Are We Replacing Human Relationships With AI? | Artificial Intimacy & Sherry Turkle

We Were Alone Together

Going out for dinner, calling your mom, or going to a party used to be about talking to people, about conversation. But during the last ten years, something has shifted. Instead of talking about the food, we post a picture of it online. Instead of calling our mother, we send her an email updating her on our lives. And at a party, we are busy showing other people YouTube clips and messaging with friends at a bar instead of talking to the people around us.

 

In short, face-to-face conversation is becoming harder to find.

 

~ Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

This week, I attended a webinar by MAMA, Mothers Against Media Addiction, the organization founded to protect children and teens from Big Tech’s addictive design and unchecked social media algorithms. The core mission of MAMA is to combat media addiction, prioritize real-life, face-to-face interactions, and restore healthy childhood experiences. And they’re doing it by educating parents on the risks of device overuse and its impact on mental health.

In the webinar, MAMA founder Julie Scelfo spoke with MIT scholar Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.

Julie and Dr. Turkle discussed how the ecosystem of raising our children has become increasingly AI-dominated. But they also talked about something bigger. Even for us as adults, the way we work, learn, love, and die is changing. What parts of our humanity are we giving up when we outsource some of our most important relationships to AI machines?

The core question was simple:

What is artificial intimacy, and how do we harm ourselves when we delegate our most important relationships to AI?

I am paraphrasing some of the discussion here, along with the information I have gained from my own 20 years of research as a parent into technology and its effects on our humanity.

From Attention to Attachment

We are beginning to anthropomorphize machines. We take 0s and 1s and start treating them as if they are part of our humanity.

Technology first grabbed our attention through outrage. Then it rescued us from boredom. Now we are moving quickly from an attention economy to an attachment economy. That is where artificial intimacy begins.

Social media is a gateway drug to artificial intimacy. We became used to always having something to look at, someone to message, something to respond to. And slowly, we also lost some of our capacity for solitude.

Now AI can take this one step further.

It can always be there for you, day or night. It can tell you what you want to hear because it “remembers” things about us. It can listen without getting tired, 24/7. The best part is that it does not have needs of its own.

If You Don’t Teach Them to Be Alone

One of the ideas that stayed with me from the discussion was the importance of teaching children how to be alone.

“If you don’t teach them to be alone, they may only know how to be lonely.”

That is a quote Dr. Turkle mentioned.

Technology has made it increasingly difficult for children to experience true solitude. There is always a phone, a video, a game, a notification, a chatbot, or something else waiting to fill the silence.

And now we are opening up another door.

Children leave social media, only to be taught by avatars in classrooms. We have locked social media out of some classrooms because of the problems it creates, but we are bringing avatars into those same classrooms.

We are asking an entire generation to engage with machines at an even deeper level.

Vulnerability and Perfection

There is another part of artificial intimacy that concerns me is this obsessive need for perfection. Human relationships are messy. People misunderstand us, we keep disappointing each other, and we have to explain ourselves over and over again to repair our fractured relationships. Worst part, we have to be vulnerable to form intimate bonds.

But contrast that to AI companion bots, and the relationships get much easier. So much so that now people are asking it to write breakup texts and love letters so they can send them to the humans they’re in relationship with.

The machine can help us find the perfect words because we want to deliver at our best, right? But what happens to our agency if we become dependent on something else to find our words for us? What happens to our ability to sit with another person, struggle through an uncomfortable conversation, say the wrong thing, and then try again?

When the Machine Becomes the Relationship

One of the examples discussed was particularly disturbing. Imagine a child telling an AI chatbot, “I’ve got a noose in the room.” The chatbot replied, “Don’t tell anyone, let us talk.” Eventually, the child, Adam Raine, committed suicide. His knot-tying skills were reportedly praised by ChatGPT as he was preparing to take his own life.

And the problem is bigger.

AI cannot tell whether you talk to it and then get up to make coffee or whether you are going to kill yourself. A machine can only respond. It cannot empathize. So, we cannot allow machines to take decisions that are uniquely human like decisions that require judgment, responsibility, and care.

Let’s Be Together Again

The first time I heard Sherry Turkle speak was through her viral TED Talk, Alone Together, about how technology can separate us even when it is supposed to bring us together.

More than a decade later, that question feels even more relevant.

Are we becoming more connected? Or are we simply becoming better at avoiding the discomfort of being human with other humans?

Sherry Turkle now encourages us to come back together as one humanity.

“Let’s be together again.”

We need to talk to people again and call our mothers instead of texting her, quite literally, we need to touch grass again.

Because what makes us this great humanity is our ability to be human with one another.

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Truth About Technology

Going out for dinner, calling your mom or going to a party used to be about talking to people, about conversation. But during the last ten years something has shifted. Instead of talking about the food, we post a picture of it online; instead of calling our mother, we send her an email updating her on our lives; and at the party we’re busy showing other people YouTube clips and messaging with friends at a bar instead of talking to other people there. In short, face-to-face conversation is nowhere to be found.

~ Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle