Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines

From the bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation, an urgent warning about how our ever-increasing reliance on AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for the very qualities that make us human.

If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists—but when we allow AI to fill these roles, we accept as sufficient its mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. The consequences are profound and troubling: Technology, by offering to do everything, is teaching us that we neither need nor have the capacity to take risks, have hard conversations, struggle through uncertainty and insecurity, or rely on our own faculties and judgment. In the process, it is producing a generation more alienated, depressed, and lonely than ever before.

In Artificial Intimacy, Sherry Turkle—the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships—draws on vivid stories as well as decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture to present an urgent warning about what these “perfect” companions are doing to our minds and relationships. Tracing our new habit of talking to machines through the human lifecycle—from children’s earliest attachments to how we face death—Turkle offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI.

“A necessary exploration of what happens when we seek the comforts of connection over the demands of relationships.”―Esther Perel

“[Turkle is] the most qualified member of Team Humanity to call us back to our senses, and to each other.”―Jonathan Haidt