Sherry Turkle
Professor at MIT and a licensed clinical psychologist who has studied people's relationships with technology for decades.
“Social media came for our attention and chatbots come for our capacity for attachment.”
The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
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".
Transcript
Very, very apt. You know, that there used to be attention hacking and now there's attachment. Yeah, our
kind of our whole facility for attachment to other people is being like manipulated. We are
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…
So I want to stand. Have
a relationship with me. I want
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.
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