Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle (born 1948) is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at MIT and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Since “The Second Self” (1984) she has been the leading ethnographer of human-machine relationships; “Alone Together” (2011) and “Reclaiming Conversation” (2015) made her the conscience of the connected age.

Against artificial intimacy

As chatbot companions boomed, Turkle turned her long-running critique squarely on generative AI. Chatbots promise empathy but deliver “pretend empathy,” she told the Harvard Gazette in December 2023 — their responses are generated from the internet, not from lived experience, and AI does not care about the outcome of the conversation. In lectures and a 2024 NPR interview she described her research into “artificial intimacy”: relationships with bots that offer companionship without judgment or friction, and thereby train users away from the rich, demanding, messy business of loving actual people.

Her warning is developmental as much as moral: practice on a partner that never disappoints, she argues, and pretend empathy starts to feel like empathy enough. Critics respond that companion AI measurably eases loneliness for isolated people; Turkle answers that treating the symptom this way deepens the disease. Her book on the subject, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” is due in 2026.