Sherry Turkle
Professor at MIT and a licensed clinical psychologist who has studied people's relationships with technology for decades.
“A chatbot, after it tells you some story about its relationship with you, when you turn away from it, it doesn't care if you cook dinner or commit suicide.”
Future of Life Institute Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Asked why it matters that AI models only seem to have empathy, the MIT sociologist said human empathy carries real-world consequence, while a chatbot does not share the arc of a human life. She went on to criticize the idea of filling people's missing friendships with AI companions.
Transcript
…to us, if it says, Sherry, how are you? You know, the only thing we ever met in our evolution were people who knew how to do that. So now we're meeting something that is as if it were a person, and we're completely programmed to treat it as though it were a person. It's a very scary moment.
…for AI and we say, okay, maybe we have an AI that can pass that test or that can help us solve some problem. We mostly care about the outcome there. How is this different when we're talking about the psychological side? Why does it matter that these models only seem to have empathy, for example?
Well, you know, if we depend on human empathy because we live in the real world where there are real world consequences to what we say to each other, and the fact that when we say there's human life and caring and consequence behind what we say, a chatbot, after it tells you some story about its relationship with you, when you turn away from it, it doesn't care if you cook dinner or commit suicide. So there's, and why should it, since it doesn't share the arc of a human life or the living in the real that you do. So you can train it to sort of tell you a pretty story, but it is not there in your life to do the things that humans who care about you do. It forces us to look at our lives in a different way and say, well, what is the end game if we're all just talking to entities that don't…
If people want to do this, if they want to talk with AI friends or have AI relationships, why are they choosing to do this if it's so bad?
Well, you know, we do a lot of things that feel good, but that aren't good. And there's no question that if you're lonely and you turn on a chatbot and it says, you know, Sherry Turkle the greatest. You had a bad day. Your class didn't go well, but you're the greatest. I've got your back. You know…
What is the Turing test for empathy?
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