Harvard Science Book Talk: Sherry Turkle, in conversation with David Kaiser, "Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines"

If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots that speak to us in a human voice offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists. As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones.

When we talk to chatbots in these roles, as intimate machines, we accept as sufficient what machines can offer: the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. We redefine human capacities for care, solitude, and intimacy in terms of what machines can do. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls the new culture of chatbots artificial intimacy, our new AI.

Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle’s decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture, Artificial Intimacy evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots. They can organize our calendars, plan our travel, or analyze our stock picks, all with an efficiency that outstrips what a person might do.

And then, they promise to be more—to be our “perfect” companion. They will always be there for us, listen to us, and support us—and ask for nothing in return. But these intimate machines, warns Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed, and lonely than ever before. More than that, we become less equipped to reverse course—machine relationships do not offer practice for getting along with people.

Artificial Intimacy is unique in how it traces our new habit of talking to machines through the lifecycle—from children’s earliest attachments to how we face death. But technology, by offering to do everything, teaches us that we neither need nor have the capacity to take risks, have hard conversations, struggle through uncertainty or insecurity, or rely on our own faculties and judgment.

Turkle has spent decades studying how digital technologies isolate us from one another. Now, in her long-awaited follow-up to Reclaiming Conversation, she offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A leading expert in humans’ relationship with digital objects, she continues to revolutionize our understanding of the role of technology on psychology and culture. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Turkle’s most recent book is Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk To Machines (Little, Brown September 29, 2026) and is available for preorder now. Turkle  is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, the Harvard Centennial Medal, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Photo Credit: Justin Kaneps

David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is the author of several award-winning books on the history of modern physics, including Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011). His latest book is Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Alan Guth in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute (CTP-LI), and has also designed and helped to conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement were featured in a documentary film, “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle,” which premiered on US Public Television stations in 2019.

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