1KHO 930: The Friend Who Doesn't Care About You | Dr. Sherry Turkle, Artificial Intimacy

Ginny Yurich (0:00)

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Hey friends, welcome back to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. Happy Monday. I have been looking forward to sharing today's conversation with you for a very long time. Dr. Sherry Turkle's books have influenced so much of how I think about technology, childhood, and our relationships with one another.

Sherry has been studying our relationship with technology at MIT since the 1970s. Her new book that launches this week is called Artificial Intelligence. This one is about how we're no longer just asking machines to help us do things. We've started to ask them to be our friends, our confidants, and even our companions. For parents especially, there are some critical things to think about here. We talk about children and AI toys, the importance of boredom and solitude, why real relationships require vulnerability, and what we stand to lose when we begin treating a performance of empathy as the real thing. This is one of those conversations I hope you'll listen to and then talk about with someone else in your life. We have a wonderful week ahead, so make sure you're following the podcast so you don't miss it. I am so thrilled to welcome Dr. Sherry Turkle to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast.

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and for an incredibly long time, probably like you listening, I've been a huge fan of Sherry Turkle. Her books are quoted in every book, reclaiming conversation, you see it, you see it alone together, and then I also have life on the screen, I have the second self, and the empathy and the love stories, which is your memoir. Fantastic books, I know this doesn't even cover all of them, but your work has been so influential, and you have a brand new book out, which has a very clever title called Artificial Intimacy. So AI, instead of artificial intelligence, artificial intimacy, welcome Sherry.

Sherry Turkle (4:13)

So pleasure, it's really a pleasure to be here.

Ginny Yurich (4:15)

Let's kick this off by talking about the fact that there's a couple things that seem new and they're not. One of the things that seems new is artificial intelligence, and you have actually been working at MIT since the 70s. You talk about you've been studying the social and psychological implications of artificial intelligence for over four decades. So this is not new. Scientists have been working on this for in programmers for a very long time. So there's been a lot of time to sort of sort through the ideas, but not in the general public too much. So that's not new.

Neither is the rat race for college. That's one of the things that you bring up in the book, that there's even back when you were applying for college, you talked about how there was a lot of pressure there.