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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.

“The cumulative impact of these legal instruments indicates, perhaps unsurprisingly, that initiating war is rarely, if ever, lawful. However, responding to acts of war can be justified.”
— Sir Geoffrey Nice KC Prosecutor of Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal
“Consider a car with malfunctioning brakes; it's unsafe to let it on the street, as it could cause harm. You'd need to confine it, but you wouldn't punish it or moralize its malfunction. Instead, you'd seek to understand why its brakes failed.”
— Robert Sapolsky Neuroscientist & primatologist known for stress research and public engagement
“You are the custodian of your body. Billions, perhaps trillions, of organisms live in your bowel and your immune system is formed and informed by those organisms.”
— Dr. Bob Lahita Rheumatologist and lupus researcher; author on autoimmune diseases

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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 Different, Not Wrong: A Conversation with Dave Plummer on Autism, Task Manager and Coding with AI 140 interviews
  5. 05 Health & Medicine Different, Not Wrong: A Conversation with Dave Plummer on Autism, Task Manager and Coding with AI 75 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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