Is It a Relationship if No One’s on the Other Side?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Ezra Klein (0:40)

For a long time, the idea that we would have AIs or robots that we could talk to, interact with, integrate into our more personal lives, those fantasy, science fiction.

SPEAKER_3 (0:51)

You, I suppose you're programmed for etiquette and protocol.

Ezra Klein (0:55)

Protocol? Why, it's my primary function, sir.

SPEAKER_4 (0:58)

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Ezra Klein (1:02)

But now, talking AIs systems, it's mainstream. Roughly half of American adults are using chatbots. Many of them are going pretty deep with their AIs. Nearly one in five US adults have chatted with an AI that simulates a romantic partner. The results here can get dark. Google's own researchers have found some children are struggling to distinguish between talking with chatbots and now interacting with humans.

Beginning in the 1970s, the sociologist Sherry Turkle has been studying the relationships between humans and machines. The 80s, she predicted that computers would evolve into the second selves. Think that basically came true. Think of the smartphone in your pocket that you're always looking at. In 2011, just a year after Instagram came out, Turkle warned that social media might create a society where even though we're constantly talking to one another, we're in this strange state of being alone together. Think the data bore that one out too.

Turkle's latest book, Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, turns his lens on AI. So I wanted to have Turkle on the show to help me figure out what's going on now that the talking machines have very much arrived. What it means is how many of us are building these, I don't know, call it relationships, don't call it relationships with them. And what might happen if we keep going down this path?

Sherry Turkle, welcome to the show.

Sherry Turkle (2:28)

Glad to be here.

Ezra Klein (2:29)

So you studied a very early, very famous chatbot named Eliza. Yes. Tell me about Eliza.

Sherry Turkle (2:36)

Well, I got into Eliza, I just arrived at MIT and I was introduced to Joseph Weizenbaum, who said he wanted to see me. I was one of the few kind of people, psychologists at MIT. And he came to see me and he explained that he had written a chatbot, a stupid chatbot.

Ezra Klein (2:54)

This is 1960s, right?

Sherry Turkle (2:56)

He said, no, this was 1976

Ezra Klein (2:57)

Okay.

Sherry Turkle (2:58)

He had written it earlier, he had written it in the 60s. It was also known as the doctor program because he had written it because it was very stupid to do something that could simulate a conversation that people would believe was a real conversation. And that was the conversation between a patient and the kind of psychotherapist that's called a Rogerian psychotherapist. And the reason that was a good thing for him to do with a stupid program was that Rogerian therapist repeats what you said in a spirit of affirmation. That is the mode of Rogerian psychotherapist.

Ezra Klein (3:32)

I should know there are podcasters who this is primarily what they do.

SPEAKER_6 (3:35)

Exactly.

Sherry Turkle (3:37)

So basically if you say to a Rogerian psychotherapist, I'm so angry at my mother, it will say, I hear you saying you're angry at your mother.

So Weizenbaum was able to create a program. And again, there's a chatbot only because it was a program that chatted. But it wasn't a chatbot the way we think of it now with Generative AA behind it, you know, processing millions and zillions. It took what you said and essentially put something like, I hear you saying that in front of it or are you saying that? Something really basic and very stupid. And he did it to experiment with language processing and he was a computer scientist and that was sort of his goal. And he found that the graduate students who had helped him, who knew that this program didn't know and didn't understand anything, nevertheless wanted to be alone with it and wanted to be in a closed room with it and wanted to talk to it. His assistant, his secretary as he called her at the time, wanted to be alone with it, wanted to talk to it.

And he was delighted to find me, a psychoanalytically trained psychologist, to try to help him understand what that phenomenon was. And this was really one of the things that drew me into the study of computers and people, because it was really one of the first times that you really saw the seductive power of machine that talked.