During four decades of studying the effects of interaction with computers, Sherry Turkle has developed a reputation as a careful if critical social scientist who approaches her work with academic rigor and distance.
Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, breaks this mold. It is a polemic warning that we have reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk from overreliance on soulless machines who pose as our tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues, and lovers. Turkle is aiming for the high bar of books —Silent Spring, The Jungle, Unsafe at Any Speed—that awaken the public to impending crises.
Essentially, this diminutive MIT professor is taking on a multitrillion-dollar industry backed by a government eager to accelerate AI into every corner of our personal and professional lives.
STEVEN LEVY: Your previous books reported results of your research as a social scientist, often leading to troubling conclusions about how people, especially children, interact with computers. But this book reads like you’re breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm. Why the shift?
SHERRY TURKLE: Like I do with all my books, I went in curious. But after 10 or so interviews, conducted during the pandemic, neutral-curious was no longer my state of mind. This was terrible! Here are these people during the pandemic, their families are suffering, reaching out to them, and they're talking to me about how they really want to just hang with their chatbot. When I was able to interview people face to face, I was not happy. People don't want to do anything in politics because they just want to live in chatbot-land. So the arc of the book ended up as—reality needs you. It couldn't be a worse time to give up on reality.
You write that social media set us up for this.
Social media softened us up by getting us used to the idea that if you're feeling sad or blue, open up your computer. Then it made you mad and kept you with your own kind. But now we have this new technology that has no reason to be first-person.
Do you think that we should ban chatbots from using the first person?
Yes! After a career of having credibility as not being Luddite-crazy, I'm not in the mood to give all that away and say all chatbots are toxic all the time. But this is very dangerous, a slippery slope. This is being used to basically say we don't need to pay for psychotherapy, we can use chatbots. In every serious interview I do, people invoke this myth about practice—that you use chatbots to practice for talking to your boss, your lover, your teacher. But when you’re bathing in the warm soup of total acceptance [from LLMs], talking to chatbots becomes the endgame.
You also have a problem with reliance on chatbots in the workplace, and a particular loathing for the term “human in the loop.”
When they use that term, it means the human has been taken out of the productive process and is there to do some sort of cleanup work, to catch the hallucinations or things the AI doesn’t see. That doesn't work, because employers only have a couple of humans in the loop. Those people basically can't change anything. They are there partly to make it sound good when they're litigated, and partly to give people a false sense that the process hasn't been delegated to an AI. But it has been delegated to an AI.
Maybe powerful chatbots are a new form of interaction that isn’t necessarily worse than human conversation, but different, as people report feeling encouraged and empowered by the positive feedback they provide.
An AI won't ever replace human conversation. It’s really not afraid of death, it’s not afraid of illness, it's not afraid of pain, it doesn't love its children, and it doesn't care if you kill yourself or make dinner. So if we raise our kids with it, or have our most intimate conversations with it, we're going to lose contact.
Still, a lot of people have nobody to talk to. They feel that talking to chatbots helps them.
If there's a crisis of loneliness, it's because we're abandoning each other. Give me one data center, and I will turn it into resources for the elderly.
Studies show that most people are skeptical about AI, and there has been considerable pushback. Yet hundreds of millions of people use them. Even people who push back against data centers are using chatbots.
The goal of this book is to expand the terms of the pushback to include this more intimate connection.
Do you really feel that our growing intimacy with AI can be stopped?
I have more hope now than I did six months ago, because of all of this talk about extinction events and Hugging Face and getting into the Australian civil service by mistake. I feel that people will be willing to look at the intimate as well as the non-intimate costs.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.