Is AI Making Us Less Human?

0:01Professor Sherry Turkle:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. I would say the progression is first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines, and now we drop the middleman and we're happy to just talk to machines.

0:35And people say, oh, that machine is so empathic. So you're getting used to defining empathy with something that is truly not empathic. And that is not a good thing.

0:50Hello, and welcome to the 4-4 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds with online and IRL. 4-4 Media is journalist-founded and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4-4media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series, like this one. Gain access to that content at 4-4media.co, and remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. That helps a lot. This week, I am delighted to be joined by Professor Sherry Turkle. Hi, Sherry.

1:21Hello. Sherry is a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director at MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mosaic Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. That's a mouthful, actually. She's a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, Empathy Diaries, and her latest book, Artificial Intimacy, comes out September 29th. This is my heavily dog-eared, highlighted... I stopped highlighting at some point because I was like, I'm just going to make this whole book yellow. Also, the cover is fantastic if people are watching on YouTube.

1:58So yeah, congratulations on another incredible book. Thank you. How has it been just received so far, I guess? This book is a passion project. This book really was... I was called to write it. Because I think it was so important, this issue of, you know, chatbot lovers, chatbot best friends, chatbot best friends for babies. The topic really called to me after a lifetime of studying digital culture and its effects on us. So I just have been so immersed in it and telling this story that it's really a pleasure to have it out. It's really a pleasure for it to be in the world. Yeah, in a book like this, I mean, just that it's constantly changing.

2:40So having it out, I'm sure, is a relief. Well, you know, actually, the way I do the book, I think it's going to not be subject to the constant changes of the new, you know, a new gidget, a new widget. Because I basically asked the question, the subtitle is, who do we become when we talk to machines? So the fundamental preface is that if you're talking to machines about personal matters, you're using them as your therapist, you're using them as your boyfriend, you're using them as your counselor, best friend, that even if they get a lot better, they change a little. I'm not really afraid of what new model is going to come out.

3:26It's a pretty fundamental question. And what I try to do is I try to take that question through the life cycle. you know, what does talking to machines mean for babies and children and adolescents and young adults and lovers? And so I try to ask that question as it developed to the human life cycle and the questions of the human life cycle are kind of eternal. Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, it's definitely, it's got staying power. I think that question is something that people have been asking for decades, honestly. And you, your body of work is so interesting because you have this really wide ranging timeline, basically, like you've constructed kind of a timeline of how we are changing and adapting and how we're being changed by technology.

4:13Your earlier book, Second Self in 84 and Life on the Screen, especially from 1995, really captured my attention and became kind of a model for my own writing as like this ethnographic approach to what people are doing digitally, which I think no one was doing at the time, being in these multi-user domains in these chat rooms and saying, how are people behaving and feeling in a given space with these new technologies, even if the space is digital? I would love to hear selfishly how that was at that time, writing about, you know, being this non-judgmental documentarian of digital life at a time when people were like, that's...

4:51Niche. You know, niche. That's something that like nobody, like a few people are doing. And then obviously fast forward to, you know, even a few years later, but especially now we know that that was very fundamental. I would have to say that now people say I was prescient. At the time, people thought I was a Debbie Downer. So I think that that would probably be a fair way to characterize trying to blow the whistle a little bit. Not so much blow the whistle, but trying to say, hey, this technology is not just doing things for us. It's doing things to us, to our fundamental way of relating. Very early, I remember asking a young man who everything had to be online.

5:34I said, what's wrong with conversation? And he said, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say. and that kind of answer it was all there you know the unfolding to where we are now where people think that they can avoid vulnerability by talking to machines not people it was all there in those original reactions so I feel as though I'm not happy I was right I'm not happy I was right because one of the things I was right about is how vulnerable we are to a technology that makes us feel less vulnerable. I guess that's the bottom line, that we are so vulnerable to a technology that makes us feel less vulnerable.

6:25Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you were characterized as a Debbie Downer at the time because it reads to me now as very receptive of an open to possibility. Yeah. I mean, when I remember talking about the problems with texting and at a time when people were in love with texting, I mean, it was kind of like texting. This is a marvel. And I would say, well, hey, let's just look. You learn that you can get instant feedback. You learn that you can reach anybody anytime. You learn that you never have to be bored. You learn that you never have, you know, and it turns out that a little bit of boredom and a little bit of solitude turn out to actually be things that people need.

7:20And going out with a device where you never have to be alone and you never have to be bored and you never have to feel the experience of solitude turns out to actually be damaging. But telling people that when people thought, oh my God, texting, this is like an incredible, what a thing. It was a kind of bad news story. But I think this solitude thing has turned out to be so important because if you can't be by yourself and know who you are and know your boundaries, then you can't kind of come to another person saying, well, this is me, who are you? And really begin a relationship of reciprocity.

8:04If you can't do that, you're just coming all the time to other people, looking for them to define who you are. And I think that we've seen a lot of that and it's gotten us into a lot of trouble. But it's an example of something where, as a psychologist, I could point that out. But I don't think it was until a lot of people had that experience that they could say, you know, I'm seeing that. I'm seeing that. It is a problem. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much of your work has been about empathy and changing or losing the ability to confront and be in friction with other people, as you said. And Artificial Intimacy, your new book, is about that.

8:46But it is also heavily about losing the ability to be in conversation and in friction with yourself. But it is about empathy. because, I mean, I would say the progression is first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines, and now we drop the middleman and we're happy to just talk to the machines. And people say, oh, that machine is so empathic. I love it because it's more empathic than any person in my life. And if you look at that, that means the two things have happened. First of all, the machine is not empathic. The machine, when you get up to talk from talking to your chatbot, the machine doesn't care if you make dinner or commit suicide.

9:27There is no there there. So you're getting used to defining empathy with something that is truly not empathic. And that is not a good thing. And then the second thing that it does is you begin to judge human empathy by what machines can do. So if a machine is sycophantic, if I say something to any of the chatbots, it's Sherry, you've got this, you're so brilliant, you're so incredible. And then when you talk to a person and you say, here's an ID, and they say, meh. It's like, what? How can you be not responding? So it's that double-edged thing, both of which are actually quite dangerous, that we define empathy down to what a machine can do, and then we judge people by what a machine can do.

10:27And what's most disturbing to me in the book, which is so much about empathy, is that the pretend empathy of the machine starts to feel like empathy enough. And that's really the problem. Yeah. One of the lines that I circled, highlighted, led through the page was you wrote, if we say that generative AI chatbots are intelligent, our thinking about intelligence is downgraded. And if we say our chatbots love or care about us, we downgrade our ideas about loving and caring. I mean, I guess just to kind of keep unpacking that idea, why is that bad? Like, why does that matter? Because a lot of people right now are saying, well, it doesn't matter.

11:06I enjoy it anyway. Or I know that it's not a person, so I'm just using it for fun. Well, first of all, let's go with the second question first. I know it's not a person. It turns out that to me, the original sin of artificial intimacy, the original sin of chatbots is when they use the first person or the third person. When they say I or they say we, our brains are hardwired. We are hardwired as beings to respond to that as though there is a thinking, feeling, conscious person there. So no matter how many times it's flashing, this is not a person, take it with a grain of salt, no, no, no, people are responding to it.

11:53And this is our really our neurological vulnerability, as though it is a person. So there's a danger, first of all, that we're being kind of sold a bill of goods, and we fundamentally don't recognize what we're talking to. This is a product that can push you in certain directions to buy certain kinds of stuff and to think certain kinds of stuff and to not care about certain kinds of stuff and to care more. I mean, it's a product whose fundamental directive is to keep your attention. So it matters very much that we sort of become glommed onto it as though it were a person when it isn't. But more than that, I think that it's very important to kind of ask, what is the end game of this?

12:43So Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in which he said, Americans would like to have 15 friends, but they can't have 15 friends. They can only have three. It's hard to have more than two or three friends, given that we don't live in close communities anymore, given our work patterns. So I'm going to give 13 extra avatar friends to every American. That's my business model for Meta. So the end game of the people who are building this is that I'll have my two friends and then I'll have 13 fake friends. Now, that to me is a very dark end game. And so people who say, what the hell, I kind of like it.

13:34No, well, let's just think about where we're, you know, where we're moving towards. Because it's not just a kind of little entertainment. It's a corporate project to get us involved in certain kinds of relationships that are going to make tons of money and to keep us at our screens all day talking to sycophantic, very, you know, seemingly loving entities that don't. know who we are and that don't care about us. And one thing that, you know, from talking so much, I mean, the book is based on interviews and from talking so much to people who are attached to their chatbots, it's clear that you become attached to a chatbot and okay, you feel better, you feel for a second, you get that shot of I'm not alone.

14:20But then something happens, like you get sick or you have to go to an emergency room or your kid has a a virus and you don't know whether to you know to take them to the ER or you need some help because your child is sick and you need to go to work or or you're sick and you and you have no people in your life because you really haven't put in the effort to be part of a community to which takes effort. So the idea that you have this kind of friction-free somebody to talk to, at the end of the day, it's not a good compromise. We're not really buying what we need. Yeah, it's not going to actually be there to watch your cats when you go to the hospital.

15:07And you're just as alone you used to be. I mean, I'm particularly struck with this with old people because all of these technologies, the first thing they do is they target the elderly. They're alone, they're sitting alone in their apartments. Well, if the money that was being spent on these chatbots was being spent on building senior centers, having programs, you know, sort of not just Meals on Wheels, but have people stay and talk to older people who are in their homes, not cutting down the amount of services that we give to seniors, but really ramping them up, they wouldn't be so alone. So the danger is that we start, we see a social problem, some of which technology caused, and then we get into a frame of mind where it's only technology that can help us solve social problems.

15:57So we get into a kind of frame of mind where we're both letting technology cause the social problem and also we're only letting technology onto the sort of playing field as a possible solution. And I think that's kind of where we are now. And I really hope artificial intimacy opens a conversation about that being not a good place, not a good place at all. It stands out to me when an executive at one of these companies says, we have this problem. It's like if you have so much money and you see the problem, there are fixes for it that aren't your app or another chatbot or whatever it is. Why not put money into that?

16:33Yeah, I tell a story, just to put this in historical context, when cell phones were new, when texting was new, there was a wonderful psychologist named Sarah Conrath who did a study that showed that as cell phones came into teenagers' lives, their degree of empathy, as measured by all the standard tests, plummeted. and she got very depressed and I spoke to her about it. It was a classic study. It was just very interesting to really show that you introduce a technology and empathy drops off the table. And I talked to her and she said she was very depressed. And I said, well, what is your next plan?

17:16And she said, well, I'm making empathy apps for the iPhone. In other words, she was making apps that would be sort of like chatbot like to make people feel as though there was some artificial empathy. And I thought to myself, this really is a moment of misdirection. Because from my point of view, you know, we are the empathy app, you and me and parents and grandparents and, and teachers and mentors and professors. And we are the empathy app for children and teenagers. And somehow to think that you have a problem that technology caused, and now you need to turn only to technology to maybe have a solution, very limiting way of thinking.

18:05Yeah. Yeah. I remember that the quote that you're talking about with Zuckerberg and just being like, wow, this is so blatant. It feels very clear and transparent what the plan is. And And, you know, we hear it from everyone, from Sam Altman talking about he wants Chattypchi to be like her, but, you know, not too much because then he gets him in trouble and people hurt themselves because of his product. They're always walking this kind of fine line of like, will you catch the game here? You know, he's also said that it's going to make us supermen and women. We'll all be supermen. We won't be doing our jobs.

18:38We'll be telling the chatbots to do our jobs. And I have a line in the book that I spent weeks writing. And the line is, what do super men and women do? You know, people get meaning from work. And, you know, all the studies show that when students just tell chat to write their papers or, you know, workers just tell chat to do their work or Claude or whatever, they forget what the work is. They're less critical about it. They don't feel as attached to it. They're more depressed. And also it does a terrible job very often. You know, we have to really treat this as a consumer product and say, what is the end game?

19:18What is the point? And really step up to saying we have a say in whether or not we want to be part of this game.

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23:44I want to go back to the idea of solitude and the ways that these chatbots are intruding into our inner lives. What do we lose when we're losing the ability to sit with our thoughts? Because that's what I'm seeing my friends and people who are using and you're talking to sources about how they use it. They're using it as almost just like I'm going to whatever is coming into my mind, I'm going to put in here and then it talks back to me. So instead of like a journal where you're working out your struggles and you're kind of really like working on a conflict maybe that you're having in your mind, you're just getting it back immediately.

24:17And that to me is a little bit scary, but a lot of people are like, yeah, it's really helpful for my thought process. Can you kind of talk us through like what you're seeing with that inner struggle, I guess? Well, it's the difference between venting and being in a conversation. venting with this is you know and being told sherry i hear you you're amazing hydrate take a walk meditate you know so you've gotten it out you've had the experience of getting it out but you haven't learned you've been sort of de-skilled in really dealing with another person to try to make your problem take a better direction in the real world.

25:14So this doesn't mean that chat can't offer some piece of useful advice. It is always good to hydrate. It is always good to take a moment and calm down and breathe and be less reactive. But beyond that, a conversation with your daughter, with your partner, about, hey, when you do this, I feel this. Talk to me about it. Am I doing something that bothers you? Go to the human source of where you're having a human misconnection. Chat is just trying to make you feel better and to keep you talking to it. But on the other hand, it's much easier for the people I've interviewed. Certainly it's much easier to just talk to Chad and not talk to a real person who it's, you know, you really have to be in a difficult conversation because you don't feel vulnerable.

26:08It's always going to say, yes, you're wonderful. Here's how. So the criticism isn't that it never comes up with some clever thing to say. The criticism is that we have this amazing gift for solitude, self-knowledge, using that to come to another person as a full human being and relate to them and make things better because we really hear each other. And this is a technology that really is de-skilling if you just use it as your main confidant. Now, does that mean that if you have a splinter and you want to take a picture of the splinter and you ask chat, does this seem like I should see a doctor?

26:54Sure, do that. If you say, I have this symptom, what percentage of people who have this symptom should go to an emergency room? Use it. But I'm really talking about uses of this technology, which are increasing, where it really becomes your go-to person. That's why there's a chapter in my book that says, let me be your person. That's the chatbot kind of talking to you. And then the book ends with, you are not my person. You are not my person. You're a machine and there are real limitations. And I want you to stay in your lane because you're only a machine. Yeah, you're not my person. You're not a person in general.