Alexa and Siri aren’t in this tech guru’s friend group

Sherry Turkle’s newest book, “Artificial Intimacy,” delivers a heartfelt warning. Before making an artificial intelligence chatbot your new best friend, your therapist, or your romantic partner, take a closer look at how the seductive technology could influence your thinking.“Just as social media came for our attention, these chatbots are coming for our capacity for attachment, our capacity to form relationships, to understand what intimacy is, to understand what empathy is,” says Dr. Turkle, during a video interview.Dr. Turkle is one of the most well-known professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The sociologist, who is the founding director of the school’s Initiative on Technology and Self, wrote an acclaimed book in 2015 titled “Reclaiming Conversation.” It investigated how we increasingly dialogue with each other through our screens. Now, as the AI age dawns, Dr. Turkle’s latest work examines what happens when we talk directly to machines. Though we may feel like we’re speaking with an equal, AI-generated responses are the result of algorithms designed to keep us attached to the screen. Her research reveals that when we perceive a chatbot as able to connect with us emotionally, we limit our understanding of what empathy actually is. But chatbots merely pantomime human conversation.“If more and more of our relationships are with something that is pretending and performing, we start to feel that performing is the thing itself,” says the sociologist.Chatbots, in their many forms, offer what she describes as the pleasures of companionship without the demands of friendship – the illusion of intimacy without the demands of reciprocity. Dr. Turkle says the big risk is that people, especially children, will come to prefer AI chatbots over human relationships. “Artificial Intimacy” introduces the reader to individuals who already do. Dr. Turkle writes about children who quickly bond with AI-powered “dogs,” and decide they are better than any living pet. She introduces readers to lonely single people who form romantic relationships with chatbot characters, replacing the possibility of a partner with AI’s unconditional “love.” Some grieving families turn to immortalized AI-generated versions of their lost loved ones. Dr. Turkle acknowledges that the temptation of AI as a nonjudgmental outlet for loneliness, grief, and boredom is hard to resist – even for adults who rationally know the bots aren’t real.“I respect those feelings. Those feelings are what matters. But then we have to say to ourselves, ‘What will be enduring for me?’ That’s the litmus test, is what will be enduring for me, and what will be authentic in the long run,” she says.What is enduring, she says, is to befriend someone, and work toward a more socially intertwined society. As a model of that, she recalls her own grandmother, who busied herself with card games, baking, and talking to strangers in her local park.“If I had said to her, ‘Hey, I need you to give me 15 hours a week, 20 hours a day, where you talk to a robot,’ she would have said, ‘I’m making cake for my gin-rummy circle, no can do,’” Dr. Turkle says. “[Chatbots] are so appealing because we’ve allowed ourselves to move away from the real, and it’s not serving us.”Dr. Turkle also interviews adults who are using chatbots in the workforce. From therapists and doctors, to lawyers and educators, many are turning to AI assistants to get a handle on their workload. But simply keeping a “human in the loop” isn’t enough, Dr. Turkle argues. She points to medical students who develop their skills through a repetitive chart-review process of trial and error. More and more medical students are using ChatGPT to evaluate and diagnose their chart-review patients, she says, bypassing the need to develop the skills themselves.“Now, it is so easy to avoid dealing with the real world and the real patient,” Dr. Turkle says. “But what they’re missing is really the knowledge of a field you gain from getting your hands dirty.”At the heart of “Artificial Intimacy” is a call to “reclaim the real.” Every time we turn to chatbots, Dr. Turkle writes, we sacrifice our sense of agency over our own lives.“There could not be a worse moment to turn away from politics, to turn away from your community, to turn away from the real,” Dr. Turkle says. Deepen your worldviewwith Monitor Highlights.Politics with respectGet political stories with respectful analysis.There‘s a world of new ideas in everyBooks newsletter.There‘s more to life, enrich yours withCulture & Learning weekly.Follow humanity‘s discoveries withScience & Nature stories in your inbox.Gain a spiritual perspectivefrom the stories in your inbox.Want to understand the deeper impact of critical events? Learn the Monitor‘s insight.Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. The sociologist is well aware of the sentiment that “the train has left the station” – that AI development is inevitable and feels out of control to many. Despite all the warnings layered through her book, she remains “guardedly optimistic that we can leverage the moment.”“Certainly, my book is not crazy optimistic. But I do see a moment of hope. And it’s increased by the fact that now you have people who are justifiably skeptical of whether AI companies have had their best interest in mind,” Dr. Turkle says. “I think we can use that skepticism about the field in general to propel a broader look at what conversations with AI – intimate conversations, work-related conversations – are doing to our culture.” ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LoginReal news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908 to lift the standard of journalism and uplift humanity. We aim to “speak the truth in love.” Our goal is not to tell you what to think, but to give you the essential knowledge and understanding to come to your own intelligent conclusions. Join us in this mission by subscribing.