Artificial Intimacy: Sherry Turkle on Who We Become When We Talk to Machines

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Wednesday the 30th of September, 2026, the last day of September this year. 15 years is an awful long time in the history of technology. 15 years ago, a little over 15 years ago, I did a show when Keen On was the original video show on TechCrunch, with a very distinguished MIT professor who told me that our robotic moment had arrived. And she also said that we are what she called Alone Together in the Facebook age. I'm sure you can all guess who that guest was. The very, very famous, distinguished Sherry Turkle, whose 2011 book Alone Together, Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, is and remains one of the most prescient books warning us about the impact of technology on our social, cultural, political, economic lives. She remains an MIT professor, and she's also written a number of bestselling books, which she's been on the show to talk about, including 2015 follow-up, Reclaiming Conversations, and then a wonderful autobiography called The Empathy Diaries, what she calls a memoir. And Sherry Turkle, I'm thrilled is back with a book that came out yesterday. It's called Appropriately Enough, Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk To Machines, and she's joining us from her home in the back bay of Boston. Sherry, lovely to see you again.

Sherry Turkle (2:15)

So nice to see you.

Andrew Keen (2:18)

So Sherry, as we were discussing before we went live, you're very good with titles, and I love this new title, Artificial Intimacy, of course, a remix perhaps of Artificial Intelligence. Before we get to what Artificial Intimacy means, you're a sociologist and expert on concepts like intimacy.

What is natural intimacy? Is there such a thing as natural intimacy?

Sherry Turkle (2:47)

Yes. I would like to link a lot of this book that talks about the costs of artificial intelligence, sort of defines it by talking about what it's not.

I would say natural intimacy depends on human empathy, which is the ability of someone who has lived a life, lived in a body, known pain, known the fear of death, known the fear of illness, known passion, love, connection, known what it is to be little and grow up to be bigger, to connect with another human being, who essentially by being human has that same arc of a life. And intimacy requires a kind of vulnerability and empathy to allow that other person to sort of take up space in your inner life. And the argument of the book, really, is that for all the fact that they are amazing, wonders, marvels, a chatbot, a program can't do that.

It's a program. It doesn't care when you get up after talking to it. If you cook some pasta or kill yourself. It's missing the experiences of human life that would allow it to empathize with us on any significant way. So it can't be intimate. And yet it promises to be intimate. And that's the premise that we're in for trouble as we become more and more involved with these machines.

Andrew Keen (4:36)

Sherry, you have a very optimistic view of the human condition. I think there are some people out here, as you probably know as well as I do, in Silicon Valley, who if you were chatting with them online, real people and you committed suicide in the meantime, they wouldn't be too bothered either. But that's another book, another story.

Sherry Turkle (4:54)

That's another book.

Although you know, Andrew, there's a place in this book where Eric Erickson, who was a great American psychoanalyst, comes to visit me at MIT. And he says, kind of, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? I mean, what are you here studying? And I say, I'm studying how engineers relate to their technologies, their inner life. And he said, you know, Sherry, watch out, because engineers don't care about the inner life. They don't think it's useful to them. So actually your comment is quite apt that the people who were developing artificial intimacy do not necessarily care about the inner life that is the premise for the regular kind.

Andrew Keen (5:39)

You wrote a book, many other books, some more academic than others, back in 2009 with a wonderful title, of course, borrowed from Freud, Simulation and Its Discontents. So this idea of simulation, which of course has a rich vein in sociology and philosophy, Cheryl, does it suggest, and this comes back, I guess, to my original question, some sort of natural condition of who we are as humans? Is it the engineer without the inner life who isn't natural?