“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle
Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment.
Who — or, more chillingly, what — do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle never quite says, but the implication is of a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, but there’s nobody really home. Which is exactly what Turkle says the chatbot is. A machine trying, without much success, to be human.
A chatbot has no stake in the reality of humanness, Turkle explains. It can’t love, for example, because that kind of empathy requires us to be enclosed in a body and have a fear of death. The increasing ubiquity of bots mimicking humans represents an emergency for humans, she warns. It explains both our epidemic of loneliness and today’s culture of apocalyptic fear about the future of our species. Just as artificial intimacy is a misnomer, so it turns us into impossible creatures. Like those unicorns beloved by the very Silicon Valley suppliers of these artificial creatures.
Five Takeaways
• Simulated Love Is Never Love. Simulated thinking is thinking — a computer that beats you at chess has beaten you. But empathy requires having lived a life, and a program has no stake in the real.
• The Original Sin. Letting chatbots speak as “I.” The only voice that has ever said it to us is another person — and now that voice is going inside plush toys aimed at three-year-olds.
• Obsequious on a Slider. Telling a chatbot not to flatter you is itself flattery: you say don’t, and it says sure. A person has their own agenda. At MIT they’re building the slider anyway.
• Two Easy Markets. The very young and the very old. Her answer to “there are no people for these jobs”: take the money from one data center and put it into childcare for a city.
• Tech Sultans, and the Avatars of the Dead. In private they’re frightened; in public they give the speech. And mourning is how we take a person inside us — a séance that never ends is not a mercy.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: fifteen years after Alone Together
00:02:19 What is natural intimacy?
00:04:56 Erik Erikson on engineers and the inner life
00:06:13 Simulated thinking is thinking. Simulated love isn’t love
00:08:21 As-if personalities, and why people can change
00:11:10 Is the fully formed interior a modern invention?
00:14:36 Can’t you just program the chatbot?
00:16:43 Bots that break out
00:19:52 Keeping AI in its lane
00:20:38 The original sin: speaking in the first person
00:23:11 Robots, the elderly and the young
00:24:15 Two easy markets — and one data center
00:28:37 Is it technology, or is it capitalism?
00:33:38 Are any of the companies doing better?
00:36:00 What Steve Jobs did at home
00:37:31 Montessori, Waldorf and the parents’ phones
00:39:08 What are Sam and Dario really saying?
00:42:37 Tech sultans
00:44:24 Why this can’t be their conversation alone
00:45:14 Technologies of mourning
00:46:41 The avatar of her mother
00:52:38 Does AI tell us truths we can’t bear?
00:55:52 Prove you’re not a bot