Sherry Turkle Doesn't Buy the Promise of a Perfect Machine
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What is Sherry Turkle’s “attachment economy” and why does it matter?
I assigned Proust in one of my classes on things and thinking. I assigned the chapter where he he his memory is sparked by dipping a cookie into tea. And my students don't read it, they put it into Chat GPT, it makes a podcast of it, or I mean it does so they can tell you what it said. But never have the experience of really reading Proust.
It's over!
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 best selling 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 twenty ninth. I think Cherry's 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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Is all
Sherry, thanks for coming on on. I'm delighted to be here. So last time we talked, I was doing a CNN series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and we were having tea in Boston. Yes. The last time we talked. And this is the topic we were talking about. You were already working on your book. And I just for people to understand, um, you started studying the effects of computers on human communication in 1984, um, the same year the Apple II. new concept. And 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 you always sort of explored the changing relationship of people with tech and especially focused on relationships.
But talk a little bit about the progression.
When I talked about the uh 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. And 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. Right. And it may on first hearing seem, well, that kind of feels similar, bears a family with them, but it doesn't. It doesn't. Because first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines. And now we're kind of dropping the middleman. And we are forming relationships with the machines themselves.
Right.
And that's a whole new ballgame.
That's a whole new ballgame because before it was either sex online or on it's with someone else, a person who exists. One of the things you said when we did that interview in Boston, and it's stuck with me since, is there's nobody there. These and you didn't like the word chatbot. Right. I say that to a lot of people when they're like, I like my relationship.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Sherry Turkle’s “attachment economy” and why does it matter?
0:00–7:19
2
How are chatbots engineered to become objects of emotional attachment?
7:19–14:13
3
Why does Turkle call AI‑generated empathy a “pretend empathy” and what are its limits?
14:13–21:41
4
How does reliance on friction‑free chatbot conversations affect boredom and solitude in child development?
21:41–28:38
5
What are the risks of delegating thinking and feeling to AI for personal and professional identity?
28:38–35:04
6
How does the rise of AI companionship intersect with authoritarian politics and loss of agency?
35:04–41:18
7
What legal and regulatory actions are being taken against AI companies for harmful chatbot practices?
41:18–47:53
8
What does Turkle see as the end‑game of a world filled with perfect‑machine relationships?
47:53–54:10
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from On with Kara Swisher
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