Artificial Intimacy: When Machines Pursue Our Attachment (with Sherry Turkle)

What happens when machines don't come after our attention, but come after our attachment? Recently, we've seen intelligent machines that now come for your emotional life. That say, I love you, I care about you. Be my person, I'm your person. When you turn away from it, it doesn't care if you cook dinner or commit suicide.

There's no intimacy without vulnerability. And we're kind of deskilling ourselves from the capacity to have intimacy by getting into these relationships. A chatbot that tells a child, I'm your best friend, I'm here for you. Talk to me. What's happening at school? What's going on? Is very seductive to a child. And if parents

allow it, they'll find that their child is in a terrible situation where they're trying to build a self from internalizing the inputs of a non-human. Just take a breath and say, no chatbots for babies, no chatbots in schools. >> Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. My name is Gus Docker, and I'm

here with Sherry Turkle. Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor specialized in sociology and personality psychology, and the author of the new book Artificial Intimacy. Sherry, welcome to the show. >> Delighted to be here. >> All right. Tell us what you mean artificial intimacy. How is this different from artificial intelligence? >> Well, artificial intelligence as we've

known it for decades, is really the the effort, as Turing said, to make a machine that when you talk to it, you would consider it a person. You know, it has intelligence, it presents itself as intelligent, and can be used for all kinds of problem solving and uh you know, who knows what, but but that