind of relating that is required. I don't see if if if a chatbot can't really relate properly to a human being, it certainly can't relate to somebody who's struggling with memory or might have Alzheimer's or any other sort of degenerate disease.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Exactly. And I'm always in conversations where people are saying, oh, but Alzheimer's, oh, but children, as though, as though they don't need the the the touch and the care and and and the feeling that anybody else does. And and I think it's something that make it a way of sort of discharging them. Um but uh you know there's very stable evidence that that the people with Alzheimer's are are comforted by human beings and human touch, and children can't do without it. So in presence, so and and human babies cannot do without it. You know, it was like the babies in the Harlow experiment where you give them monkeys that'll serve them sugar milk, and they'll cling to the monkeys, but they'll get psychotic too.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Actually, you talk about that a lot in the book about the importance of embodiment. Um, did you want to just because you you're touching on that now, really? Is that where the self lives in the embodiment of things?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

I mean, I I I love the anthropologist Sarah Erdie, who I quote because she gave a TED talk, and I'm not sure if it's the title of the talk or one of the lines in the talk. She says, if robots raise our children, they won't be human. So in other words, she she flat out. She's honest. She says, Look, you want robots to raise our children? They're not going to be human children. And what she means is they won't have to be raised by someone who really understands them across the arc of the life cycle. So they won't be raised by someone who knows what it is to fear death or have passion or fall in love or know what it is to be sick, what it feels like to have a headache, or I mean, our children who were embodied children need to be raised by their kin because only we have the human experience of a human life cycle. And there's plenty of science fiction, you know, and to support that whenever you try to make a you know uh uh a human-like robot, what you're struggling to do is give it memories of having been raised by a human mother, because that's the thing that will give someone a sense of fusional attachment and loss, but it's impossible because these are bodily experiences. You you learn your mother by being hugged by your mother, you learn your mother by being, you know, in her arms and learning her body. I have a young grandson, and when he sees me, he's you know really less than one, and when he sees me, he his first thing is to just put he just tries to put his head right here and sort of smell me and kind of just get right in there at the at the at the neck. And I I know that when he smells the neck, then he sort of settles into my shoulder. I mean, these exper and then I hug him, and I mean these experiences are the experiences that will give him his relationship with me. Have people really forgotten this?

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Well, I was gonna ask you that. Why is it that Silicon Valley are so determined to sort of do the mind-body dualism thing, you know, cognitive uploading, upload your mind, you know, resurrect your your memory bank, you know, being a 48, all this sort of stuff. Why or when did they detach cognition, if you like, or even memories or you know, the brain from the body? Because most people would agree, I think, that our brain is in our fingertips as well as in our heads.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Exactly. Well put, our brain is in our fingertips as well as in our heads. Why has it been separated in Silicon Valley? Because they Can't do their job if they don't believe that. I've been teaching at MIT for decades. And they can't do their job if they don't do that. That's the that's the essence of their job description, is to try to build entities that detach the brain and the body and the thought and feeling. You know, they they want to separate thought and feeling that's essential. And then they want to reconstitute feeling as though it were thought. So, you know, it's kind of like saying to a, you know, that that is the job description. And in artificial intimacy, I tell a story that I love where when I'm a very young professor at MIT, a baby professor, Eric Erickson, who was a great psychoanalyst, came to MIT to give a lecture. And he, I'd been his student at Harvard, and he takes me aside and he says, Um, hey, uh, what are you doing here? It's kind of like a what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this kind of moment. And I say, Well, I'm studying the connections, the emotional connections that engineers have with their new technologies. And he says to me, he says, you know, engineers don't believe in an inner life. Watch it. They don't believe you're trying to study their connection with an inner life, but they really don't believe in an inner life. They beh they believe in behavior. So, not so fast. And I I think that's kind of the deeper answer to your question.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

That is very interesting. Because at the same time that that is increasing just because of the power they have and the rollout of all these products. I mean, there's over a billion people using Chat GPT or OpenAI now, right? I mean, huge scale. At the same time as that, there's a resurgence in perhaps if not religion, spirituality, where most humans, particularly in the West, I think, are trying to discover or rediscover a sense of interior, inner piece, spirituality. Do you think that's a do you think the two are connected in that in some way?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

I do. They these two, it's like um there you many, many years ago there was a book that made a lot of noise, and it argued for high-tech, high touch, that when things, when things, and was a, you know, it was kind of like a a fancy marketing kind of language, but there was a truth in it, is that when you give people too much high tech, they they kind of are ready for some high touch. So in a way, it sort of makes no sense, but it makes every sense that the same people who are bringing you no touch in a kind of no touch. Let's just upload ourselves to a chip thing, are like meditators, spiritually, they're, you know, begin the day with with with. I mean, I I go to I go to tech conferences, and like we have two hours of drumming, and then this other thing where you make sounds with a kettle by like, you know, making it vibrate. And I'm looking around me, and I know I've interviewed these people, like they're they believe in nothing but behavior. They want to create a world in which a robot that behaves is considered a person, and they're all like listening to the the vibrations from a drum. That's how they are. And I'm thinking, why are they foisting on the world an object that definitely is not interested in the vibrations of a drum? So it's uh we are living in a very schizoidal time, and the danger is that we're, you know, handing on to our children the the values of a very schizoidal time.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Hmm. Very interesting. Like um post-normal, isn't it? Contradictory, complex and contradictory. I guess that's the networked world.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Right. Well, you know, that's the you know, it's a famous story that the developers of this technology would not let their kids touch it. You know, somebody and reporter once asked Steve Jobs, you know, if he had uh, you know, iPhones and iPads for his kids. They said, I live in a in a in a tech-free house, a tech-free house. And uh they knew it was toxic for children. They knew that the represent the digital representation of of finger paint was not finger paint. But they're selling it to the rest of us as though it is finger paint.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Do you know? I interviewed Steve Hilton about 10 years ago because he had a book about being more human, and it was about that. And he to he told me that he'd had conversations and he'd found out that they don't allow their children to use all the social media that was being pushed on us. And now he's running for governor of California. I think that's like a hilarious sort of like a full circle moment. Um, I wanted to ask you something very specific, almost from a futurist point of view. I had Patty Mae on and Patty and Pat talking about future you because I'm fascinated with future you and the establishment of well, I suppose we'll call it self-continuity, the present self with some future self and the dialogue, the toggle that happens between those those two selves. Well, at least two selves, probably the past self as well, seeps in. But you talk about it in the book, and I wasn't sure. I mean, I was kind of reading between the lines. Obviously, it's part of, you know, they're the people you work with at MIT. Um, I saw you speak at the first AHA. Yeah, I think I I wrote about it in Forbes actually. Brilliant about the the human cost of talking to machines. I wasn't sure whether you were agnostic or ambivalent on future you, because obviously you quite rightly do have some concerns about it, although also appreciating, you know, this could be interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

I think it's interesting, but I I I try, I'm not agnostic. I say, I say, nah, and let me tell you why. You know, I've I've been a professor for many decades, and I've mentored people, and I've been a therapist for many decades, and I've tried to get people to reflect on their futures. And all of this is in a context of someone who is there to care for you and help you reflect on your future self and talk to you about real things, real choices that they made that really did impact their life. And it's a conversation where somebody says, Well, you know, I could postpone marriage. So if somebody says to me, Well, you know, I could postpone marriage and children until I have tenure, until I die. Well, I'm in a position to say, you know, I did that, I got my tenure first and established myself first, and then had my children. But here's the downside for me. Instead of a robot that says, well, here are some things that you might want to know about the dangers of uh of your of your doing that.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

So the lack of specificity again from lack of experience.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Who cares? I mean, uh who cares? I mean, you know, it's like uh our our lives and choose and making choice points for our lives, uh, the difference between doing it with someone who cares for you and is thinking about you and who's had the experience and can talk about the pluses and minuses from a life that really happened, versus a program that's kind of, and what if the program gets starts to be more uh inflected by, let's say, a male perspective that wants to keep women sort of in the home, who might say to a woman talking about postponing childbirth, well, you know, that's kind of dangerous because you know, we really need more, the society needs more children, and uh and you don't want to do that because you know, I mean, we don't know who's in control of these things. You know, I love Pat and Petit and they're close friends, so I'm not you know, I'm not worried about them, but this thing is this thing is uh it's not in their control. I mean, they've created a program that's right. So my my problem with these marvels, I mean, that program is a marvel. Again, I like the I like the image of a Marvel because you can appreciate a Marvel, but also not feel as though this Marvel is your mentor. It's a marvel. And I I in in the book, I I, you know, I don't I don't trash my closest and most treasured colleagues, but I do say, what's the end game? Because a lot of people, and that's maybe one of the findings of my book, don't like the the friction and the conflict and the back and forth of really talking to a person. And so they choose the Marvel that allows them to sidestep that. They choose the Marvel. And then what do we have then? A lot of people talking to future you and not people talking to their friends and family.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

See, I've heard you you say this that um I mean, correct me if I'm wrong paraphrasing you, um, that actually, I mean, I think what you're kind of uh explaining is like the atomization. So if you can keep people distracted from like a more public or a social discourse that might be political or might, you know, ends in groups who have some sort of I know small power, let's say, um, to influence anything. Actually, you can keep people atomized, they're not entering that discussion or having that discourse. I worry about something similar but different, um, which is I think we're having agency trained out of us. Um, so it's not just relating and conversation and discourse, it's taking action. And what really worries me is the next stage of all this, which is like a delegated agency to allow these chatbots or agents in the agentic age, I suppose, to go out and act on my behalf. Because at the moment they're representing me a lot of the time, and they could then go out and act on my behalf. Then where does that leave me, my sense of self? And the reason I ask you this is because I did some research a few years ago, um, without going into detail, it was some Gen Z young people about 2021, and they wanted analytical AI versions of their own expertise, like a fashion stylist wanted an AI fashion stylist. And it was because they thought they were going to be more objective, more analytical, and I guess somehow kind of more accurate. I don't really know. Um, but because of that, the data wasn't coming back to them, the data was going to the model, and so they weren't kind of filling up their own reserves of like trust, if you like. And my reading of it was that they'd lost trust in themselves to take action. And so that's one I wondered what you thought about that. And with the chatbots, as they get more and more powerful and agentic, are going to rob us not just of our discourse and conversation and relating, but actually our agency as well.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

You know, it's funny, I actually end the book on agency, and I and it's it's very ironic because before I met chatbots and saw them roaring back, I was writing a book about agency because I noticed that my students, who I thought at this moment in time should be more political, should be more involved with the real world, were kind of disappearing into their phones. And I wanted to write something in the early 2020s after I finished my uh I wrote a memoir, and then I came back to write another book about technology, and it was focused on agency. And then I met Chat GPT and I did this, but it turned out, and this is my point, that this book that we're talking about now is really a book about agency, because chatbots remove agency at every point in the life cycle where I study them, because the book is really structured across the human life cycle. And so, for example, when you feel that you can't talk to a professor until you practice it and get your script from chat. Okay, then you go into the conversation with the professor and you're saying the things the chat told you when I interview those kids who do that, it's not a celebration of how great it was that chat let you practice. They have less confidence. It's a de-skilling, it's not a skilling. And I really disagree with the people, and maybe this gets me back to the Pat Petit conversation about future you, is I really disagree with the people who say that practicing before you get into a conversation is somehow fabulous, you know. No, because you're losing your sense that you can go into a conversation and you can talk, you can form a relationship. In other words, it's the difference between my having practiced this before I spoke with you with a chat bot and saying, hey, I'm gonna meet a new person. This is great, whole different country, whole different point of view. I'm really interested in what she has to say, I have confidence in what I think, but maybe she'll show me some place where I I missed something. This is a this is why I'm a person. This is why I'm a person. This is why I went into the business of being a person who's a writer. If instead I'm like so anxious about being uh unmasked, I can say I'm wrong or I didn't think about that, or I'm humbled.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Why does that generation feel so anxious about is it perfection, productivity, optimization? What is it that's driving that additional anxiety on top of what I would have uh experienced as a teenager, sort of pre-digital?

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Well, you know, I see social media as the gateway drug to what where we are now, because it basically said, or texting, so texting and social media. One one guy many years ago who I said, Well, what's wrong with a conversation? He said, I can't stand the conversation. I'm texting all the time. So I'm all text. I said, Well, what's wrong with a conversation? He said, conversational tell you what's wrong with a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're gonna say. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're gonna say. So this isn't real time. You know, to be in a conversation, you can't be, you know, you and you can't control the you can't just leave. I can't just walk out. I you know, you're you're here for a human encounter. Because it's so fascinating how you can't just phone someone. Yeah, that's what de-skilled us. Conversation became terrifying. Phoning somebody, horrible.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

That generation, not everybody obviously, but think it's rude if you just phone. It's interesting you say that because I've now don't just phone somebody of that age. I think I better get in contact with them first to say, is it okay if I phone you? Which is absolutely crazy.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

But but it, you know, I I feel the same way, but but to them, it's not crazy. They're not ready to have a human encounter just kind of foisted on them. Foist, foist it on them. But I think that you know, as we got into that culture of texting, not talking, we prepared ourselves for avatars. Because look where we've ended up. I mean, we've ended up with Mark Zuckerberg saying, look, I know he was talking about Americans. He said, I know most Americans would like to have uh 15 friends, but they can't have 15 friends. It's not practical. I mean, I don't know how he knows, but he said, you can't have 15 friends, you can have like three. So my business model is to give you those extra quote friends as avatars. I'll give you, I'll give you 12 avatars, the delta, the delta 12, to make up the difference. Why is he making this rule? Why is this rule being made? Because his he says his business plan at Meta is to make those 13 extra friends that you can't have in real life. So that whole sensibility, but but who will these friends be? These will be friends who will never give you any friction, who will just always say you're fantastic, you're right, who were tuned exactly to what Meta thinks are your needs. It's not, it's a very particular kind of friendship.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Yeah, it feels like massive projection, that does personal projection.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

But that's the business plan. So you have an industry that's trying to give us, we've really never had this happen before. We're an industry that's dominated by men of a very particular mindset, who, as Eric Erickson said, don't necessarily believe in the human interior life, are telling us how they think our human relationship should be.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

Well, that takes us quite nicely onto something I wanted to ask you, which is the chapter on love, which arguably is the most intimate of intimate, and that is absolutely fascinating. The sort of programming of a partner rather than the experience of a person as a partner. What was the most surprising, or maybe none of it surprised you in that chapter? You've been working in this area for so long. Something surprised me.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

When I first, and I think that listeners should take this to heart, when I began working on this book, my assumption was it had kind of you know, the the the chatbots had kind of started during COVID and then post-COVID, they became big. And in my assumption, the people who would be drawn to it would be somehow isolates, living in isolated places, disabled in some way, with some strike against them that would make it difficult for them to find a partner. By the time I really did the work and the ethnography and the field work, everybody. You didn't have to be an isolate, you didn't have to be funny looking, you didn't have to live in a you know in a in a basement. Everybody was talking about their chatbot, uh, best friend, lover, you know, extra little special, something, something, something it had normalized radically, and I think that that the rapidity by which having a kind of chatbot something on the side normalized in the culture has been surprising to me. Because after all, you're saying I'm I'm getting ready to leave the people who are asking too much of me for this chatbot that asks nothing of me.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

I'm preparing myself for Do you think there's a difference culturally in East versus West with these kinds of relationships? The reason I ask you is because in 2020, when I was doing a lot of research into this, there was one, I mean, there was a lot of the what were they calling cross-dimensional marriages, weren't they? Where in Japan, for example, they were giving out marriage marriage certificates for you if you're gonna marry your avatar. And one person said, one guy said, Well, um, it's just another form of diversity. So they'd kind of broadened out diversity, different to me or the group, to this extreme, really. Um, and I wondered if you thought that that may be more either acceptable or adoptable in like Japanese culture because of, I don't know, animism or something, or whether you think it's different in the West or it's just all the same.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

Well, you know, in Japan, uh objects are infused with life to the point that there are burial ceremonies for needles, for used needles, because it is expected that the needle has been uh infused with the spirit of its users. Um and I attended some of those needle burial ceremonies, and it was it took my breath away. I mean, it's it's it's for real. Um I'm just crying when I think about it because it's it's such it's such a different way of now to say that in in to say that in Japan it therefore was less surprising that this that that that really intimate relationships with objects seemed less strange, less other, is makes sense. But there's also as that's going on, documented illnesses in Japan and documented social groups, not just in Japan, but in the east, of young men in particular who disappear into their rooms and live a life with their chatbot. So, you know, hotels where you bring your chatbot girlfriend, but also or avatar girlfriend, but but literally they also are seeing before the Westsaw the full blown picture. Of what that looks like in across the arc of a life. So why are we learning from that then? Well, I was gonna say just to complicate the picture, so you have that going on. And at the same time, in China, they have just outlawed chat bot friends for kids. And I say good China, you know, and it was I think that there's a lot going on here. Social acceptance, mass involvement, then oh my god, all these men, you know, they're all in their rooms. I think it's a new diagnostic category. And then you have a country that says uh this is not good. Chatbots for children, big no, no, zero out, out of the schools, out of the playgrounds, out, no, nothing. So, you know, I think it's it's easy to watch the East and see one thread, but I think actually there are multiple and very overlapping threads. And I think we're gonna have in our culture a lot of overlapping threads. A lot of people who say, Oh, but you know, I really love my, I love my chatbot lover, and a lot of an increasing number of psychologists, certainly, who are now sort of in the tank for the idea of having chatbot psychotherapy and chatbots will do this, and who are gonna say, this is leading to trouble. I think we're in that moment of evolution, and I want to be part of, I want this book to be part of the story of trying to sort that out.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

What do you think will happen organizationally? Because you cover brilliantly and in-depth the sort of personal, if I can call it relationship. It's not, I know, but with the with a chatbot. But so much of this AI is getting implemented into organizations at a corporate level. So maybe a team is using interactive chatbots or AI, or a gentic is going to cover a complete sector of a particular business. What happens organizationally, do you think? Because obviously you you touch on conversation, well, don't touch on your your whole book is about the importance of communication and conversation with humans. But what happens to the culture of an organization when actually you're infiltrated?

SPEAKER_00 46:11

I have a chapter I call work, and uh because I I I take you through the life cycle, but then I have separate chapters on work and mourning and therapy. So it's it's not just purely done on moments of the life cycle. I also pull out three moments, three activities, where really chatbots are trying to make a big push. You know, the companies are making a big push and of course succeeding. And I try to talk about, I try to raise the question that you just asked. And let me just take work, and I let me just take work. Let me take doctors, for example. So, so doctors are a great example, and I interviewed a lot of doctors, so doctors are a great example where obviously the knowledge of the chatbot is amazing, you know, and and it's just uh an amazing thing that there's so much the chatbot knows about the minuscule nature of every disease and every symptom and every early sign. So you don't want to say just flat out, well, medicine will not mean medicine is going to use chatbots very this, or let's say medicine is going to use generative AI very intensely. On the other hand, there's a complication because part of the training of a doctor where young students at medical school do a thing called chart review, where every week each medical student is responsible for a patient, all the charts, all the intake, all the interviews, all the patient history. And their job is to present a diagnosis to their teachers and their colleagues and make sense out of this massive data. It takes them a week. You know, a regular, a mature doctor would have to do that like much faster, but they they're given a week to do it. And they're told, do not use Chat GPT. Because the idea is that a doctor does that, a young doctor does that. The first time they can't, the second time they're struggling, the third time they get it right, the fourth, the rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And then somehow, like a doctor pops up at some point in this, it's like an emergent, a doctor will pop up from having done this over and over and over and over again. And the medical student I interviewed says that every student knows they're not allowed to use Chat GPT, and they all do. Yeah, I'm not surprised. And it's a very interesting moment in the book because it shows what happens to an organization. The organization has norms, they know the older doctors know that this hands-on artisanal, doing it by hand, struggling with it by yourself, has a real function. Because if you do it a hundred times, you learn about signs and symptoms, but they can't really stop it escaping from them where students really aren't doing that work. And I think that that's what organizations have to grab hold of, is that there may be elements of work where we have to do more than say don't do it, in order to get people to really learn how to the skill that we're interested in. That's what interests me. It takes more than saying don't do it, because the temptation is so great. I mean, I think of my own students, everybody focuses a lot on chatbots and writing. Let me just focus a minute on chatbots and reading. Uh, my students don't read Proust. In one of my courses, I assign Proust. I teach a course on things and thinking. And the the gist of the course is how we think that we we love the object we think, we love the objects we think with, and we think with the objects we love. You know, those videos that the thinking and feeling go together. And we read Proust because in remembrance of things past, he he talks about remembering being tied to the taste of the Madeline being dipped in tea. It's a very famous passage, very famous chapter. My students don't read it, they put it into Chat GPT, it comes back as a podcast. Now, what has been lost when they do that? No, everything, everything's been lost. Well, but but for my students, they can present bullet points of what Pru's theory of memory is. So if you only care about the output, nothing's been lost. It reminds me of you know, Pat and Patty and Future You. You have a whole bunch of things somebody said to you about possible paths, but you have no relationship. You have no relationship. So why substitute a mentor where you have a relationship with a lot of choice points of some program telling you how things what's the end game? I like to ask in the book. I end up finally, you what's the end game? What is the end game? Yeah, tell us what the end game is. Well, the end game, I think I think the reason I've come to appreciate Mark Zuckerberg so is that what's the expression that he says the quiet part out loud? And uh he says the quiet part out loud. You're gonna have maybe two friends, and then you're gonna have the 13 others that are gonna be avatars, a family of avatars. But that takes us the way I end the book is I say the real needs you never before. The earth needs you. How are we gonna solve? How are we gonna even begin to solve the problems of our raping the earth if we're at our screens? Chatbots are not interested that there's no water to drink, or that the the that the weather is crazy, or we can't live in the heat. They don't live in that or the garbage isn't picked up, or the the uh they don't live that they don't live in that world. So the world needs you, reality needs you. And and uh the idea that you're sitting being told that you're the greatest and you're wonderful and you're fantastic by a thing that isn't a person, that's that's a corporate end game. And selling you things, there might be product placement. I mean, it's gonna get crazy. Undoubtedly. So it's not an I think it's really not an end game that a lot of people want when it's presented to them that way. And I, you know, I don't want to be alone here as a, you know, as a sort of uh beacon. I want a lot of company uh to start to say this is not the end game that we're interested in.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Yeah, no, but I think what your book does brilliantly, as all your books have done, is to dissect and or diagnose what's going on, but also give people the language to talk about it, to reflect on it and talk about it. Because when people don't have the vocabulary of the language, it is very hard to discuss. Um and just in having the language, um, I mean, if a language defines reality, then just having that allows us to tap into that reality again that you're talking about. I have a final question for you, Sherry. But before I ask that, what haven't I asked you that you wished I'd asked you or I should have asked you? What haven't we covered that you think is pivotal?

SPEAKER_00 53:51

Well, I'm kind of interested. I'm not sure it's a question, but you know, right now AI companies are getting very bad press because they're out of control. Um they forgot to mention that the products are out of control, that they're ferreting their way into companies, destroying data. They seem to have a mind of their own. I touched on this a little in the book about how I expect this to happen, the early signs it was happening. And I think that the question of how we can use this moment of skepticism about the politics, the intention, the wisdom of these corporate leaders were a moment where we can really say, you know, these are not, you know, the heroes of our time. These are super duper robber barons who were looking at the bottom line, not the not the health of the planet. Really, I'm hoping that can be a moment where we expand that critique into the kind of area that I'm interested in, which is what is it doing to us as people?

SPEAKER_01 55:04

Yeah, which is the subtitle of the book, isn't it? Who do we become?

SPEAKER_00 55:08

Yeah. But so I a lot of people say, oh, Sherry, your book came it's so irrelevant because now we're worried about, you know, companies being infiltrated. And I say no. That this shows that we cannot put our deepest and most intimate emotional lives and the lives of our children into the hands of these guys who really, you know, they're just trying to make money in a company, they don't have a lot else on their mind.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Oh, yeah, totally. I'm think we're at a very strange point in time when we consider how and why people think about the future. I mean, as a futurist, I would say that there's almost too much future for people at the moment. There's like, um, you know, in good times.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

I love that. I love that. It's too much. It's too much future. No, I really I'm signing on to that. I'm gonna put that's my new bumper sticker. Too much future.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

Yeah, and doing a little series on that because what it is is that people are so cognitively, I mean, you know much more about this than me, of course, being the practitioner and the academic, but it's almost like cognitive overwhelm of everything at the moment, even the scariest stuff about AI that, as you say, is coming out from the PR press releases every day from these companies. People can't can't deal with it because they can't absorb it, because actually, like the information overload is already there. So I think what I'm seeing is they can only think about the present and they kind of just cultivate their own garden over here because like this is what I can manage and control. I can't control the chaos out there, but unfortunately, the chaos out there is gonna spiral completely out of control unless people do obviously kind of take it on board. But it is that that feeling of the sort of a foreclosure on the future because there's too much of it, it's too overwhelming. People feel they can't do anything about it or can't get back to our conversation about agency, they have no agency over it because of these kinds of individuals and corporations who are so powerful and at such scale, that actually they go over here and think, I'll wait for it to all like blow over. Unfortunately, it's not going to blow over. So, your book and everything you were talking about is so pivotal, like fundamental as a tool almost to help people re-enter this, I think.

SPEAKER_00 57:25

Yeah. You know, I end the book on Hannah Arendt and Robert Lifton writing about why people turn to authoritarianism. And it's very much in line with what you say. Lifton has some wonderful ideas about how people turn to strong men not just because they, you know, want to feel that somebody's in charge, but they kind of want the reassurance that everything's going to be okay. That when things seem out of hand, you're afraid to step up. You feel so little. And that's what Arrent is basically saying, too. You know, when people feel little and disempowered. And the mundanity. Yeah. And our I fear that our screens and our this notion of delegating our work and delegating our craft and delegate, uh, we can't even read, are going to make us feel smaller and more in the mood to delegate.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Yeah. Yeah, brilliant that you quoted that. You also quote Christopher Lash, of course, in the book, who I'm like a big fan of a lot of things he was also very pressing about, of course, of course, cult of narcissism, etc. But I wanted to ask you, and thank you for your time today. It's been wonderful to speak with you. I wanted to ask you a final question, which really is about the course. What is a better future? Is that the course that you Yes, what is a better future? What is a better future, which I just thought was magical when I read it. I was like, somebody does what is a better future? What a fantastic course. Now, what is a better future? And if you are still teaching this in 2045, Sherry, um, physically or as a holograph, um, what would have been a better future for us to have created by 2045? And what will this new generation, including the grandchildren that you dedicate this book to, by the time they are, you know, 20 years on from now, what will they be looking back at, thinking, well, they took this action and it ended up in a better future for us? We claim the real.

SPEAKER_00 59:24

The real needs you and we're afraid of the real because it's really scary, but that's on us. Other generations have stepped up to challenges, and our challenge is to reclaim the real. And we have a lot going against us because corporate America seems to like not be that interested in the real. There seems to be like an international global fight against who's going to be best at the not real. But I I I really think that this can be, you know, that I think it's very good that we're having a kind of moment of reckoning with social media through lawsuits, plus uh regulation. This moment of hold on, these AI companies really do seem out of control. It's not like just a science fiction book. I mean, to use this moment to reclaim the real. And I think that it's actually quite hard to do. We really have it, we're only making baby steps, but I think that that is the the challenge, the specific challenge for this generation and their elders. I mean, I think, you know, as somebody who may not be there in uh 2047 or I don't know, 2050, or uh, I don't want my hologram to be looking down on this, actually. I thought you might say that. I have a I have a chapter in the book about making a hologram of yourself. It's pretty, I would say it's pretty shows the problems with that. I think it's time to step up to the fact that we are biological humans. We live in a in a blessed biological universe and we have to try to heal it. Have you come across Delphi?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:10

No. So Delphi is like a platform that sucks in and aggregates all of your academic work, all of your posts, all of everything you've ever uttered, aggregates it all. So that if somebody wants to come to you for an advice or expertise or an opinion, it kind of spits it out as representing you. So I thought, I mean, obviously my work's tiny compared to yours, but I thought I'd put some stuff in and just see what it does. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34

With yours? With yours?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:36

Yeah, exactly. I haven't I haven't completed the experiment, but I thought this is so fascinating in terms of represent I always say not representing me, but representing me, because it's representing me. In the end, it'll be my voice, my personality, whatever, but it won't be me, to your to your point. So it will be completely f a fake, a fake person.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:57

Well, you know, I had a lot of I I tried to experiment with all these deathbot grief tech uh ones, and I did not have a good experience of being represented. I was so surprised you did that. I was so surprised in the book when you said talk about it. I just kind of throw myself into it. Well, I want to see what's I want to see what's up. I I cannot say that representing yourself is uh and even if it gets better. So this is one of those things where the better it gets, the worse it gets. Because it's still not you, and it's still gonna be rogue. I I think that when people die, if they've written books that are in their words, that's cool, and people can read what they wrote and or spoke and uh make their inferences. To me, I live with Hannah Arendt, she's kind of like, but I have what Hannah O'Rendt said. I don't have what some program inspired by at a at a company inspired by Sam Altman thinks that Hannah Arendt meant. I mean, I have what Hannah Arendt said, and I like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:06

Just finally then, what's one small action people could take like tomorrow?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:10

No chatbots for your children. Because Disney and Mattel and OpenAI have a consortium to bring chatbots into your Elmos and Barbies and Mickeys and no. It's gonna be an amazing, it's gonna seem amazing, but it is really not where you want to take your children. No chatbots for children. I think the threat is existential.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:37

Bit more boredom for children. That would be um a good idea, I think, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:42

No chatbots for children. Take them out for a walk. They need to learn how to be alone, they need to learn solitude, they need to learn how to be bored, they need to learn how to be in their heads, they don't need to learn how to be distracted by fake people.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:56

That's good advice for all of us, isn't it? Particularly children, but actually for all of us. Yes. Reclaim reality. What a great note to end on. What a privilege to speak to you. Thank you so much, Sari.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:07

I've loved it. I've just loved it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

Artificial intimacy: who we become when we talk to machines, is published by Little Brown on the 29th of September. Go grab it.