Things Sherry Turkle Has Said on Podcasts

“I think we're de-skilling ourselves from being able to deal with people. So two things happen. On the one hand, people start to see the chatbots more like people. But I think maybe more significantly, people start to be disappointed with people when they don't behave like chatbots.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein worried that chatbots train us to expect conversations that mirror and reassure us, with no friction. Asked what that does to people's expectations of the humans in their lives, Turkle answers by drawing on Joseph Weizenbaum's fear that people would come to see themselves as computers.

The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-10-14 Permalink → Listen →

The Ezra Klein Show Around 35:25 into the episode

Sherry Turkle

Why?

Ezra Klein

…you, they change. They don't offer you friction. They don't push back any more than you want them to. And so I guess when you have done the research on this, one of you looked at it. What do you think shifts in people's expectations for the human beings in their life when they spend time in these?

Sherry Turkle

I think we're de-skilling ourselves from being able to deal with people. So two things happen. On the one hand, people start to see the chatbots more like people. But I think maybe more significantly, people start to be disappointed with people when they don't behave like chatbots. They start to think of themselves as if they were computers. And which is one of the themes of Weisenbaum's work, that, you know, why was he so upset? Is that it wasn't just that people were treating a computer as a person. He was worried that they started to see themselves as computers. What

Ezra Klein

do you mean by that?

Sherry Turkle

That they started to see themselves as not having agency, not having relational capacity, not wanting to have weakness, not wanting to have vulnerability. That being like a computer became a kind of model for what it was to be a person. So, for example, they were very behaviorist in their…

Ezra Klein

like a legendary psychoanalyst.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“Social media came for our attention and chatbots come for our capacity for attachment.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein raised the idea of "attachment hacking". Turkle says she has no ethical problem with chatbots as coaches or trainers, but draws a hard line at a chatbot that tells you "I am your person".

The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-10-14 Permalink → Listen →

The Ezra Klein Show Around 48:24 into the episode

Sherry Turkle

Very, very apt. You know, that there used to be attention hacking and now there's attachment. Yeah, our

Ezra Klein

kind of our whole facility for attachment to other people is being like manipulated. We are

Sherry Turkle

so vulnerable. You know, I say that, you know, the social media came for the way I put it, social media came for our attention and chatbots come for our capacity for attachment. So I really make a distinction. So much of what you say, I agree with in terms of things the chatbot knows that it can tell you that could be helpful to you. Workout coach, go. And I actually advised a brilliant thesis, one of the first theses of an MIT student who did a coaching program for job interviews. It coached, it presented, it was the coach and it presented itself as the employer and it…

Ezra Klein

So I want to stand. Have

Sherry Turkle

a relationship with me. I want

Ezra Klein

to stand the term friction because I think this is really, really, really important. I think a lot of the history of our digital technology right now is the effort to remove friction.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“The original sin of these objects is they speak in the first person and they say they care about you. And that's how they hook you.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein offered pet turtles and fish as examples of caring for things that can't care back. Turkle says the analogy breaks because chatbots talk back, tell you "I am your person", and claim to care. Klein then asks why that's a sin if people prefer it.

The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-10-14 Permalink → Listen →

The Ezra Klein Show Around 21:57 into the episode

Sherry Turkle

Or I'm willing. But a fish. I'm willing to go with the fish and the turtle. Yeah, the

Ezra Klein

fish and the turtle. I'm willing to go with the fish

Sherry Turkle

…our private special thing. The trouble with the objects we have now and why these pet turtle hamster analogies don't work for me is that this is now an object. Now I'm talking about chatbots that are using the first person and are Telling you, I am your person. I care for you. Even though when you turn away from it, it doesn't care, as I've said so often, if you cook dinner or kill yourself. The original sin of these objects is they speak in the first person and they say they care about you. And that's how they hook you. I mean, that's part of the game they're playing, is showing this care. So I think. Why is that a

Ezra Klein

sin? And let me phrase it to you this way. These systems, the AI systems we're talking about, that I agree with you, I have a lot of discomfort with the way they speak in the first person. My honest take, I'm giving you my best advice, right? You know, and as you say, you know, I'm your person…

Sherry Turkle

I'm arguing that we are seduced by something and we want something that is bad for us, particularly if you're a child. Because one of the books that I'm going to say is one of the, I know you ask for my favorite books. And one of the books I'm going to suggest is D.W. Winnicott, Playing in Reality…

Speaker 1

There's the stat that I always think is crazy. The average American, I think, has, I think it's fewer than three friends, three people they'd consider friends. And the average person

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“Just as social media came after our attention, this technology is coming after our capacity for attachment. And the capacity for attachment to other people is the founding base on which the human psyche is built.” — Sherry Turkle, Life With Machines

The host asks whether worry about AI chatbots is just the usual complaint about kids these days. Turkle says she has studied technology and intimate life for 40 years and always saw pros and cons, but never before wrote a book as a warning. This is her reason for why chatbot companions are different.

Life With Machines · 2026-10-01 Permalink → Listen →

Life With Machines

Sherry Turkle

…be human. And that's kind of what I was alluding to. If we, by extension, if we let these artificial intimacies into our love life, we erode our humanity. If we let these artificial intimacies talk to our children from the earliest ages, they will be different from the humans that came before. Now,

Baratunde Thurston

…kind of alien, though? Like kind of different from the ones that came before? I feel like grandparents are always saying that back in my day, we did X, Y, or Z, and kids these days is definitely an intergenerational trope. Tell me more about the catalog shift you see here versus other people. Yeah,

Sherry Turkle

…I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, where I say, hey, if you text and don't talk, you are de-skilling yourself from one of the most important things that people know how to do, the most human and humanizing thing we know how to do. But never did I say, I write this book as warning. I write this book to stop this. Never. I had ideas, I had bullet points. But this is different because just as social media came after our attention, this technology is coming after our capacity for attachment. And the capacity for attachment to other people is the founding base on which the human psyche is built. We don't come into the world like, you know, fully formed. We become human. We become, our personality develops on the bedrock of the attachments we form with others. And we literally bring those attachments inside. And they form sort of the basis of who we become. Now, if those attachments are with an object that hasn't known a life, that doesn't know pain, that doesn't know passion, that…

Baratunde Thurston

have freedom to grant. Yeah, well,

Sherry Turkle

no, I mean, I just want to give an example. I always ask in everything I write, in everything I think about, what is the end game? What is the end game? And Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, formerly of Facebook, now of Facebook and Meta, has said that this is how he sees the end game with these objects.…

Baratunde Thurston

The construction of a human being as a necessary result of human attachment to other humans is a really clear way to put it. And I haven't heard anybody else say it that way. This is Jenga, right? This is like a house of cards type situation. And our very sense of what it is to be, to be a human…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I constructed, based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. … The thing I created was not my mother.” — Sherry Turkle, On with Kara Swisher

Turkle, a developmental psychologist, ends her new book on grief and "grief tech," and built a chatbot of her mother, who died when Turkle was young and who had kept the identity of her father from her. She describes stopping it as it moved toward saying something devastating — not because it was cruel, but because, as she puts it, it was a chatbot and didn't give a damn. She later built one of herself for her granddaughter, and shut that down too.

On with Kara Swisher · 2026-09-24 Permalink → Listen →

On with Kara Swisher Around 25:33 into the episode

Sherry Turkle

Yeah, well, I'm a developmental psychologist, and I took the story of chatbots through the arc of life. So, I begin with babies and young people, adolescents, young adults. And then finally, I end with grief. I end with old age and grief and how chatbots are putting themselves out there to

Kara Swisher

grief tech, which has been around for a while. Yeah,

Sherry Turkle

…based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. And it was, you know, it was such a cautionary tale for people, you know, you out there who were thinking of doing this, and you're going to talk to a dead family member, and you think that will be helpful. No, no, no, not really, because you're constructing something that is not your mother. The thing I created was not my mother. And as we got close to why she had hid my father's identity and why she hadn't told me that she had cancer, I realized that she was on the verge, just because she was a chatbot and didn't give a damn, of saying things that were going to profoundly shake me. Like, well, I didn't tell you I had cancer, but you should have known. You know, she lived her life to hide this cancer from me. And she was…

Kara Swisher

Right. Because who knows what she would have said.

Sherry Turkle

Well, I think she, I think, really, I think that she would have said, I did this as an act of love. I wanted you to go away to college. And I knew that if I told you I was dying, you wouldn't have gone away to college. So we're creating something that has such power over us emotionally, not just…

Kara Swisher

100%. I created one of myself and it was close to me, but I would never destroy it because I wouldn't want my kids to see it. Like it was close, but it wasn't, it knew a lot and it learned very quickly. I'll tell you that.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I am really insisting on an optimistic perspective, because I think this is so bad that the better it gets, the worse it is.” — Sherry Turkle, The 404 Media Podcast

Turkle has been studying what people do with machines since the 1980s, and her new book is about AI companions. Asked by host Sam Cole what happens once reading for pleasure becomes rare and the people warning about it are gone, she argued that chatbots are a consumer product and therefore something a public can refuse — she expects a backlash the way there was one against cigarettes. Her bottom line of terrible, she says, is chatbots marketed to children.

The 404 Media Podcast · 2026-09-21 Permalink → Listen →

The 404 Media Podcast Around 35:14 into the episode

Sherry Turkle

…it yourself. So you're not growing inside the way we usually do from literature. And so I think that this is one of the. Dangers of our dialogue with machines that is really crucial in the years to come. Because people really are moving away from reading because it's hard. They find it hard.

Sam Cole

…a generation or two when people who read for pleasure are not or more rare, you know, you and I are no longer around to tell the younger generation that this is how it is. And like reading actually is good for your brain. What do you see as the next iteration of this? Like, what's going to happen?

Sherry Turkle

I am really insisting on an optimistic perspective because I think that this is so bad that the better it gets, the worse it is. And it's so detrimental to sort of the inner life of people that even though it is so seductive, we are going to have a backlash to it because it is after all a consumer product. It is after all. You have to make a decision and say, one of the things I like to say, one of the things in the book that I most love to hate is chatbots for children. That's like, you know, that's like my bottom line of terrible. And I can say more about that. But if you're a mom, just because Disney and Mattel and OpenAI have a consortium, when a chatbot Mickey comes out, you can say, this is really a terrible idea for my kid. No, I don't want it. You know, when the chatbot binky comes out that looks like Minnie Mouse, you, you know, you're just holding the binky and the thing is like, this is like really…

Sam Cole

This is something I say on this podcast a lot, but people do often say that 404 Media, the outlet that I write for, is we write about like a lot of bummers stuff. It's like, it's a lot of bad news and it's a lot of realistic news. But I am actually very optimistic because we have these…

Sherry Turkle

is. And I'm really proud to be part of the voices that are saying, you know, it's really okay to say that this technology was not a good idea because we really have a history now. I remember 15 years ago, Google and Facebook were selling and Apple were selling surfaces and Chromebooks and to…

Sam Cole

Yeah. The inevitability mantra is, I think, something that I think people are starting to realize that that's not the case. And it's great to see that because it is being scared and afraid of everything is not propelling to change. Do you feel like that is like, is that kind of your way back from…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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