Artificial Intimacy

Sherry Turkle's long-awaited follow-up to Reclaiming Conversation asks an urgent question. As AI chatbots offer themselves as our best friends, our therapists, even our lovers, and ask for nothing in return, what happens to our capacity for real empathy, real care, real connection? Turkle traces our new habit of talking to machines across an entire life, from a child's first attachment to a device, to how we face our own mortality.

This is not a casual evening. It's a profound conversation, the third in a series that Sherry herself has called the situation humanity finds itself in as a "break the glass moment,” time to take action and look deeply at our epidemic of loneliness already living inside our homes and our kids' pockets.

The event was hosted by Steve Stein of WisdomFeed Publishing.

This is the third session of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast with Jon and Sherry. The first two conversations, on the intersection of digital living and mindfulness, were so profound that we decided to bring the third in celebration of Sherry's new book.

About the book

Artificial Intimacy is Sherry Turkle's long-awaited follow-up to her bestseller Reclaiming Conversation. She's the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and author of Alone Together and The Empathy Diaries. Little, Brown published the book September 29, 2026.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A leading expert on humans' relationship with digital objects, she is the New York Times bestselling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Turkle is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and the Harvard Centennial Medal, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Steve Stein is the founder and curator of WisdomFeed Publishing and BetterListen!, a digital audio publisher since the cassette era and a founding member of the Audio Publishers Association. For four decades he has recorded and worked directly with the defining teachers in mindfulness, psychology, and wellness, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marion Woodman, Ram Dass, James Hillman, Mariann Williamson, Alan Watts and more. He is the host of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast, where this conversation began.

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