“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.”
Life With Machines · Tech Criticism & Accountability · October 2026
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.
Transcript
They won't 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,
isn't every generation of kids 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,
I really want to pause on this question. I think it's so important. I have been studying technology and the human heart for 40 years. I came to MIT as a baby professor. And I always saw pros and cons. I always saw the excitement of a new kind of cognition when kids learn to program. I saw the possibility for new experimentation online with, I called it, that online life could be an identity workshop. You know, I really have tried to see and appreciate the range of effects that technology has on our intimate life. But never have I, and I saw the erosion of conversation. 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 doesn't know love or loss or fear of death or fear of illness or joy or sex or none of that. We are dehumanizing ourselves. We will become so profoundly other. You know, you think of kind of like a kind of cultural autism. I mean, I don't even know what metaphors to draw on because we're performing the experiment. And I'm saying we cannot perform this experiment on ourselves. So, I mean, I really do see, you know, there's been pundits, there's been back and forth, there's been how much texting, how much talking, how much screens, at what age? I think this is really different because, and I mean, just to end this rant. You
have freedom to grant. Yeah, well,
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. That, Baruchunda, you want to have 15 friends, but you can't have 15 friends. The world, you know, social life is so difficult. Travel, people aren't around for you, work. You can have three friends, and the other 12 he is going to give you as chatbots that are perfectly designed to hook you in to be the kind of people you would want to talk to. And then he says, that's my business plan. I mean, I give credit. To Mark Zuckerberg, he actually says what he's thinking. I mean, he's, you know, kind of like, and that is the end game of these objects. And so I really don't think that, you know, I feel I have the credibility because through this journey that I've made with technology and the self, I've kind of never cried, wolf. I've never cried, the sky is falling. And now I'm at a point where I'm saying, look, you don't want your child raised. You don't want your child having their baby best friend, a chatbot. Their toddler best friend, their adolescent best friend, you don't want it to be a chatbot. There's no end game that's good.
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, to be a self, to be at all, is a result of all of this chain of relationships with other living beings.