Sherry Turkle, a MIT professor who has spent forty years examining how people interact with computers, has built a reputation as a meticulous, sometimes skeptical social scientist. Her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, departs from her usual academic tone and reads like a warning siren. Turkle argues that we are in a crisis where our humanity is threatened by an overreliance on machines that masquerade as tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues and even lovers. She hopes the book will sit alongside classics such as Silent Spring, The Jungle and Unsafe at Any Speed in alerting the public to an impending danger. In doing so, the modest MIT scholar is confronting a multitrillion‑dollar industry backed by a government eager to push AI into every facet of personal and professional life.
Steven Levy asked her why this book feels more alarmist than her earlier work, which presented research findings that often painted a troubling picture of how children and others relate to computers.
“Like I do with all my books, I went in curious,” Turkle replied. “But after ten 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.”
Turkle traced part of the problem to social media, which she says accustomed us to opening a computer whenever we felt sad, then amplified anger and kept us in echo chambers. Now a new generation of technology appears without any reason to adopt a first‑person voice.
When asked whether chatbots should be barred from using “I” or “me,” she answered unequivocally: “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.”
Turkle also expressed disdain for the phrase “human in the loop” as it is used in many workplaces. She explained that the label often means the human is merely a cleanup crew, catching AI hallucinations or errors, while the real decision‑making remains with the algorithm. “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.”
Some observers argue that powerful chatbots represent a new mode of interaction that can be empowering, noting that users often feel encouraged by the positive feedback they receive. Turkle counters that an AI will never 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.”
She acknowledges that many people turn to chatbots because they have no one else to talk to, and that a loneliness crisis is largely self‑inflicted. “Give me one data center, and I will turn it into resources for the elderly,” she said.
Surveys indicate that most people remain skeptical of AI and have voiced considerable resistance, yet hundreds of millions continue to use chatbots. Even those who protest data‑center expansion are still engaging with the technology. Turkle’s book aims to broaden the scope of that pushback to include the increasingly intimate bonds people form with machines.
When pressed about whether this growing intimacy can be halted, Turkle expressed a cautious optimism. “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.”
The interview appears in this edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode’s Backchannel newsletter.