In short
Sherry Turkle argues that chatbots and “artificial intimacy” are not a harmless evolution from social media; they create attachment to machines, reduce human vulnerability, and weaken children’s development, adult work/learning, and political agency. She rejects the “promise of a perfect machine” and says the core harm is the medium’s psychological design, not just occasional bad outputs.
Guest backgrounds
Sherry Turkle is a MIT founding director of the Initiative on Technology and Self and a long-time researcher of how digital tools affect human relationships. Kara Swisher hosts. The episode’s outside question comes from Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist and author.
Key claims
Chatbots “perform empathy” without caring (“nobody’s there”), using first-person language to trigger human social instincts and keep users engaged. They remove solitude/boredom needed for identity formation and de-skill people (e.g., doctors, lawyers, students). Turkle links chatbot intimacy to reduced agency and a risk of authoritarianism.
Notable examples
Students using ChatGPT instead of reading Proust; “grief tech” versions of lost relatives; AI dolls/companions for isolated older people in South Korea; Microsoft’s system generating Nazi propaganda; Pope Leo’s encyclical warning against AI answers replacing questions.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to the Episode and Guest
0:00 to 1:28
Kara introduces the theme of the episode and guest expert Sherry Turkle.
“I assigned Proust in one of my classes on things and thinking.”
Exploring Human Relationships with Technology
3:11 to 6:15
Kara and Sherry discuss how technology affects human relationships, focusing on chatbots.
“So last time we talked, I was doing a CNN series.”
Vulnerability in Communication
6:17 to 10:19
Sherry elaborates on the challenges of vulnerability in face-to-face communication versus interactions with machines.
“It fills it in because they're either lonely or they're, or I want to get to the idea of vulnerability in relationships in a second, but you open talking about this encounter with your granddaughter.”
The Original Sin of AI
10:22 to 14:00
Sherry explains the implications of AI chatbots using first-person language and the effects on human interaction.
“Because it makes it easier for them to sell you things, too.”
AI and Existential Danger
14:00 to 18:43
Discussing the implications of AI technology and the cyclical panic surrounding its potential dangers.
“I think this is how we get people to stay with us and also to feel in some way that what this avatar is performing is in fact enough to make you feel that you're in a relationship with it.”
Impact of Chatbots on Development
18:43 to 20:56
Exploring how chatbots affect children's emotional processing and development, particularly through boredom and solitude.
“So let's shift to how chatbots actually affect our identities and development.”
Friction in Human Relationships
20:56 to 24:46
Examining the significance of friction in human interactions and how chatbots create echo chambers.
“The problem starts when the chatbot talks in the first person and keeps you constantly, constantly involved.”
Friction in Human Relationships
26:18 to 27:48
Examining the significance of friction in human interactions and how chatbots create echo chambers.
“Before an attack shows up, it's already moved through the network.”
Friction in Human Relationships
27:53 to 28:05
Examining the significance of friction in human interactions and how chatbots create echo chambers.
The Limits of AI Empathy
28:05 to 29:43
Explore the idea that AI's attempt at empathy lacks genuine human experience.
“So it cannot have the empathy of the arc of a human life because it hasn't had a human life.”
Show all 22 chapters
Grief Technology and its Risks
29:44 to 32:19
Discuss the emotional dangers of creating chatbot versions of lost loved ones.
“Yeah, well, I'm a developmental psychologist and I took the story of chatbots through the arc of life.”
AI Companionship for the Elderly
32:20 to 33:58
Examine the use of AI dolls as companions for isolated elderly individuals.
“I created one of myself and it was close to me, but I would never, I destroyed it because I wouldn't want my kids to see it.”
Human Care vs. AI Solutions
33:59 to 35:06
Discuss the reliance on AI in caregiving and the implications for human jobs.
“Because I've heard this about therapy bots and old people bots and child care bots.”
The Dangers of De-Skilling
35:07 to 38:42
Investigate how reliance on AI diminishes essential skills and cognitive abilities.
“I mean, it's not every moment is not apocalyptic.”
Empathy Crisis in Technology
38:43 to 41:00
Analyze the societal implications of replacing human empathy with AI-driven solutions.
“So one of the things Elon Musk said, one of the many terrible things he said, the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Health Awareness and Meningitis
42:14 to 42:29
Learn about meningitis, its severity, and the importance of vaccinations.
“Fox News is streaming live on Fox One, bringing you the stories you won't hear anywhere else.”
Introducing Julia Angwin
42:29 to 42:44
Kara Swisher welcomes investigative journalist Julia Angwin to discuss technology and intimacy.
Intimacy and Authoritarianism
42:44 to 43:56
The discussion focuses on the crisis of intimacy and its political implications in the age of technology.
“isn't the same as real intimacy, but we need Sherry to give us the language and context for understanding where we need to set boundaries in this new realm.”
Chatbots and Human Agency
43:56 to 45:41
Sherry Turkle discusses how chatbots may undermine personal and political agency.
“Actually, I tried to end the last chapter of my book after I've taken you through the life cycle.”
Accountability in Tech
45:41 to 47:34
Kara and Sherry explore recent legal developments regarding Meta and children's safety online.
“and what we need from leaders, legislators and each other.”
Shame in the Age of Social Media
47:34 to 49:32
The discussion highlights the role of shame in community relationships and how chatbots affect this dynamic.
“friends, we'll give you 12 fake friends.”
The End Game of Technology
49:32 to 53:02
Sherry Turkle reflects on the implications of social media and chatbots on human relationships.
“chatbots instead of putting themselves out there to avoid judgment that can come with being vulnerable for another human and get shame.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I assigned Proust in one of my classes on things and thinking. I assigned the chapter where his memory is sparked by dipping a cookie into tea. And my students don't read it. They put it into ChatGPT. It makes a podcast of it. So they can tell you what it said, but never have the experience of really reading Proust.
0:38Kara Swisher:Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Sherry Turkle, a leading expert on how humans relate to digital objects. She's the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and has written a number of bestselling books, including Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Her latest book is Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, which is out September 29th. I think Cherry is one of the greatest researchers in this area. I have known her for decades and decades, and she was one of the first people to talk about the deleterious effects of getting too close to machines and actually chronicling it.
1:21Kara Swisher:And it's very interested in how humans do interact with them. It's a really important question right now. Our expert question today comes from Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and author of the book On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in the Age of Fear. So stick around.
1:48Kara Swisher:In the AI era, you have to stop cyber attacks where they start. So security has to be fused into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense. Cisco, the critical infrastructure for the AI era.
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3:11Kara Swisher:Sherry, thanks for coming on On. I'm delighted to be here. So last time we talked, I was doing a CNN series. Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and we were having tea in Boston the last time we talked. And this is the topic we were talking about. You were already working on your book. And just for people who don't understand, you started studying the effects of computers on human communication in 1984, the same year the Apple IIc arrived on the scene, and when personal computers were still a relatively new concept. And you recently described the evolution of your relationship with tech as a shift from attention economy to attachment economy.
3:48Kara Swisher:Talk a little bit about that, because you always sort of explored the changing relationship of people with tech and especially focused on relationships. But talk a little bit about the progression. When I talked about the attention economy to the attachment economy, I was really referring to our most recent shift, which is from social media to chatbots. Because with social media, you see companies struggling to keep you at the screen, focused at the screen, not getting up. And I wrote several books about why that really was bad for us. Life on the Screen, I wrote Reclaiming Conversation, I wrote Alone Together.
4:30I was trying to find ways to communicate to people that this was not good for individuals and not good for politics. Now something new and really more toxic has come along, which compelled me to write this new book. And that is you're being kept at the screen not to talk to other people or do something that compels you. You're being kept at the screen to talk to avatars, chatbots, artificial agents that are trying to hook you into a relationship of attachment to them. Right. And it may on first hearing seem, well, that kind of feels similar, bears a family resemblance, but it doesn't. It doesn't.
5:15Because first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines, and now we're kind of dropping the middleman, and we are forming relationships with the machines themselves.
5:26Kara Swisher:Right. And that's a whole new ballgame. That's a whole new ballgame, because before it was either sex online or it's with someone else, a person who exists. One of the things you said when we did that interview in Boston, and it's stuck with me since, is there's nobody there. And you didn't like the word chatbot. Right. I say that to a lot of people when they're like, I like my relationship. I was like, nobody's there. And there's no relationship. It's all in your head. When you turn away from your chatbot after a deep conversation about your innermost feelings, it doesn't care if you cook dinner or commit suicide.
6:05It's performing empathy. It's performing caring. And the story I tell in my new book is a very disturbing one where this performance of empathy becomes empathy enough for a lot of people.
6:20Kara Swisher:Right. It fills it in because they're either lonely or they're, or I want to get to the idea of vulnerability in relationships in a second, but you open talking about this encounter with your granddaughter. Can you spool that out? When I first began studying this, it was in the middle of COVID. And so I was living with my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter in a remote location, a really remote location. And the little girl, she was less than one, was trying to put on her hat, trying to sort of figure out, it's mine, it belongs to me, Can I get it on me? It was unfolding. And I talked to my family about it, and we connected really over these moments.
7:02And because I was studying chatbots, I asked Chana. And it told me this long story about her cognitive processing. And it struck me that it sort of wasn't Chana's fault that it missed the point because it hadn't lived the arc of a human life to understand why
7:22Kara Swisher:that moment was so precious. What it should be contributing, which we've seen in fictional depictions like data is always doesn't get it. Spock doesn't get it. Right. That concept is they don't understand it. You know, William Shatner as Kirk is always like, you don't understand our emotions. But here we're committing ourselves day by day by day to have relationships on a civilization wide scale with these objects that every little interaction shows are totally not up to the child. And there's nobody there. There's nobody there. So when you were writing about this 40 years ago, the relationship between people can be difficult and vulnerability can be difficult.
8:02Kara Swisher:In the progression of going from face-to-face communications to talking to each other through computers, why do people go along with this? Why do you think people move in this direction rather than face-to-face communication? Well, so much is going on here, but what I've seen really over decades is a gradual increase in lockstep with the technology of people wanting to avoid vulnerability. When I was writing about texting, I talked to a young man who said, texting is my life. And I said, what's wrong with conversation? Face-to-face says, conversation, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation.
8:45It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say. I mean, the conversation, which is the most humanizing and humane thing that we do to get to know each other. This was terrifying for him. My students don't want to come into office hours. People would rather text than talk. And now the least vulnerable thing you can do is talk to a chatbot that really will always say you're wonderful, that will always say you're fantastic, where there's no vulnerability at all.
9:18Kara Swisher:Yeah, whatsoever. And one of the things you said you noticed at the time was that many years ago you wrote about online sex activity, etc. It was sort of on the fringe, and now it isn't one of the things you are starting to notice. Explain that progression from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, when I began studying chatbots in relationships. I had to kind of advertise in laundromats, you know, for people who were experimenting. And most of the people were trying to sort of date their chatbot. It was erotic. It was romantic. They were lonely. Now, you know, the guy to the right at me of dinner is afraid his husband is going to be jealous of his chatbot.
9:59The one at the left is using it to write her love letters. I mean, it's become a universal phenomenon. And I really think because people are so drawn to relationship with no vulnerability, where they're always told that they're the best, that everything they do was fine. It's kind of a friction-free relationship.
10:17Kara Swisher:Right. Friction is the word, which is, of course, what tech people, you and I both know. They love seamless, frictionless. They love friction-free. Because it makes it easier for them to sell you things, too. Right. So you wrote in The Atlantic recently about the original sin of AI, which is essentially generative AI chatbots speaking in the first person when chatting with users. You described them, as you just noted, a companion that is always available, always supportive, and never judgmental. Talk about why this was an original sin and why they did it this way. Well, the original sin is using the first person, or worse, worse, the third person.
10:52We are going to do something together. Because people are wired that when something speaks to you in the first person, In our Darwinian evolution, the only things that ever did that were other people. So as soon as somebody uses that language, we're kind of cooked. It's kind of pre-cooked that we are going to respond to that entity as a person. And even when you go in with a kind of double consciousness, you know, I know it's a machine, I know it's a machine. As soon as you're in that I want to do this and you want to do this, it's as if you have forgotten everything you know, even the most sophisticated users.
11:31Kara Swisher:Or it's, I mean, last night I was trying out Muse. I'm not giving them much access to anything, but instantly I thought it was a person. I did. Like it was, I knew it wasn't. Yeah. But I was like, they were very friendly and helpful, like an assistant responding exactly the way if I texted one of the producers of the show and said, can you do this? Or what do you think about this? And it was quite good at it. So why did they build it that way? Because engineers and tech leaders love to push the idea that their products are just tools. And if there's a problem, the users are to blame. And of course, it's a cover your ass tactic that's been around forever.
12:04Kara Swisher:You and I are both familiar with. But why build it this way? Because this is the best way to do it, or they think they're being more useful. Give them maybe a tiny bit of the benefit of the doubt, and then don't give them the benefit of the doubt. Well, on the benefit of the doubt side, we are programmed to have conversations in which the other entity is using the first person. So if you want the conversation to be efficient, to the point, easily understandable, you'd want to use the kind of language that people are used to. That's the benefit of the doubt. But actually, the motivation is to keep you at the screen, that old attention economy motivation.
12:52Because when you're talking to this entity that speaks in the first person, we are programmed to believe that if we care for it, if we attend to it, it cares for us. And so the most compelling thing that keeps you at the screen is feeling that you're in a kind of relationship with this entity that's talking to you. You want the first person. It's the most powerful, intimate, get you by the psychology thing that they can do.
13:27Kara Swisher:Is it from science fiction that they pull it? Or where do you imagine it's just the natural thing to do, correct? Well, you know, I just finished reading Jill Lepore's book, and she's very smitten with the idea that so much of our new tech world and our new tech overlords are drawing from their childhoods reading science fiction. I think, having grown up with this community around me at MIT, that they know that this is the way to hook people. I don't think they're trying to make these objects sound like some boyhood set of books they read. I think this is how we get people to stay with us and also to feel in some way that what this avatar is performing is in fact enough to make you feel that you're in a relationship with it.
14:19Kara Swisher:And good for you. They always blame the user. Like it's the kids who are chatting and become suicidal. It's never the prompt because a person having that conversation would be jailed in many, you know, when you see of them. So now many top AI companies are soundly learning about the threat of AI agents and going rogue, bypassing systems designed by humans to control them, worried about their ability to lead people to suicide, these weird interdependent relationships. We did a whole episode about the worries this week, but the proposed solutions we're hearing from Silicon Valley tend to boil down to slow down or speed up.
14:54Kara Swisher:Talk a little bit about the moment right now that is happening from your perspective. Well, I'm a little cynical because this cycle of they're going to kill us. We've got to make them immediately. They're going to kill us, but we're in a race and we can't slow down. They're going to kill us, but China, you know, for many years that kept them on a very fast track. And then you may remember that at launch, they're going to kill us. The government should slow us down. And then when they saw how much money, the incomparable amounts of money that were to be made, let's just proceed. And then there have been these recent events that have demonstrated once again that this thing is, in many ways, out of the standard ways that we think about control.
15:50And so once again, they don't want to be responsible for these extinction events, as they call it. And so once again, you have, they're going to kill us. Why isn't somebody else taking charge of this? There is an escape from liability going on. But I also think two things can be true at once. We really are facing a technology where the insidious ways that it gets to us, both psychically, but also perhaps civilizationally, are genuinely new. It reminds me of the early days of nuclear energy, where there was a cultural moment when people said we have to control it. And this industry hasn't faced that yet.
16:32Right.
16:33Kara Swisher:Though this is not as controllable. Explain that for the average citizen of why it's different. You can stockpile nuclear materials. You can take doctors who clone out of the system, right? And put them in a special facility. So the irony of where we are now is the past two things that we've tried to control for good reason, by building special places for the work to be done, by putting up walls and walls around it, nuclear and bioengineering. We had strategies where we felt pretty confident of what kinds of controls were needed. But in this industry, and here I think the sort of tech bro loose talkers are speaking with a version of the truth.
17:24It isn't so clear you can have the industry if you don't allow the technology a fair amount of leeway to kind of learn from where it will. And as a matter of fact, that's the reason the technology didn't get released earlier. Microsoft had a system that was quite fluent. And it started spouting Nazi propaganda at the least, you know, which is like what it wanted to do because it had been trained on a part of the net. It had a lot of Nazi propaganda and, you know, it thought that's how people talked. So I would say if you want something to be so fluid that you are convinced it's your perfect lover, which is a kind of high bar, it's going to be unpredictable in many ways in what it says.
18:18And that really is in the nature of the thing. The thing that makes it, quote, great is the thing that gives it its greatest vulnerability. Right, or its greatest strength to bypass us. Right. So I think that a couple of things can be true at the same time. It can be really true that we're in a moment of existential danger. and it can be really true that these companies would like a lot of protection from liability.
18:43Kara Swisher:So let's shift to how chatbots actually affect our identities and development. You talk about all levels of age because one of the things I always say, everyone's focused on child safety. I'm like, it's all of us. You do know we're all addicted. So it's a bigger problem than that. But let's start with children. You've talked about how children interact with chatbots to process emotions and how chatbots, the chatbot serves as a mirror and eliminates the space they need to self-reflect. But as you say, boredom is essential to child development. So how are chatbots hindering that? Well, it turns out that two of the most understudied and undervalued moments in children's development are moments of boredom and moments of solitude, which are kind of related because usually these things happen when you're alone and you have a moment of kind of mind wandering where you're brought back to yourself.
19:34You need a sense of solitude and comfort with solitude, because that's when you establish yourself and its boundaries in a sense of, I'm okay, here's who I am. So that when you face another person, you can ask, who are you? So solitude facilitates relationship and mutuality. Keeping that in mind, boredom is a moment when the nervous system sort of resets and establishes your sense of kind of autobiographical continuity. It's in these moments of mind wandering when not too much is going on. Now, we are now in a kind of stimulation of children, where if it's not Facebook begging for your attention and distracting you and saying you never have to be alone, you could always have something new and exciting.
20:32And now a world of chatbots where literally it's not just doing something new and exciting, it's being given a quote, fake person who's going to entrain you in some kind of conversation. So you're never alone and never bored. We are robbing children of these two really essential experiences for their development. A lot of people say, oh, you know, the trouble starts when a program suggests suicide. No, it's much bigger than that. The problem starts when the chatbot talks in the first person and keeps you constantly, constantly involved.
21:10Kara Swisher:Engage without having any moment of a second, which renders young people unable not to have it near them. I was with one of my kids and they're like, what'd you do when you stood in line? I said, we stood in line. Exactly. Now, one of the things we just talked about, and you've written extensively about how the essential part of human relationships is friction, you know, playground friction, work friction, relationship friction. But with chatbots, the friction disappears if you're only fed back what you already believe, creating an echo chamber of one. Talk about when AI overindexes for validation and against that friction.
21:46Well, you know, friction has gotten a bad name. As soon as people felt that they could get away from it, they said, oh, that sounds like an easier day, you know. But actually, friction with another person, those moments of sort of stumbling and not being sure you've said the right thing and kind of struggling to see what another person is thinking. These are very precious moments that people use to get to know each other. And also, you learn to talk across difference. And you could say that never, ever have we all needed the ability to stay calm as we talk across difference now. And we are literally in the presence of a captivating technology that is de-skilling us in the ability to talk across difference.
22:35Kara Swisher:Let me read you something from the Pope's encyclical, the Pope Leo's encyclical. He's on my side, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Let me read this. The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time. As Plato wrote, the deepest and most important things are learned only after much time and effort by engaging in discussions with others, striking upon ideas and experiences together like Flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us. We must learn then how to exercise restraint in the use of AI and to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine, from the subtle temptation which renders human thoughts seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.
23:24Kara Swisher:I love that idea, the promise of a perfect machine. because it's the promise of a perfect machine that will stand in for a person. I mean, that's the full thought there, is that this perfect machine isn't cutting out, you know, a perfectly sized piece of clothing or a perfect architectural piece. It's cutting out a perfect companion for you. You know, Mark Zuckerberg recently said that people would like to have 15 friends, but they really, most people can only manage two or three. And the job for Meta is going to be to create these, this Delta 12 of avatar friends. And really the Pope is getting at that, that you're being offered perfect avatars that will respond to exactly your most vulnerable things.
24:16Kara Swisher:And even if they design them to be frictiony, you know, make them more argumentative to me or something like that. Yeah, but that's a new way of faking you. That's correct. I asked one of his avatars to be meaner, and they were. They were, but not too much. Yeah, but, you know, also you're in control. I mean, the thing about being with a person is that you're not in control. Yeah, you don't know what they're going to do. Yeah. So for somebody to say, you know, tell him to misbehave exactly the way you want him to misbehave. Right. Yeah. Back to one. Back to square one. We'll be back in a minute.
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24:55Thank you.
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28:04Kara Swisher:so anthropic is trying to optimize for empathy by hiring a philosopher to try to endow claude with a digital soul talk about what you make of this attempt and how far it can go to bring if not human feelings and moral reasons i i think this is insane myself well i think it's i think it's taking a bad situation and making it worse i mean i often say to my colleagues who were working on making pretend empathy seem more like real empathy is that this is an example for me of the better you make it, the worse it gets. So it cannot have the empathy of the arc of a human life because it hasn't had a human life.
28:50It doesn't know pain or loss or fear of death or getting old or feeling what it's like to hold a baby. So it's sort of out of the game of the things that construct a human life in the world. And no matter how empathic it seems, it really doesn't care if your garbage is picked up. It doesn't care if there's no water or the water comes out of the faucet green. It's not in this life. So it seems to me that the idea of trying to perfect a pretend quality.
29:28Kara Swisher:Empathy. Yeah, this pretend empathy. You're perfecting a pretend empathy. And that to me seems scary, not desirable. So talk a little bit about in your book, the encounter with your mother, a version of your mother. Yeah, well, I'm a developmental psychologist and I took the story of chatbots through the arc of life. So I begin with babies and young people, adolescents, young adults. And then finally, I end with grief. I end with old age and grief and how chatbots are putting themselves out there to... Grief tech, which has been around for a while. Yeah, to allow you to do two things. Create a version of yourself for future generations to talk to.
30:13And to create a version of somebody you've lost that you can talk to. So grief tech has kind of these two components. And I lost my mother when I was very young. And we had a lot of secrets. She kept a lot of secrets from me. And one of the things she kept was the identity of my father. And she never let me see him. And so I constructed, based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. Mm-hmm. And it was, you know, it was such a cautionary tale for people, you know, you out there who were thinking of doing this and you're going to talk to a dead family member and you think that will be helpful.
31:00No, no, no, not really, because you're constructing something that is not your mother. The thing I created was not my mother. and as we got close to why she had hid my father's identity and why she hadn't told me that she had cancer, I realized that she was on the verge, just because she was a chat button, didn't give a damn, of saying things that were going to profoundly shake me. Like, well, I didn't tell you I had cancer, but you should have known. You know, she lived her life to hide this cancer from me. And she was about to say, well, you know, I tried to hide it, but really, you're a smart girl.
31:43Why didn't you know? It would have been devastating, even though it was coming from a chatbot. Right. Because who knows what she would have said. Oh, well, I think she, I think really, I think that she would have said, I did this as an act of love. I wanted you to go away to college. And I knew that if I told you I was dying, you wouldn't have gone away to college. So we're creating something that has such power over us emotionally, not just when we fall in love with it, but when we create this grief technology without realizing what a dangerous, toxic thing.
32:20Kara Swisher:We are vulnerable. We are - A hundred percent. I created one of myself and it was close to me, but I would never, I destroyed it because I wouldn't want my kids to see it. Like, it was close, but it wasn't, it knew a lot and it learned very quickly. I'll tell you that. Well, I created one for my granddaughter to talk to of me. I did the same thing. And it started telling my granddaughter, you know, that I was the kind of person who would overstep boundaries because I was too emotional. I mean, and so when I stopped it and I said, why are you saying to my granddaughter in my voice that I was too emotional.
32:57It says, well, because you write about technical things in such a highly emotive way. Oh, they just decided. The AIs don't like that. They don't like you.
33:06Kara Swisher:You hysterical woman. Anyway, we talked a lot about AI doom and gloom, but I will say in a series that we were just discussing, I did on longevity, I did see a specific application with my own eyes that had, I thought, some benefit. In South Korea, AI dolls were used as companions for older people who were living in isolation. And I can't see a negative there. I didn't. I was hard. You know, I always try to find the negative. So are there good applications? Because these older ladies, they got together. They like playing. Dolls are a real thing, right? And they, you know, a lot of them are very religious.
33:38Kara Swisher:So it would read biblical passages to them. It would ask how they were, made sure they took their medicine. To me, this was like, okay. And then they don't have enough people to deal with all these older people in Korea because women tend to live longer, right? So caregivers are a problem. So talk about... Right. I will say this about that. Because I've heard this about therapy bots and old people bots and child care bots. There aren't enough people for the job. And I've done the math. And if the money we are spending on just two or three of these data centers would be spent on finding people to take care of older people, on building the appropriate facilities for kids and teens instead of shutting them down.
34:32We would have enough people to do these jobs. And what bothers me is not to get into a specific case of this particular doll might be nice for that particular person. I have no problem with that. But the larger argument that there are no people for these jobs and only a technical response is going to be able to help us. And that's the larger context in which one or another sort of interesting application, I'm good.
35:05Kara Swisher:So you think that rather than using these, all I was saying is it wasn't the worst use of them I've ever seen, right? I mean, it's not every moment is not apocalyptic. I mean, where I feel there's an existential crisis is with children. With children, right. I mean, they're, you know, children are trying to develop their inner lives. And they do that by modeling the relationships that are offered to them and the feelings of empathy and connection that are offered to them. And if there is nobody home in the relationships they're having, there's kind of nothing to bring inside. Yeah. With the old people, I thought, well, it's either that or TV and I'm going to pick that over TV.
35:48Kara Swisher:That was how I felt about it. So talk about how we're handling it. As we offload more and more and more of your thinking to chatbots, you argue in the book that it disincentivizes us from doing our own work. As I noted with the Pope, you don't have the spark, even when we're perfectly capable. It's like we used to remember our friends' phone numbers. We don't do that anymore. Although I can remember everybody's phone number. To quote you little by little, we become supporting players in our own lives. I know my grandmother's phone number. I know it by heart, right? Because I call there all the time.
36:18Kara Swisher:But talk about what it does softening your brain. Like we don't have to churn butter now either, right? We just buy it. But talk a little, although I make butter by hand, but go ahead. Well, I think in my chapters on work, I studied several professions. I talked to lawyers, I talked to writers, I talked to doctors. You know, I tried to get a little bit of the waterfront on how people were using AI conversations to, they thought, to give them more. But in the end, it was moments of more and lives of less because they felt de-skilled in the things that had made them feel that they knew their work and that they knew the work that gave them meaning.
37:03Right. So doctors who rely on AI for diagnosis, they felt that they, what would happen if they didn't have the AI? What did they have?
37:13Kara Swisher:Yeah, they were dumber. Yeah. You're seeing that in college stuff. You're seeing that in schooling, the cognitive abilities. Lawyers who the AI was writing their briefs. I mean, you see law case after law case where this gets pushed up to the point. They're so de-skilled that it takes them being before a judge for somebody to finally, on the opposition, to finally look at the brief and say, excuse me, you're quoting cases that never happened. Right, right. Which is, even if it was completely right. Exactly. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. For every time we say, oh my God, the AI is taking something off my plate.
37:47It's so fantastic. I feel liberated. What is the cost of that liberation in terms of your identity as a working person, as a thinking person? And in colleges, I mean, I would say in my business, people talk so much about AI and writing. And yes, student papers were written by AI, and that's really a de-skilling. But what about AI and reading? I assigned Proust in one of my classes on things and thinking. I assigned the chapter where his memory is sparked by dipping a cookie into tea. and my students don't read it. They put it into ChatGPT. It makes a podcast of it. I mean, so they can tell you what it said, but never have the experience of really reading Proust.
38:37That is correct. That is correct.
38:38Kara Swisher:Although we have had Cliff Notes forever, but yes. Yes, but it's kind of like normalizing the Cliff Note. So one of the things Elon Musk said, one of the many terrible things he said, the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. Now, I'm not going to unpack all his mental illnesses, but you've devoted a lot of time and thought to the sort of crisis of empathy, where we replace human interaction with machine interaction, and in turn, reduce our ability to listen and be responsible to the subtlety of being human. Talk about this statement he made and what happens to a society when empathy is not considered a virtue.
39:12Well, you know, not happy that the critique of empathy has become a kind of undercurrent in the tech world. And I think it started because computers can't do it. Because empathy requires not just a cognitive understanding, but a kind of creation, a kind of community, and a walking a bit of the road with you. I mean, it arguably is the thing that computers really can't do. and yet it's become the number one product. So there's a real tension that their number one product is trying to perform a human quality that it really cannot achieve. And it's not on the path to achieving because more pretend empathy is just better acting.
40:03You don't say when somebody's a world-class actor, well, now they're the person. No. So you have this moment where the technology industry has to convince you that, well, this empathy thing, maybe it wasn't so good for you anyway. Right, that you didn't want it. Yes. And they often substitute compassion, which they're convinced a technology can do for the empathy that they know it cannot do. Which is very different. Which is very different. A more cognitive idea. They call it a more universal idea that somehow you can be compassionate over strangers. You don't need to know them. It's more universal.
40:49And that's the kind of mind game they play, which is to critique empathy in order to argue that the thing that the computer can do is really the better thing. We'll be back in a minute.
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42:33Kara Swisher:Hi, Kara. Hi, Sherry. Thanks for inviting me to jump in. I'm Julia Angwin. I'm an investigative journalist. I cover technology. Of course, we all know in our bones that talking to a computer isn't the same as real intimacy, but we need Sherry to give us the language and context for understanding where we need to set boundaries in this new realm. And that leads to my question for you, Sherry. I just wrote a book about how to fight authoritarianism on courage, how to be a dissident in an age of fear. And so these days, I'm seeing everything through the lens of the rising tide of authoritarianism that is surging around the world.
43:13Kara Swisher:And so my question is a political one. How do we situate this intimacy crisis that you describe so eloquently within a political context? You write so beautifully that to me, human love is an act of self-summoning. When we express our love, we discover ourselves. And so that raises the question for me about what does it mean politically when we allow that self-discovery of intimacy to be interrupted? Does that encourage the authoritarian project? And if so, how? And what should we do about it? Thank you. Thank you for that great question. Actually, I tried to end the last chapter of my book after I've taken you through the life cycle.
44:06I try to end literally on this question of agency, politics, and chatbots. It's been a personal story that ends up leaving people with a less sense of personal agency because they're so busy figuring out what prompt will allow them to delegate things to the computer. But agency is something that encompasses a whole person. And they're also left with less sense of political agency, of really how to act in the world. And I write a lot about the desire for authoritarianism, or comfort, or yearning for authoritarianism. And I write about Hannah Arendt, I write about Robert J. Lifton, who talked about people want reassurance.
44:51Kara Swisher:Yes, they do. And a sense of not needing to show agency, and that that's the kind of building blocks of authoritarianism. And so I really believe that the relationships we've gotten ourselves into with chatbots are a building block for a kind of preparing us for authoritarianism when we delegate, when we don't feel that we're master of our own fate. I try to talk about the end game of all of these things. You know, what is the end game of spending your day talking to a fake person? And I think the end game is you don't get involved in the world around you. You don't get involved in politics. Right.
45:36Kara Swisher:And so you stay out or you have a coarsening of the political discussion with it. So then let's end talking about the prescription, how to be human in 2026 and what we need from leaders, legislators and each other. Meta has been in court a lot lately. I'd love your take on the recent Meta settlement over claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children of$17 billion. Not enough, but not a small thing. So do you feel like it's a start of some meaningful accountability? Because there's cases lined up behind it, especially in the realm of chatbots, children, suicide, even adults getting into these strange relationships and it hurting them mentally.
46:13Kara Swisher:It will be the start of something important. If we allow ourselves to kind of expand our vision away from the cases where the chatbot says something harmful, like, oh, you have a noose in your room, let's just keep it between us, because the chatbot is trying to maintain the relationship with the user as the most important thing. Don't tell your parents you're committing suicide. Let's just keep that our own private conversation. And if we expand our vision to the ways in which the fundamental contract with the chatbot is really undermining kids as they grow up, and we begin to really expand the ways in which that happens developmentally.
47:00We're looking for more people on the spectrum. We're looking for poor people who are open to authoritarian leaders. We're looking for people who don't have a sense of agency, who don't know they can act in the world, who don't have confidence. The more we allow ourselves to see the harms as being intrinsic to this medium and not just, oh, it says something wrong. There's a case where it says something wrong. We need to find another person who committed suicide to expand the case, that really this is a medium that is bad for us. You know, that's why I love bringing up the Mark Zuckerberg, you know, you can't have friends, we'll give you 12 fake friends.
47:39If that's the end game, that's where we need to be focusing. Is that something really that we want for ourselves?
47:46Kara Swisher:But these lawsuits that people, plaintiffs have succeeded in addiction litigation against Meta and Google by approaching lawsuits from a product liability angle, like what you're talking about. could it work against chatbots and AI companies? I'm hoping, but I'm saying that it should follow the theme of these lawsuits. And, you know, Section 230, which protected the industry against things that it said, you know, literally things that were content. It's an opening to get at the industry for things that are intrinsic to the product and to the algorithm. And you have to really find ways to argue that intrinsic to the first person with a 13-year-old is something very toxic.
48:32It's designed. Yes. I mean, OpenAI, Mattel, and Disney have a consortium to put a chatbot into every plush toy. So, you know, this is like what Sherry Turkle loves to hate.
48:46Kara Swisher:Yes, me too. I've had discussions with all those executives about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the worst idea ever. Yeah, it is. I was talking to one of them. I'm not going to say which one. And they said, why are you against this? I said, I'm hoping you go to jail for it. That's my goal is to put you in jail for this. I'm on the team with you and the Pope on this. Yeah, me and the Pope. I think most people are like, oh, you shouldn't do it. I'm like, you need to go to jail. That's my feeling. Jail is where I feel it's going to work. We're going to stop you doing it. Because it's sort of exploiting the fact that you can feel that you're in a relationship.
49:21And getting in early and getting in in a toxic way. That's where I want to see the lawsuits expand.
49:27Kara Swisher:Yeah. So there's a lot of talk about how our sense of shame has changed in the age of social media. In writing your book, you spoke with people who turned chatbots instead of putting themselves out there to avoid judgment that can come with being vulnerable for another human and get shame. Talk about the need for shame. And someone said this to me last night, there's no more shame anywhere. And shame and judgment are an important part of growth as painful as that might be. Right. Well, the thing about shame that makes it very interesting as opposed to disapproval is that for shame, you need a community.
50:00We talk about shame, really, it's a response because you're in relationship to a community that has norms that can shame you. Now, what I'm arguing is that chatbots have a unique ability to take you out of the community and give you talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, as though your community doesn't exist to distract you from the world that needs you. The world needs you. And you're busy talking to this thing out of the world. So I think by focusing on the need for shame and why we want to, again, avoid the vulnerability of shame, it's a different way into that problem of we need shame because we need to be in communities.
50:46And that is the only way that we are going to get the world back. Right. By being vulnerable. From people who don't seem to care. I mean, what's striking is that the tech developers, they've got to be the first generation of massive industrial developers who don't seem to care if progress happens on this world, the next world, with us uploaded or downloaded.
51:08Kara Swisher:Yeah. I say that to people all the time. They're like, what's their goal? I said, They don't care. They don't care. Yeah, yeah. And I go, no, no. Think about what that means. They don't care. But we need to care. We need to really care. It's not evil per se, but it becomes that way. But it's not caring is really at the heart of it. So my last question, 15 years ago, you wrote a book called Alone Together, which teased out the link between social media and loneliness. I mean, kids being in a room all staring at their phones, things like that. Considering where we are now with chatbots contributing to isolation, even more loneliness, I'd love you to say, what is the one lesson that people are not learning?
51:47We focus too much on content and don't want to look at the underlying toxic kind of psychological dynamic. And the way in which I try to force people to look at that is to ask this question about the end game. When Mark Zuckerberg says you can have 13 fake friends, 12 fake friends, it's going to make them perfect for you. What is the end game for Sherry Turkle if he does that? I sit at home with my screen talking to 12 fake friends who know that I want to talk about Jane Austen or know that I love Middlemarch or know that I'm what? Film noir. I mean, that is not a good endgame for me, that I'm at home alone sitting talking to my fake friends.
52:38And yet you have a business that's kind of predicated on that being what everybody needs.
52:44Kara Swisher:And wants. And wants. And so I think that I try to get people to, you know, I got some things wrong. I got some things right. But the basic thing that I got right is that these machines, it's not just the content of what they say to us. It's really how they're getting into our heads to change the kind of relationships that we want. And that's, I think, what I take away from the arc of my work. Sherry, thank you so much. It was my pleasure.
53:23Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Vicki Vergolina, Michelle Eloy, Catherine Millsop, Olivia Briley, Megan Burney, and Madeline LaPlante-Duby. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Alyssa Soep, Devin Schwartz, Catherine Barner, Bradley Sylvester, Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, that's one more human you're hearing from. This is not AI. If not, ask your chatbot to make a podcast about this podcast for you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.
54:04Kara Swisher:Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.
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From the publisher
Our relationship with the digital world is more intimate than ever before – and in her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, pioneering tech researcher Sherry Turkle explores the rise of AI companions and what they’re doing to our relationships and identities.
Kara and Sherry talk about how chatbots aren’t just competing for our time – they’re designed to become objects of emotional attachment. They also discuss the risky appeal of friction-free relationships, the importance of boredom and vulnerability to development, and what we lose when we outsource our thinking and emotional lives to machines.
Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
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