Sherry Turkle
Professor at MIT and a licensed clinical psychologist who has studied people's relationships with technology for decades.
“I am really insisting on an optimistic perspective, because I think this is so bad that the better it gets, the worse it is.”
The 404 Media Podcast · September 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
…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.
…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?
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…
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…
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…
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…
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