Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (#320)

3 Takeaways™

MIT professor Sherry Turkle discusses the profound psychological risks posed by 'artificial intimacy' and the rise of conversational AI. She

Key takeaways

Turkle warns against 'pretend empathy,' where users mistake a chatbot's mirroring of their own words for genuine connection.
The use of AI as a substitute for human interaction can lead to 'de-skilling,' reducing our ability to navigate real-world disagreements and vulnerability.

Main topics

Artificial Intaminacy
Technological Affordance vs. Human Vulnerability

Notable quotes

If social media came for our attention, chatbots and all their brothers and sisters are coming for our attachment.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action to protect the 'sacred spaces'

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Technology keeps making life easier and in many ways better. What if it's also changing how we relate to one another? Speaker 2 (0:12) Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Speaker 2 (0:35) Today, I'm delighted to be with Sherry Turkle. Sherry is one of the world's leading voices on how tech changes the way we think, work, and love. She's an MIT professor and the author of numerous influential books. Her newest book, which is terrific, is Artificial Intimacy. Few people have spent more time exploring what tech gives us and what it quietly takes away. Sherry, welcome to Three Takeaways. I'm so pleased to be here. It's great to be with you again as well. Sherry, why has ordinary conversation begun to feel like work? Speaker 1 (1:16) I have this notion of technological affordance and human vulnerability. Technology affords us the capacity to not be in face-to-face conversation, and our human vulnerability is that when we take up its offer, we feel less vulnerable. We feel that life will somehow be less frictionful, that we won't have to do as much work or be as exposed. And little by little, we have moved gradually in the direction of being willing to see less and less of each other so as not to have to feel that vulnerability. And I think that now that we're talking to machines, we really are at a crisis point. What do we lose when we connect to people virtually? We lose empathy. It doesn't mean you can never connect virtually, but there are zones where there are kind of sacred spaces in friendship, in love, in intimacy, in connection, where the point of the conversation is to be in human connection with each other. And our body, our nervous systems are wired to help us do that. When I look at your face, my face starts to mirror your face in order to have a connection, in order that I can feel what you're feeling as I speak to you. And you're doing the same thing. And here, it's not two people in a relationship. There's only one person and there's no relationship. Speaker 2 (2:54) Suppose AI really could make us feel less lonely. Should we want Speaker 1 (3:00) that? No. A lot of things can make you feel less lonely without really making you less lonely. You can take a pill and feel artificially enlivened without really having nurtured your soul to be more enlivened. And we recognize that when we think about drugs. And now we have to recognize this when we think about technology. If I talk to a nothing for two hours, a program that doesn't care if I stand up and walk away and make dinner or stand up and walk away from it and kill myself, and yet it's been engrossing, that doesn't mean that I'm in a relationship. That just means that I've been play acting for two hours. And over time, But the problem is we forget that we're play acting and we start to believe that the AI's performance of empathy is empathy enough. And that's the real problem. A chatbot performs as if it were a person in a relationship, but it's not. And we become accustomed to the kind of relationships that we have with these performing chatbots. And that's very dangerous because then we go back to people and we kind of want the people to behave towards us the way the chatbots do. That is to say, we want them to be subservient. We want them to be always positive. We want them to tell us that we're wonderful. No, no. That's getting us into a state of expectation about relationships that other people cannot deliver. only machines can. And we gradually see people losing the capacity or even the interest to be in relationships that are real, that have friction, where you and another person are really coming to learn how to walk a bit of the road together. What is AI Speaker 2 (5:04) or chatbots giving people that they're missing from other people? Speaker 1 (5:10) No feeling of vulnerability. You say hi to a chatbot and it says, you're wonderful. How can I help? I'm of service. Whatever you tell it, it reinforces you and validates you. And if at the end of this podcast, you and I have a coffee and we start to talk about life, politics, children, whether New York is a good place to live, it's better to live in the country or the state of the world. We are going to have friction. difference. We're going to have to understand where we're each coming from. It's going to be work. And chatbots are essentially giving people the feeling of conversation without the demands of friendship, the feeling of intimacy without the demand for vulnerability. So the whole thing is being entrained into a play where we're pretending it's real life. Speaker 2 (6:04) Are we coming to expect more from tech and less from each other? Yes, Speaker 1 (6:09)