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The Original Sin of Artificial Intimacy: A Conversation with Sherry Turkle on Chatbots, Empathy and Why We Have Abandoned Each Other

In this interview, I spoke to Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent forty years studying our relationships with machines, about her new book Artificial Intimacy: why a chatbot cannot be a therapist, what these…

Vikas Shah 30 min read

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Three thousand moments. Three picked at random.

“A lot of people in society understandably want to feel important, and one of the ways you do this is to show people how busy you are… and one of the ways you show people how busy you are is to describe how little time you have for sleep.”
— Matthew Walker Sleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep
“In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.”
— Melinda Gates Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
“You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional. Markets that are getting-along but not doing as well as they could are very hard to change.”
— Alvin E. Roth Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

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  1. 01 Business & Economics The End of Hand-Written Code: A Conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on AI, Omarchy and the Future of Programming 365 interviews
  2. 02 Culture, Society, Sports & Arts The Original Sin of Artificial Intimacy: A Conversation with Sherry Turkle on Chatbots, Empathy and Why We Have Abandoned Each Other 238 interviews
  3. 03 Politics & Policy Who Decides What a Country Is? Michael and Liam Bates on Sealand, Sovereignty and Belonging 172 interviews
  4. 04 Science & Technology The Original Sin of Artificial Intimacy: A Conversation with Sherry Turkle on Chatbots, Empathy and Why We Have Abandoned Each Other 138 interviews
  5. 05 Health & Medicine The Continuum of Mind: A Conversation with Professor Michael Levin on Cognition, Bioelectricity and the Future of Being 74 interviews
  6. 06 Nobel Laureates Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Professor Alvin Roth 21 interviews

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