Sherry Turkle Doesn't Buy the Promise of a Perfect Machine

Sherry Turkle (0:00)

I assigned Proust in one of my classes on Things and Thinking. I assigned the chapter where his memory is sparked by dipping cookie into tea. And my students don't read it, they put it into ChatGPT, it makes a podcast of it, so they can tell you what it said, but never have the experience of really reading Proust.

Kara Swisher (0:38)

Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Sherry Turkle, a leading expert on how humans relate to digital objects. She's the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and has written a number of bestselling books, including Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Her latest book is Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, which is out September 29th.

I think Sherry is one of the greatest researchers in this area. I have known her for decades and decades, and she was one of the first people to talk about the deleterious effects of getting too close to machines and actually chronicling it, and is very interested in how humans do interact with them. It's a really important question right now.

Our expert question today comes from Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and author of the book On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in the Age of Fear. So stick around.

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Kara Swisher (3:11)

Sherry, thanks for coming on On.

Sherry Turkle (3:13)

I'm delighted to be here.

Kara Swisher (3:15)

So last time we talked, I was doing a CNN series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and we were having tea in Boston.

SPEAKER_6 (3:22)

Yes.

Kara Swisher (3:22)

Last time we talked. This is the topic we were talking about. You were already working on your book.

Just for people to understand, you started studying the effects of computers on human communication in 1984, the same year the Apple IIc arrived on the scene and when personal computers were still a relatively new concept. You recently described the evolution of your relationship with tech as a shift from attention economy to attachment economy. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that because you always explored the changing relationship of people with tech and especially focused on relationships. But talk a little bit about the progression.

Sherry Turkle (3:59)

When I talked about the attention economy to the attachment economy, I was really referring to our most recent shift, which is from social media to chatbots. Because with social media, you see companies struggling to keep you at the screen, focused at the screen, not getting up. I wrote several books about why that really was bad for us. Life on the screen, I wrote reclaiming conversation, I wrote alone together. I was trying to find ways to communicate to people that this was not good for individuals, and not good for politics. Now, something new and really more toxic has come along, which compelled me to write this new book, and that is you're being kept at the screen, not to talk to other people or do something that compels you, you're being kept at the screen to talk to avatars, chatbots, artificial agents that are trying to hook you into a relationship of attachment to them.