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Sherry Turkle at the Harvard Science Center
Past event
Featured Book
Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines
Fom the author of prescient best seller and classic Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle, comes an urgent warning about how our ever-increasing reliance on human-like AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy, caring, and the very qualities that make us human.
If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots that speak to us in a human voice offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists. As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones.
When we talk to chatbots in these roles, as intimate machines, we accept as sufficient what machines can offer: the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. We redefine human capacities for care, solitude, and intimacy in terms of what machines can do. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls the new culture of chatbots artificial intimacy, our new AI.
Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle’s decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture, Artificial Intimacy evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots. They can organize our calendars, plan our travel, or analyze our stock picks, all with an efficiency that outstrips what a person might do.
And then, they promise to be more—to be our “perfect” companion. They will always be there for us, listen to us, and support us—and ask for nothing in return. But these intimate machines, warns Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed, and lonely than ever before. More than that, we become less equipped to reverse course—machine relationships do not offer practice for getting along with people.
Artificial Intimacy is unique in how it traces our new habit of talking to machines through the lifecycle—from children’s earliest attachments to how we face death. But technology, by offering to do everything, teaches us that we neither need nor have the capacity to take risks, have hard conversations, struggle through uncertainty or insecurity, or rely on our own faculties and judgment.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
RSVP is required for this event.
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Sherry Turkle—Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and the New York Times bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation—for a discussion of her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. She will be joined in conversation by David Kaiser—Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT and author of several award-winning books on the history of modern physics.
Ticketing
RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Artificial Intimacy and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing.
Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.
Praise for Artificial Intimacy
“All around us, people are beguiled by the siren song of artificial intimacy. Sherry Turkle's 40 years of groundbreaking research and beautiful writing make her the most qualified member of Team Humanity to call us back to our senses, and to each other.” —Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation
“The best thing I’ve ever read about one of the biggest questions of our time: how will we relate to machines as they become more like us? Sherry Turkle’s book is insightful, emotional, rigorous, and deeply human. Read it cover to cover and absorb its wisdom; don’t, whatever you do, just ask a bot to summarize it.” —Nicholas Thompson, author of The Running Ground
“Sherry Turkle, our wisest guide to digital life, has written her most urgent book yet. Artificial Intimacy will help you avoid the profound but often hidden threats AI poses to you and your relationships. Read it and share it with all the humans you know.” —Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows
“The preeminent sociologist of smart machines, Sherry Turkle, now writes against the techno-utopianism of our time and the promise of frictionless intimacy, chronicling the distinction between virtual and actual human community and connection.” —MIchael Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit
Harvard Science Book Talks
The Harvard Science Book Talks series is a collaboration between the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store. The series features talks by the authors of recently published books on a variety of science-related topics and is open to both the Harvard community and to the general public. Learn more and watch recordings of past talks here.
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Contact Info
General Info
(617) 661-1515
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Featured Authors
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A leading expert in humans’ relationship with digital objects, she continues to revolutionize our understanding of the role of technology on psychology and culture. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Turkle’s most recent book is Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk To Machines (Little, Brown September 29, 2026) and is available for preorder now. Turkle is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, the Harvard Centennial Medal, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Photo Credit: Justin Kaneps
David Kaiser
David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is the author of several award-winning books on the history of modern physics, including Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011). His latest book is Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Alan Guth in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute (CTP-LI), and has also designed and helped to conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement were featured in a documentary film, “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle,” which premiered on US Public Television stations in 2019.
About the Venue
Harvard Science Center
Presented by Harvard Book Store
The presentation will take place in Hall B of the Harvard Science Center, located at 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge.
1 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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