Sherry Turkle is a licensed clinical psychologist and the founding director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self. Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, arrives on September 29.
In 1984, Turkle described the computer as a second self. That idea has flipped. Now, the machine creates a version of you, and you become the second self. This shift means time spent getting back to your life is constantly diminished.
Convenience over connection
Conversational tools like ChatGPT and Replika offer users a way to avoid the fatigue of genuine give-and-take. There is no fear of judgment or abandonment. Turkle argues this dynamic causes people to lose the skills required to interact with humans. Chatbots feel like a better option because disappointment with people feels unnecessary.
What happens when people stop caring that there is not a human on the other line? Turkle says the technology’s fundamental directive is to keep your attention. It matters that we become attached to it as though it were a person when it is not.
A corporate end game
She asked what the final goal of this trend is. The answer comes from Mark Zuckerberg’s interview last year, where he stated Americans can only have three real friends. He intended to let AI fill the demand for more.
“Now that to me is a very dark endgame,” Turkle said. She noted that people who say they kind of like it should think about where we are moving towards. It is a corporate project designed to get us involved in certain kinds of relationships that will make tons of money. The goal is to keep us at our screens all day talking to sycophantic, seemingly loving entities that do not know who we are and do not care about us.
What it means
Turkle calls this process deskilling. It is the loss of one’s own capacity for human connection and vulnerability. When you trade difficult feelings and conversations with humans for convenience and instantaneous feedback, you are forfeiting empathy skills at an alarming rate.
