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Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (#320)
22 September 2026

Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (#320)

3 Takeaways™

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What if AI becomes easier to talk to than another person?

And what happens to us when it does?

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying what technology does to the way we think, work, and love. Now she says there are two parts of our lives we should never let AI into.

She discusses:

    Why ordinary conversation has started to feel like workThe surprising reason people may prefer talking to chatbotsHow AI will change what we expect from other peopleWhy “pretend empathy” may be more dangerous than it seemsWhat happens when relationships become frictionlessWhat it could mean for a child to have an AI friendWhether AI could make us worse at being with each other

The question isn’t just what AI can do. It’s what AI may do to us.