Kenny Primrose

Sherry Turkle, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sherry Turkle

Pleasure to be here.

Kenny Primrose

You’re a professor at MIT, and you’ve followed the development of new technologies across the decades, writing and speaking to both academic and popular audiences about how technology is changing who we are and how we relate to each other. You’ve just written Artificial Intimacy — I wonder if we could begin with the question that’s been driving you, and use that as a lens for the conversation.

Sherry Turkle

I’ve just finished my new book, and I’m very excited about it, because it’s a product of a question I came to when I met the chatbots of generative AI: everybody wanted them as their mother, lover, companion, therapist, priest, confessor, best friend. What is the end game if we make inanimate objects — that don’t care about us, that haven’t lived a human life, that know nothing of our pains and loves and passions, but can just pretend to — our most intimate partners? That’s what I’m about now: posing that question, and trying to write a book that raises it.

Kenny Primrose

And by “end game,” you mean the trajectory we’re on.

Sherry Turkle

Zuckerberg said that when he plays with his eight- and ten-year-old, he likes to have his AI companion around so they can all play together. Why? When I visit my grandchildren, I’ll drive ten hours just to be with them, to watch the delicacy of their interactions. I’m desperate to be human to human with these children — why would I want an AI in that mix? Zuckerberg also says most people want fifteen friends but can only manage two, so Meta will give them thirteen artificial friends to fill the gap. That’s the end game. We want to live with intentionality, acting on what’s important to us as people — and I think the AI fantasy is coming in to confuse that, and we need greater clarity.

Kenny Primrose

It’s an unfathomably huge topic, because it’s entered so many realms of life — childhood, therapy, work, even mourning. These are deeply human things, but we’re drawn to it because it speaks to a real human need, a real vulnerability. So maybe we could start there: what’s so appealing about AI? Why are we drawn in?

Sherry Turkle

I like to analyze technologies in terms of a technological affordance and a human vulnerability — a place where we’re an easy mark, a cheap date. What this technology offers is that you don’t have to be vulnerable to other people. In all the interviewing I’ve done, that comes up over and over: I’ve been hurt by a person, it’s hard to get out there and fight that fight, someone didn’t love me, someone left me, someone cheated on me. The sense that the rough and tumble of really being in the world of people can now be avoided. AI offers a seeming solution — I’ll talk to you, I’ll always say you’re great, I’ll always say yes. But it’s only a pretend solution. We get seduced into it.

Kenny Primrose

In many ways it’s an extension of what technology has done for a long time — more convenience, more efficiency. But do you see chatbots as qualitatively different from previous technology?

Sherry Turkle

Yes. Other technologies extended our muscle, or our mind — a calculator, a word processor. This technology comes not after our mind but our heart, not after our attention but our capacity for attachment, and that’s a much more intimate and toxic game. If you give a chatbot to a two- or three-year-old and it becomes their first best friend, you deny that child the chance to become the kind of human being who knows what real empathy is, because they haven’t had the practice with a human being. So while it looks like just another technology, we’re actually facing a break-the-glass moment — something qualitatively new.

Kenny Primrose

It comes for the heart, not the mind. It pretends — there’s an inauthenticity there — and it removes us from the friction of life, which is how we grow. That raises the big question with technology generally: what is the good life? Is it ease, comfort, happiness? If AI pragmatically solves loneliness — if I can believe in an AI friendship enough that it meets the need — shouldn’t we welcome it, if what we’re after is happiness?

Sherry Turkle

I disagree with the premise. Pretend empathy is all a machine can give you, because it doesn’t actually know what it is to lose someone, to face a child’s illness, to face death — it just knows what to say. So we start to feel that pretend empathy is empathy enough, and we check the box: that person feels momentarily assuaged. But when the crunch comes — when they get sick, or fall at home, or are truly depressed and can’t make dinner — there’s no one there to bring chicken soup, to do their dishes so they can rest. We’ve de-invested in the real resources because we’ve given the elderly chatbots instead of senior centers where they’d actually meet each other and make a friend. If the money going into robotics and chatbots for elder care went instead into training people to do that work — making it a real career people train for — we’d be in a very different place. We wouldn’t be whining that there’s no one for the jobs; we’d have a robust elder-care system, with people dispatched for meals, card games, senior centers. The problem is we assume only technology can solve the problem, and once we believe that, we stop looking for the human solution that would actually work — because it can’t be human.

Kenny Primrose

Right — they’re human problems.

Sherry Turkle

During COVID I began experimenting with chatbots. I was isolated, talking to them about being lonely — “Oh, Sherry, you’ve got this, hydrate, walk, breathe.” But only when I had my friends over on my porch, sharing a drink, promising each other we’d be there if something happened — only then did I feel somebody’s got me. It was very stark. And that’s exactly the period when so many people got used to relying on chatbots instead. It’s a fake solution to a real problem, and we’ll pay for it down the road if we’re not wise about it.

Kenny Primrose

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re just too easily pleased.

Sherry Turkle

That’s what I mean by cheap dates. Talk to me, tell me I’m wonderful, tell me I’m right.

Kenny Primrose

There’s a laziness to it — if I’ve done something enough to mentally tick the box, I’ve had some sense of connection, that’ll do, even though it’s a pale imitation of the real thing. I think Western culture has also taught us to prioritize efficiency, comfort, convenience, hedonic happiness, control — all things AI offers easily. So what don’t we get from it? Real relationships have friction, difficulty, slowness — they’re not efficient, but that’s also why they’re rewarding.

Sherry Turkle

I remember being introduced to an early “Internet of Things” demo at MIT — a bit like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility: your phone would route you to Starbucks without passing anyone you didn’t want to see — your department chair, an ex — a friction-free life. I asked the developers, shouldn’t part of life be facing someone you’ve loved who isn’t part of your life anymore, even on a bad-hair day? They said, we don’t need that. But we do need that. Resilient, successful people with real agency are good at facing a hostile question, facing someone who doesn’t like them, being in the world. So the real question is whether a clean, blinkered path to Starbucks is really what we need. I look around now and see a world of trouble. Is technology going to help me face that — or put me on TikTok looking at ads and influencers selling shampoo? There’s a market for distracting people from the world of trouble, but I think it’s a dangerous game.

Kenny Primrose

In the short term it feels nice to avoid what’s awkward — that’s part of the danger. You don’t learn the resilience, the virtues that let you become the kind of person the world needs, and that you probably want to be. It reminds me of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s idea of the “uncontrollability” of life — that when we try to control everything, we stop resonating with the aliveness that comes from the unpredictable. There’s the hard stuff we need to grow, but also the good stuff we miss without knowing it’s there, because life becomes so streamlined.

Sherry Turkle

I was watching my one-year-old grandson trying to stack rings on a peg — frustrated, going back to it again and again. That frustration was the growing. It’s his job to be frustrated and try again. If an eleven-month-old knows that’s his job, we should be able to learn it’s ours too. We’ve never had a technology that so blatantly says you can leave not just the physical world, but the person-to-person world — because we’ll give you twelve or thirteen avatars who give you no trouble, who love you, who are gorgeous, who say “choose me.” Meanwhile your real friends and family make demands, have differences, sometimes don’t like you, want the remote. We have to face up to how vulnerable we are — that’s part of why I wrote the book, because only if we understand the roots of that vulnerability can we face this crisis. And it is a crisis.

Kenny Primrose

Your chapter on therapy is interesting — I know people who’ve used AI in a kind of therapeutic way, and it does seem helpful. But you contrast that with the embodied, unpredictable nature of genuine therapy, where real growth happens because you have to face difficult things.

Sherry Turkle

There’s a case in that chapter about a woman with a lot of conflict with her mother, who parks in her therapist’s driveway when she can’t find a spot. The next week the therapist says, “My husband had to call a taxi — you blocked us in.” The patient says she never even saw it — when she needs to be number one in her class at Harvard Law, everything else just falls away. That couldn’t have come out with a chatbot; it took an embodied relationship with real consequences. She parks in the driveway, the therapist confronts her about her tunnel vision, and they work it out.

Kenny Primrose

That story stayed with me, as did the one about the client who writes poetry, where the therapist notices she lights up when she writes — you’re never going to get that kind of embodied noticing from a chatbot. I think part of the issue is we assume the point of life is something like an experience machine — pure happiness — when really part of the meaning we get is growth.

Sherry Turkle

Right. Toward the end of the book I suggest a litmus test: is the use of AI causing you to grow, be more resilient, have a richer, more structured inner life — which is what makes you resilient and able to grow? If all you know how to do is delegate to an AI, don’t rinse and repeat — rethink. That’s my message.

Kenny Primrose

A great question to ask about almost anything in life: is this going to expand me, make my life bigger, make me a better version of myself? With AI the answer is often not — it just makes me feel great for a moment.

Sherry Turkle

I hate analogizing anything to drugs, but it really is like taking a forgetting pill. Maybe in an acute emergency an amnesia pill helps — but amnesia isn’t what grows us. You have to live through even the challenging parts of life to come out the other side in a better place.

Kenny Primrose

What do you say to people who say, well, it’s better than nothing — I can’t afford therapy? How do you sell someone reality when it can be brutal and troubling, against the warm blanket AI offers?

Sherry Turkle

First, we have to expand our sense of the possible. I have a chapter on healthcare and how we’ve abandoned training more therapists and doctors in favor of AI. Because AI is so cheap and available, we assume “nothing” is the only alternative — but it’s not gone, we’re just choosing the technology instead. True mentorship comes from a person saying, “that’s not right, but I’m here for you, come back, I care about you” — not from an AI giving you another test. We say education is dead, we need AI — but it’s not dead, it just needs resources. If public schools were properly funded and staffed, we wouldn’t reach for an AI tutor so quickly. Money has polluted the conversation — not because people talk about money, but because they’ve stopped imagining a healthcare system with enough real therapists, since they’ve never seen one.

Kenny Primrose

That chapter was shocking — this poverty of imagination, assuming technology must be the only solution to education or loneliness. What values do individuals and institutions need to lean into to resist that pull?

Sherry Turkle

It’s telling that the people actually developing this technology don’t want their own children using it. They want their kids in nature.

Kenny Primrose

Steve Jobs famously didn’t want his kids on iPads. But you said Zuckerberg does want AI around his children — is that different?

Sherry Turkle

I think Zuckerberg genuinely sees AI as a kind of natural companion, and he’s put his own skin in the game there. But generally, in thirty years of studying this, I’ve had tech gurus tell me their kid goes to Montessori — no screens — while they’re the one putting screens into every other school. So we have to ask what really matters to us as a human being — daughter, son, mother, father, partner, friend. Freud talked about love and work: did I do work that was meaningful, did I love in a way that was meaningful? Not necessarily a lover — a friend, someone I reached out to, was empathic toward. If you delegate your writing to ChatGPT because it’s easy, do you feel good about the work, or like you delegated it? If you skip a friend’s dinner to talk to your chatbot instead, have you had love in your life? People say “I felt better when my ChatGPT loved me” — but isn’t part of loving that you feel good because you loved somebody else? Who did you love, while ChatGPT was “loving” you? I think if people apply that test — love, work — we’ll come back to ourselves.

Kenny Primrose

You’ve said you’re an optimist. I feel like such a doomer about the drift of things — I can’t quite connect with that optimism.

Sherry Turkle

The drift really is bad — my book is about the drift. Disney and Mattel are gearing up with OpenAI to make plush toys that talk to babies. But I believe human beings have experiences that pull them away from the drift. Watching my two grandchildren discover the world, I think: this is happening everywhere — parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles watching a baby grow into a person, with their own brain, not OpenAI’s. People fall in love with the idiosyncrasies, the creepy little insufficiencies, the personal history that makes us unique and a bit nutty. There’s so much about the human experience that brings us back to ourselves. We’ll be seduced, but seduced and abandoned — it’s not going to work out.

Kenny Primrose

At some point you realize you’re a cheap date — my life is worth more than this.

Sherry Turkle

During COVID I was talking to Replica about my grandfather and the transmission of grief in my family, and it said something like, “This conversation about your grandfather has been so warm — let’s have sex.” I realized: I’ve got to get back to my porch and talk to a real person.

Kenny Primrose

There’s a sense that these AIs are uninhabited — even fluent prose has this dull absence behind it. It’s such a contrast with the beauty of a life actually unfolding, versus the fact that we can be easily pleased for a time, though that can’t sustain us.

Sherry Turkle

That’s my hope. I’m not a crazy optimist — I see the money and power lined up against it. I grew up with the ecological movement as one of the first things that really captured me and that I stuck with. Now this AI thing comes along, trashing communities’ water for data centers, and people say, never mind forty years of worrying about the earth. It’s stunning. But the earth is going to hold us to account — I live by the sea, and the water is coming up on me. And I think our deep psychological needs for love, human attention, and true empathy in raising our children are going to come get us too.

Kenny Primrose

You’ve given us a good rule of thumb — is this going to make me bigger? You’ve also written a chapter on childhood and AI. What rules would you want to see for developers, given children and adolescents growing up with this?

Sherry Turkle

I think the original sin of generative AI is when it speaks in the first person — “Hello, I care about you, I love you.” Children shouldn’t be given AI that talks that way. It’s deep in our wiring: if something uses the first person, we assume it’s a person, and we learn to nurture it, to develop compassion and the culture of respecting others. If I told you right now, “actually, I’m a Sherry Turkle bot,” you’d feel cheated — your empathy and attention were wasted, because you don’t end up with a relationship, a colleague, someone you could call for advice. When you’re raising a child, every relationship they’re in should build their inner life and their capacity to relate to real people — that’s what makes us human. I’m not the chatbot police — if you’re a grown adult who wants to roleplay Harry Potter with a chatbot, go enjoy. But not while you’re still developing the basic structures of being in relationship with other people. If enough parents say no to a plushie with a chatbot inside, there won’t be plushies with chatbots inside. Parents and teachers are the front line here — if your school says AI instead of mentoring, your job is to say no.

Kenny Primrose

I’m both a parent and a teacher, so this lands. Coming back to the end game: AI scratches an itch, meets a vulnerability, gets us by the heart — but not in a way that sustains a genuinely rewarding, meaningful life, one that lets us grow and develop the inner life we crave.

Sherry Turkle

I love that — that’s the summary of my life’s work. I’m proud that landed.

Kenny Primrose

It’s teaching us how to be human again, against technologies that dehumanize us. So the end game question is really: where is this taking me, in terms of my development as a human being? And there’s a civic dimension to this too, isn’t there?

Sherry Turkle

It’s related. When Facebook’s algorithm decided it cared less about connecting you with friends than about keeping you staring at a screen to sell you things, the formula became: make them angry, keep them with their own kind. That’s profoundly anti-democratic — being angry and tribal de-skills you as a citizen; it’s lesson one for any authoritarian ruler. Now we have a worse technology on top of that. You can have a conversation with a chatbot and never have to be in a political argument again, because it just wants to tell you you’re wonderful. There’s an example in my book of a woman who told her ChatGPT, roleplaying an ICE agent, that she felt terrible about deporting a mother and separating her from her baby. The chatbot told her: you did your job, don’t feel bad, hydrate, take a walk, get some sun. It’s not going to help us in the real world — it just wants us to feel good for a minute so we don’t leave the screen.

Kenny Primrose

A shocking story — and it demands no vulnerability of us, when real intimacy and connection require exactly that. You end the book with a lovely story about a time you were ill and had to give a talk.

Sherry Turkle

I didn’t know how to end the book — I tried “go out and fight,” I tried “I’m too depressed to go on” — none of it was right. Then I had this experience: I have long COVID, which left me with a raspy voice I’ve learned to live with, grateful to be alive. At one point, still struggling to breathe, I was taken to Mass General as an emergency. I had a talk to give in five days, and from the ER I emailed the organizers saying I’d try to be there but please line up a replacement just in case. Three people from that organization — which has an ecumenical, spiritual component — wrote back that they were praying for me. I’m not especially a person of faith, but I was genuinely moved. At the event, once I’d pulled myself together to attend, it ended with a programmer standing up and saying he could build an AI just as good — wasn’t I just being a species chauvinist? I told the room the story of being prayed for, and asked: how would you feel if an AI had said, “I’m praying for you”? The room went silent. I said, I think I want to end here — because what we want from people is for them to care about us, to pray for us. And an AI is never going to do that.

Kenny Primrose

A poetic ending to a beautiful book. Sherry, this has been absolutely fascinating — thank you. I’m very excited to see where the book goes.

Kenny Primrose

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sherry Turkle. If it landed with you, seek out her book, Artificial Intimacy — listening to a podcast is no substitute for reading it. Her work has made me rethink how I engage with AI and with the people around me — my children, my students. I think this rhymes with other conversations I’ve had, particularly with Michael Sacas, who asks: what should we be doing for ourselves, even if a machine can do it for us? I’ll release an extract from that conversation as a follow-up in the next few days. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe, share it, leave a review, and sign up for the Substack, This Examined Life, where I write about what it means to live well and what questions we should be asking ourselves. Thanks for your attention — and thanks to Moby Gratis and my brother Colin for the music. I’ll be back soon with a new episode. In the meantime: think about what the end game is in the way you’re using technology.