Although it is from 2012, Sherry Turkle’s TED talk ‘Connected, but alone?’ is still the best summary of what tech is doing to us and our relationships. If you have some time this fine Sunday, give it a watch.
You see it everywhere now, people are glued to their devices. Even when we are together, we are alone. When I am out in restaurants or bars, I see endless couples or families all sitting silently, each person on their device. We all do it in moments of boredom or unease; we turn to our phones to distract us.
Teachers and lecturers tell me that when they enter a class now, where once there was chatter, there is silence, as all the students are on their devices.
The new age of AI promises to accelerate this even further. Why deal with the messiness of the real world and real people when you can turn to your always interested, always agreeable new AI best friend? They are there for you at any time, always ready to listen and validate your feelings.
Sherry has updated her book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, to take account of the new advances in AI.
Some extracts from the new introduction:
I was a young faculty member at MIT in the late 1970s when the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson visited to talk about engineering education. After his presentation, he asked me what I was doing as a humanist at an engineering school. I told him I was studying how computers change people’s ideas about themselves, and he made this comment: “Engineers, they’re not convinced that people have an interior. It’s not necessary for their purposes.” They see the complexity of inner life not as a feature but as a bug.
All that uncertainty, friction, ambivalence, pushback, all that drama. Who needs it?
Turns out, we need it.
When you reach out to make common cause with another person, accepting all the ways they are different from you, you increase your capacity for human understanding. That feeling of “friction” in human exchange is a good thing—it comes from bringing our whole selves to the encounter. When we communicate on screens, we distance ourselves from one another. We lose the ability to put ourselves in the place of others and negotiate differences. Intimacy and empathy are compromised, and civil society suffers as well.
This book is animated by my alarm about a flight from conversation—a retreat to social media and texting. But why would we do this to ourselves? Why would this seem so attractive? My fieldwork in homes, workplaces, classrooms, and schools demonstrates that what people most want is to avoid the “stress” of face-to-face interaction. To flee vulnerability, people in the 2010s mostly turned from talk to text. Today, in the flush of generative AI, we opt for even less risk and talk directly to machines. The urgency to reclaim conversation is even greater in the face of this seductive new threat.
Conversation is about more than information. In conversation, we reveal ourselves to each other in our conflicts, contradictions, and fears. There, we nurture our capacity for empathy by connecting to other humans who have experienced the attachments and losses of human life. What was a flight from conversation becomes the death of conversation itself.
These days, social media’s problems are in the news. It’s addictive and divisive, and it undermines the emotional growth of children. But just as we contemplate the first steps away from Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, we fall in love with generative AI chatbots. Social media was our gateway drug to conversations with machines. And now, we live as addicts poised to substitute one drug for another, using chatbot “relationships’’ where we once used social media. Our criticism of technology lags behind its seductive power.
It’s an old story, actually—one where technology creates a problem and then offers a new technology as its solution. But all of this was an illusion. When I first encountered social media, which replaced friendship with friending, I saw us in the cold, hard center of a perfect storm. We came to expect more from technology and less from each other. And now, with the intimate machines of generative AI, we are so much further along this path of being satisfied with less.
Silicon Valley is there to make money—by keeping people at their screens. Now the industry has a new claim: the conversations of artificial intimacy will finally “cure” loneliness by offering more gratifying and supportive conversations than people ever could.
I argued for this assertion of agency in 2015, and now I argue ever more fervently. There is more than a threat to empathy at stake; there is a threat to our sense of what it means to be human. The performance of pretend emotion does not make machines more human. But it challenges what we think makes people special. Our human identity is something we need to reclaim for ourselves.
That means making face-to-face conversation a priority because it is truly the most human and humanizing thing we do. It’s what has always allowed us to have common cause with other people. This preface is not only a warning against a new assault on conversation; it’s a reminder that our old tool works.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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