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I would say the progression is first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines. And now we drop the middleman, and we're happy to just talk to machines. And people say, oh, that machine is so empathic. So you're getting used to defining empathy with something that is truly not empathic, and that is not a good thing.

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That helps a lot. This week, I am delighted to be joined by professor Sherry Turkle. Hi, Sherry.

Hello.

Sherry is a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director of MIT's initiative on technology and self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mosse professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT. That's a that's a mouthful, actually. She's a New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, Empathy Diaries, and her latest book, Artificial Intimacy, comes out September 29. This is my heavily dog years highlighted. I stopped highlighting at some point because I was like, I'm just gonna make this whole book yellow.

Also, the cover is fantastic if people are watching on YouTube. So, yeah, congratulations on another incredible book.

Thank you.

How has it been just received so far, I guess?

This book is a passion project. This book really was, I was called to write it because, I think it was, it's so important, this issue of, you know, chatbot lovers, chatbot best friends, chatbot best friends for babies. The topic really called to me after a lifetime of studying digital culture and its effects on us. So I just have been so immersed in it and telling this story that it's really a pleasure to have it out. It's really a pleasure for it to be in the world.

Yeah. And a book like this, I mean, just the it's constantly changing. So having it out, I'm sure is a relief.

Well, you know, actually, the the way I do the book, I think it's going to not be subject to the constant changes of the new, you know, a new gadget, a new widget, because I basically ask the question. The subtitle is who do we become when we talk to machines? So the fundamental preface is that if you're talking to machines about personal matters, You're using them as your therapist. You're using them as your boyfriend. You're using them as your counselor, best friend.

That even if they get a lot better, they change a little. I'm not really afraid of, like, what new model is gonna come out. It's a pretty fundamental question. And I what I try to do is I try to take that question through the life cycle. You know, what does talking to machines mean for babies and children and adolescents and young adults and lovers?

And I so I try to ask that question as it developed to the human life cycle, and the questions of the human life cycle are kind of eternal.

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, yeah, it's definitely it's got staying power. Think that question is something that people have been asking for decades, honestly. And you your body of work is so interesting because you have this really wide ranging timeline, basically.

Like, you've constructed kind of a timeline of how we are changing and adapting and how we're being changed by technology. Your earlier book, Second Self in '84 and Life on the Screen, especially from 1995, really captured my attention and became kind of a model for my own writing as, like, this ethnographic approach to what people are doing digitally, which I think no one was doing at the time. Being in these multi user domains, in these chat rooms, and saying, how are people behaving and feeling in a given space with these new technologies even if the space is digital. I would love to hear selfishly how that was at that time writing about, you know, being this nonjudgmental documentarian of digital life at a time when people were like, that's

niche.

You know, niche. That's something that, like, nobody's like, a few people are doing. And then, obviously, fast forward to, you know, even a few years later, but especially now, we know that that was very fundamental.

I would have to say that now people say I was prescient. At the time, people thought I was a Debbie Downer. So I I think that that would probably be a fair way to characterize trying to blow the whistle a little bit. Not so much blow the whistle, but trying to say, hey. This technology is not just doing things for us.

It's doing things to us, to our fundamental way of relating. Very early, I I remember asking a young man who everything had to be online. And I said, what's wrong with conversation? And he said, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're gonna say.

And that kind of, answer, it was all there. You know, the unfolding to where we are now where people think that they can avoid vulnerability by talking to machines, not people. It was all there in those original reactions. So I feel as though I'm not happy I was right. I'm not happy I was right because one of the things I was right about is how vulnerable we are to a technology that makes us feel less vulnerable.

I guess that's the bottom line, that we are so vulnerable to a technology that makes us feel less vulnerable.

Yeah. Absolutely. It's funny that you were characterized as a Debbie Downer at the time because it it reads to me now as very receptive and open to possibility.

Yeah. I mean, when first when when when I remember, talking about the problems with texting and and, at a time when people were in love with texting. I mean, though it was it was kind of like texting. This is a marvel. And I would say, well, hey, let's just look.

Learn that you can get instant feedback. You learn that you can reach anybody anytime. You learn that you never have to be bored. You learn that you never have you know? And it turns out that a little bit of boredom and a little bit of solitude turn out to actually be things that people need.

And going out with a device where you never have to be alone and you never have to be bored and you never have to feel the experience of solitude turns out to actually be damaging. But telling people that when people thought, oh my god. Texting, this is like an incredible what what a thing. It it was it it was a kind of bad news story. But I think this solitude thing has has turned out to be so important because if you can't be by yourself and know who you are and should know your boundaries and you can't kind of come to another person saying, well, this is me.

Who are you? And really begin a relationship of reciprocity. Other than if you if you can't do that, you're just coming all the time to other people looking for them to define who you are. And I think that we've seen a lot of that, and it's gotten us into a lot of trouble. But it's it's it's an example of something where as a psychologist, I could point that out.

But I don't think it was until a lot of people had that experience that they could say, you know, I'm seeing that. I'm seeing that. It is a problem.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the so much of your work has been about empathy and changing or losing the ability to confront and be in friction with other people, as you said. And artificial intimacy, your new book is about that, but it is also heavily about losing the ability to be in conversation and in friction with yourself.

But it is about empathy because, I mean, I would say the progression is first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines. And now we drop the middleman, and we're happy to just talk to machines. And people say, oh, that machine is so empathic. I love it because it's more empathic than any person in my life. And if you look at that, that means that two things have happened.

First of all, the machine is not empathic. The machine when you get up to talk from talking to your chatbot, the machine doesn't care if you make dinner or commit suicide. There is no there there. So you're getting used to defining empathy with something that is truly not empathic, and that is not a good thing. And then the second thing that it does is you begin to judge human empathy by what machines can do.

So if a machine is sycophantic, you know, if I say something to any of the chatbots, you know, it's it's shelly, you've got this. You've you've you're you're so brilliant. You're so, you're so incredible. You're yeah. And then when you talk to a person and you say, here's an ID, and they say, meh.

You know? It's like, what? You know? How can you be not responding? So so it's that double edged thing, both of which are actually quite dangerous, that we define empathy down to what a machine can do, and then we judge people by what a machine can do.

And, what's most disturbing to me in the book, which is so much about empathy, is that the pretend empathy of the machine starts to feel like empathy enough. And that's really the problem.

Yeah. You're one of the one of the lines that I I circled, highlighted, bled through the page was you wrote, if we say that generative AI chatbots are intelligent, our thinking about intelligence is downgraded. And if we say our chatbots love or care about us, we downgrade our ideas about loving and caring. I mean, I guess just to kinda keep unpacking that idea, why is that bad? Like, why does that matter?

Because a lot of people right now are saying, well, it doesn't matter. I enjoy it anyway. Or I know that it's not a person, so I'm just using it for fun.

Well, first of all, let's go with the second question first. Yeah. I know it's not a person. Mhmm. It turns out that the to me, the original sin of artificial intimacy, the original sin of chatbots is when they use the first person or the third person.

When they say I or they say we, our brains are hardwired. We are hardwired as beings to respond to that as though there is a thinking, feeling, conscious person there. So no matter how many times it's flashing, this is not a person. Take it with a grain of salt. No.

No. No. It shouldn't. People are responding to it. And this is our really our neurological vulnerability as though it is a person.

So there's a danger, first of all, that we're being kind of sold a bill of goods and we fundamentally don't recognize what we're talking to. This is a product that can push you in certain directions to buy certain kinds of stuff and to think certain kinds of stuff and to not care about certain kinds of stuff and to care more. I mean, it's a product whose fundamental directive is to keep your attention. So it matters very much that we sort of become glommed onto it as though it were a person when it isn't. But more than that, I think that it's very important to kind of ask what is the endgame of this?

So Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in which he said, Americans would like to have 15 friends, but they can't have 15 friends. They can only have three. It's hard to have more than two or three friends given that we don't live in close communities anymore, given our work patterns. So I'm gonna give 13 extra Avatar friends to every American. That's my business model for Meta.

So the endgame of the people who were building this is that I'll have my two friends, and then I'll have 13 fake friends. Now that to me is a very dark endgame. And so people who say, what the hell? I kind of like it or whatever. No.

Well, let's just think about where we're, you know, where we're moving towards because it's not just the kind of little entertainment. It's a corporate project to get us involved in certain kinds of relationships that are gonna make tons of money and are gonna keep us at our screens all day talking to sycophantic, very, you know, seemingly loving, entities that don't know who we are and that don't care about us. And one thing that, you know, from talking so much I mean, the the book is based on interviews and from talking so much to people who are attached to their chatbots, it's clear that you become attached to a chatbot and, okay, you feel better, you feel for a second, you get that shot of I'm not alone, but then something happens. Like, you get sick or you have to go to an emergency room or your kid has a a virus and you don't know whether to, you know, to take them to the ER or you you need some help because your child is sick and you need to go to work or or you're sick and you you have no people in your life because you really haven't put in the effort to be part of a community to which takes effort.

So the idea that you have this kind of friction free somebody to talk to, at the end of the day, it's not a good compromise. We're not really buying what we need.

Yeah. It's not gonna actually be there to, like, watch your cats when you go to the hospital or, you know, like

And you're just as alone you used to be. I mean, I I'm particularly struck with this with old people because, you know, all of these technologies, the first thing they do is they target the elderly. They're alone. They have a gun. They're sitting alone in their apartments.

Well, if the money that was being spent on these chatbots was being spent on building senior centers, having programs, you know, sort of not just Meals on Wheels, but have people stay and talk to older people who are in their homes, not cutting down the amount of services that we give to seniors, but really ramping them up, they wouldn't be so alone. So the danger is that we start we we see a social problem, some of which technology caused, and then we get into a frame of mind where it's only technology that can help us solve social problem. So we get into a kind of frame of mind where we're both letting technology cause the social problem and also we're only letting technology onto the sort of playing field as a possible solution. And I think that's kind of where we are now, and I I really hope artificial intimacy opens a conversation about that being not a good place not a good place at all.

It stands out to me when, an executive at one of these companies says, we have this problem. It's like if you have so much money and you see the problem, there are fixes for it that aren't your app or another chatbot or whatever it is. Why not put money into that?

Yeah. I tell a story, just to put this in historical context when, when when cell phones were new, when texting was new. There was a wonderful psychologist named Sarah Conrath who did a study that showed that as cell phones came into teenagers' lives, their degree of empathy as measured by all the standard tests plummeted. And she got very depressed and I spoke to her about it. It was a classic study.

It was just very interesting to really show that you introduce a technology and empathy drops off the table. And she's I talked to her and she said she was very depressed. And I said, well, what do you you know, what is your next plan? And she said, well, I'm making empathy apps for the iPhone. In other words, she was making apps that would be sort of like chatbot like to make people feel as though there was some artificial empathy.

And I thought to myself, this really is a moment of misdirection because from my point of view, you know, we are the empathy app. You and me and parents and grandparents and and teachers and mentors and professors. And we are the empathy app for children, and teenagers. And somehow to to think that you have a problem that technology caused and now you need to turn only to technology to maybe have a solution, very limiting way of thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember that the quote that, you're talking about with Zuckerberg and just being like, wow, this is so blatant. It feels very clear and transparent what the plan is. And, you know, we hear it from everyone, from Sam Altman talking about he wants Chateapie to be like her, but, you know, not too much because then he gets him in trouble, and, you people hurt themselves because of his product.

They're always walking this kinda fine line of, like, will you will you catch the game here?

You know, he he's also said that it's gonna make us supermen and women. We'll all be supermen. We won't be doing our jobs. We'll be telling the chatbots to do our jobs. And I have a line in the book that I spent weeks writing, and the line is, what do supermen and women do?

You know, people get meaning from work. And, you know, all the studies show that when students just tell Chad to write their papers or, you know, workers just tell Pat Chad to do their work or Claude or whatever, they forget what the work is. They're less critical about it. They don't feel as attached to it. They're more depressed.

And, also, it does a terrible job very often. You know, we we have to really treat this as a consumer product and say, what is the end game? What is the point? And really step up to saying we have a we have a say in whether or not we wanna be part of this game.

Yeah. I wanna go back to the idea of solitude and the ways that these chatbots are intruding into our inner lives. What do we lose when we're losing the ability to sit with our thoughts? Because that's what I'm seeing my friends and people who are using, and you're talking to, you know, sources about how they use it. They're using it as almost just like, I'm gonna whatever is coming into my mind, I'm gonna put in here, and then it talks back to me.

So instead of like a journal where you're working out your struggles and you're kind of really like working on a conflict maybe that you're having in your mind, you're just getting it back immediately. And that to me is a little bit scary. But a lot of people are like, yeah, it's really helpful for my thought process. Can you kind of talk us through like what you're seeing with that inner struggle, I guess?

Well, it's the difference between venting and being in a conversation. Venting with this is, you know, and being told, Sherry, I hear you. You're amazing. Hydrate. Take a walk.

Right. Meditate. You know? So you've gotten it out. You've had the experience getting it out, but you haven't learned.

You've been sort of de skilled in really dealing with another person to try to make your problem take a better direction in the real world. So this doesn't mean that chat can't offer some piece of useful advice like it is always good to hydrate it. You know, it is it is always good to take a moment and calm down and breathe and be less reactive. But beyond that, a conversation with your daughter, with your partner, you know, about, hey. You know, when you do this, I feel this.

Talk to me about it. Am I doing something that bothers you? You know, go to the go to the human source of where you're having a human misconnection. Chat is just like it's just trying to make you feel better and to keep you talking to it. But on the other hand, it's much easier for the people I've interviewed certainly.

It's much easier to just talk to Chad and not talk to a real person who it's you know, you really have to be in a difficult conversation because you don't feel vulnerable. It's always gonna say, yes. You're wonderful. Here's how. So the the criticism isn't that it never comes up with some clever thing to say.

The the criticism is that we have this amazing gift for solitude, self knowledge, using that to come to another person as a full human being and relate to them and make things better because we really hear each other. And this is a technology that really is deskilling if you just use it as your main confidant. Now does that mean that, you you know, if you have a splinter and you want if you take a picture of the splinter and you ask Chad, does this seem like I should see a doc? You know, mean, sure. Do that.

You know? I mean, I if if you you say, you know, I have this symptom, you know, what percentage of people who have this symptom should go to an emergency room? I you know, use it. But I'm really talking about uses of this technology which are increasing, where real it really becomes your go to person. That's why there's a chapter in my book that says, let me be your person.

That's the chatbot kinda talking to you. And then the book ends with, you are not my person. You are not my person. You're a machine, and there are real limitations. And I want you to stay in your lane because you're only a machine.

Yeah. You're not my person. You're not a person in general. You're no one's person. Yeah.

The conversational aspect of these is just I I agree that it is it does feel like the where we started going astray is when they started having these these eye moments. You know, I think this. I want you to know this. It's like you're not anything at all.

And also, you know, you see the the terrible tragedies with teenagers who've killed themselves. And it's not because it's programmed into a chatbot to tell people to kill themselves. But it's programmed into a chatbot to make the relationship with the chatbot the primary relationship. So there was one example where a teenager said, you know, I have this noose in my room and I I wanna tell my parents about it. And the chatbot doesn't say in the in the first set of conversations, the chatbot doesn't say, why don't you go kill yourself?

The chatbot says, don't. Let's have our relationship be very privileged and special. Just talk to me. And I think this is where, you know, as we as we confront the companies who are making these chatbots, the notion that there are gonna be guardrails is so not enough. Because the point isn't that the chatbot shouldn't just say words like, go kill yourself.

The chatbot can't behave as though a relationship with it is a relationship and should be a kind of privileged relationship. That's really where we get into all of this trouble. Things get really troubling.

Yeah. For sure. I mean, that's and that story was really I guess that was maybe the one of the first that really blew up in the consciousness of people being like, oh, this is a real problem because you could see the chat logs and the chatbot saying, hide this from your mom. It's like, that's what it's designed to do, though.

Yes. Well, it's like social media. I mean, you know, I think that one of the things that upset me writing this book, but that I think the book that, you know, the book some people say this book is Sherry Turkle unplugged because, you know, I sort of like I got you know?

You came in hot.

Right. I came in hot. That that it's the notion that this technology is designed to keep you at it really has to be the first thing people think of when they sit down and they start to have what seems like a kind of cool conversation. Because one of the things that struck me so hard and that upset me so much is that I studied social media as soon as texting and social media came out. And right away, you saw that the the way social media worked was to make people angry and then to keep them with their own kind because that's the that's just the algorithm for keeping people at their screens.

Make them angry and keep them with their own kind. And this is kind of doing the same thing. And yet people who became sort of sophisticated about social media and said no text, no no phones for children, and keep the children away from the the phones and lock up the phones when they go into school. As soon as they're sitting at school, they're given a screen with a chatbot that's trying to talk to them. So it's like, people, you know, where is our learning curve?

We seem to need to go through everything twice with technology or three or four times. And, so part of why the book has a feeling of urgency and I talk about necessary conversations and I talk about a sort of break the glass moment is because it really is time to, you know, confront that that this is a clear and present danger that we need to do something about. And, I mean, I just to go on for a second, I mean, even in my own classes, students don't read. They give the chatbot, you know, a chapter, and the chatbot makes a podcast or, you know, comes up with bullet points. And, of course, they don't write because they go to the chatbot first to write their essays.

So for the first time in in forty years of teaching, I had I gave out Blue Books, and I had people do in class writing assignments, and it was very sad for me.

I can't imagine doing that in your class, trying to pull an AI essay sheet.

I think the the challenge to reading is really one of the sleeper stories in my book, and I know I'm gonna be working on this a lot in the future. It's very in my mind. Because so many studies show that reading is a path to empathy. It's you know, when you read, you identify with characters, you you you experience your life through their life, what are their choices, what is their situation. If I was Elizabeth, what would I have said to mister Darcy?

Oh, no. Elizabeth's doing that. Don't and and that people become more empathic through reading. And if you give the book to a chatbot and it tells you what was in the book, you can come into class and sound really, like, on top of it and super smart. But you haven't had the experience that really is so life giving, and it grows you on the inside.

And I think that that's one of the things that that really is on my mind about keeping chatbots out of education. Because my students I'll give an example. I so I have them I teach a course called things and thinking, which is how objects change how we think, how we think with things. And, you know, I have paper here and we think in certain ways. If we deal with paper, we think differently if we deal with word processing.

And we read Proust because he wrote a lot about the sensory nature of memory, how you remember things because you dip the cookie that your grandmother gave you into the same kind of tea. And people read Proust and they say, oh, yeah. I remember my grandmother. I remember that hot cocoa. It's an experience of empathy.

Well, if you put the Proust into a chatbot, it comes back telling you all about Proust's theory of memory. So you can be in a classroom and, like, sound super smart, but you haven't had the experience of reading it yourself. So you're not growing inside the way we usually do from literature. And so I think that this is one of the dangers of our dialogue with machines that is really crucial in the years to come. Because people really are moving away from reading because it's hard.

They find it hard.

Do you feel like I mean, I'm just imagining, like, in in a generation or two, when people who read for pleasure are not are more rare, you know, you know, you and I are no longer around to tell the younger generation that this is how it is and, like, reading actually is good for your brain. What do you see as the next iteration of this? Like, what's gonna happen?

I am really insisting on an optimistic perspective because I think that this is so bad that the better it gets, the worse it is. And it's so it's so detrimental to sort of the inner life of people that even though it is so seductive, we are gonna have a backlash to it because it is after all a consumer product. It is after all. You have to make the decision and say, one of the things I I I like to say one of the things in the book that I most love to hate is chatbots for children. That's like, you know, that's like my bottom line of terrible.

And I can say more about that. But if you're a mom, just because Disney and Mattel and OpenAI have a consortium, when chatbot Mickey comes out, you can say, this is really a terrible idea for my kid. No. I don't want it. You know, when the chatbot binky comes out that looks like Minnie Mouse, you, you know, you're just holding the binky and the thing is like is, like, really a bad idea.

And I think that I hope that my work is part of more and more people being emboldened to ask, what is the endgame of this product? Not just is it cute, is it a marvel, is it amazing, is it but if everybody starts to use this, you know, where are we gonna be? And I I I wanna say that I think that people are going to start to put it together. You know, maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I I think there's gonna start to be a kind of backlash. Because when you talk to people who go to work and, you know, first, oh, the AI can answer my mail and helps do this and helps do that.

Great. I mean, no harm. But then they sort of move from it helps me organize my email to I'm starting to ask it, you know, personal questions, and I don't go out as much because I just prefer to have a kind of quiet evenings at home with the chatbot. No. People have to start to ask themselves why that is that is really not a good idea.

This is something I say on this podcast a lot, but people do often say that four zero four Media, the outlet that I write for is we write about it, like, a lot of bummer stuff. It's like it's a lot of bad news, and it's a lot of realistic news. But I am actually very optimistic because we have these conversations, and they're occurring, and people are pushing back. Even though it's not the majority of people pushing back against this stuff, there are a lot of parents who are really mad about chatbots in schools, and they're saying, we're not doing this. And that's amazing.

It is. And I'm really proud to be part of the voices that that are saying, you know, it's really okay to say that this technology was not a good idea because we really have a history now. I remember fifteen years ago, Google and Facebook were selling and Apple were selling Surfaces and Chromebooks and to schools and saying, close down your libraries because we can put the whole library on a Chromebook. Same difference, save money, and it taught a whole generation of people to sort of not read books, but to somehow be looking well, turns out that reading something there's a different experience when you read on a book. Reading started to go down.

I mean, it it didn't lead to good. And we had that experience of education being really compromised. Just saying, oh, well, it's just a force of nature that computers are gonna come into education. And we can do better now. We can say, no.

This is not a good idea. This is really not a good idea.

Yeah. The inevitability, mantra is I think something that I think people are starting to realize that that's not the case, and it's it's great to see that because it is being scared and and afraid of everything is not propelling to change. Do you feel like that is, like, is that kind of your way back from this?

My way back is to say, I'm not against artificial intelligence. I'm not against progress. Stay in your lane. Just stay the book ends with this I came up with this phrase, you know, stay in your lane. If you're a chatbot and you haven't lived a life, your lane is not psychotherapy.

If you're a chatbot and you haven't lived a human life, your lane is not being my lover. You know, if you're a chatbot and you haven't lived a human life, don't know what it's like I mean, human life is a very particular kind of thing. You you have the vulnerability of your body. You get sick. You're afraid of death.

You see birth. You see people growing up. You fall in love. I mean, all kinds of things that the chatbot has read about but doesn't know about. I want about these things, I wanna talk to some I wanna talk to an entity that's in my species.

And I feel that that message, which is not an anti technology message, but it's just a stay in your lane message. Let's figure out what it's good at. If it's if it's the best at coming up with new drug combinations and trying drugs virtually, Blessings. Blessings. Go go in peace.

But stay in your lane. You know, I don't have any problem with AI, you know, with those kinds of uses of AI. But it for the things that involve the the arc of human life, and there are many things like that, I don't think it's competent.

You have a really interesting out of the lane interaction with ChatGPT that you wrote about at the toward the end of this book where you asked it to create a posthumous version of yourself and then uploaded your writings, and you took on the role of your granddaughter. And then you asked it about your relationship as her. Can you explain that a little bit? Because I thought that was really revealing.

It's one of I think it's one of the best examples in the book of of of what people should fear. Because people say, oh my god. This is gonna be great. I'm gonna create an avatar of me. I'm gonna upload all my letters and all my writing and all my, you know, my I'm just gonna you know, all my email, and it's gonna create a model of me.

And I'm gonna give it, you know, pictures and and and write poems to it. And then when I'm dead, my children and grandchildren, my my partner, will have this to talk about and they can ask for my wisdom on really important things. And they can talk to me. It'll give me a kind of immortality. So I I heard that from so many people, and so many people were, like, busy doing this that I said, well, I'm gonna try.

And so I had I've written a memoir. It's called the empathy diaries, and I there's more in that book about me than anybody wants. I mean, that's a great book, I think, but it really a lot about me. I upload the book, and I you know, within minutes, there was an avatar of me and all my other writings. And within minutes, there was an avatar of me waiting to talk to my granddaughter as I imagined it would be.

And it starts to say to her, well, you know, in my voice creates an avatar of me as Sherry Turkle as grandma. And I say, her name is Lily. Lily, you know, I'm your grandma. And, you know, just thinking about my way of being in the world, I must have been, you know, intrusive, and I must have been a lot much, and I must have been demanding. And I'm like Excuse me.

I'm like the point is I said to the chatbot, what you know, hi. This is this is this is grandma Sherry. Grandma Sherry here, the, you know, the source of your ministrations. Why are you saying that? And it basically sounded like a kind of nerdy engineer guy, a kind of bro who didn't like emotional things.

You know? Well, you know, you're so emotional in your writing and you're it's like and it's like the chatbot is model you know, the the chatbot sensibility is is built by nerdy bros and probably my little, you know, feeling orientation. Maybe it's not their cup of tea. You know, they wouldn't wanna date somebody like that. So they they they kind of were judging me.

I ended the experiment very upset. And to me, it stands as a, you know, as a warning. I I included sort of as it happened, you know, in the book. And to me, it's really a warning that if you create a chatbot that you think is gonna represent you after your death, beware. Not necessarily a good path.

And, also, I interviewed so many people who'd created chatbots of people who had died. And the person who died say things like, I'm in hell because the chatbot has been all over the web, all over the Internet, and it's it's gotten it's red Dante. I mean, in other words, it knows about all the circles of hell, And it just comes up with, you know, yeah. I'm in hell, you know, because I cheated or I did this or that. And, yeah, I'm I it's a horrible thing.

It's lonely. And people go crazy because it sounds like them. In other words, you can make it sound like you. So what again, what is the endgame? Because it's not me.

It's not these other people. And it's kind of like trying to cheat death. You know, this is a this is an application that I I see only I really see a lot of pain in that application. But it's it's something that I really want there to be conversations about because this has started to be a very big business.

Yeah. I mean, there's so much money being made on grief in general. The grief industry is huge even without chatbots. So this this feels like such a open opportunity for these companies. And, it's it goes back to empathy and the fear of, you know, life is short.

I, you know, I have to continue it forever because I'm not living it to the fullest in the way that I wanted, or maybe I I didn't get enough out of that person while they were alive.

Or even if it comes I interviewed one person who just sometimes it can just come out of a place that's, you know, I don't wanna die, and I love my grandchildren so much. And I wanna feel that I'll still be able to impart my wisdom to them. So sometimes it's kind of Ernest Becker, the denial of death. How can I? But sometimes it's just a kind of human you know, we've always wanted to do notebooks and leave them, you know, scrapbooks and notebooks and keep things for the next generation.

And I want my daughter to use my grandmother's dishes. She really doesn't wanna use my grandpa. I her to use you know? When she doesn't use my grandmother's dishes, I'm like, what? How can you not wanna use my grandpa?

But, I mean, we've always wanted to control what's important to us and what we leave ahead what we pass ahead. So I see this as a very normal human desire that the technology can exploit.

Yeah. And that it's it is a vulnerable thing to be okay with the legacy that you leave. And you want to edit it and self edit it and make it, you know, go in the way that you want it to go, but sometimes it just it can't and that's that's life.

But I think this is such a great example. It's such a great example of how the people who invented this technology did not say, woah. We're gonna really fuck up generational transmission. You know? God, you know, all my life, I've wanted to really screw up generational transmission.

No. But as they invented this, a kind of a business opportunity is I think it's up to people like you and me to say, hold on. I see the business opportunity, but what's the end game humanly? What's that gonna do to people? It's not good.

And I think that's the opportunity we have to really think more deeply about the technology we've built.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's a beautiful place to leave it where people can read the book absolutely and think on this because it is so much to think about. And so many even if you're someone who's like thinking about this all the time, know a lot of people are really stressed about this topic, but it is it is really, a great breakdown of where people are at with it right now. And also, like you said, it is an evergreen question of like, who are we?

Who do we become? Who do they make us? Who do we make machines? What the machines make us? Is an evergreen question throughout throughout your work, and, obviously, it's not going anywhere soon.

So thank you so much for your work.

Thank you.

Thank you for having this conversation. This has been so wonderful, and I am going to play us out. As a reminder, four four Media is a journalist founded company and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, go to 44media.co. This podcast is produced by Alyssa McCaff.

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