Turkle's "Artificial Intimacy" warns on AI bonds

Sherry Turkle writes from MIT, and her new book builds its case less from theory than from people: interviews with the tech developers who build emotionally engaging AI, and profiles of users who have come to depend on those products. That pairing is the book's method, and it is what Kirkus Reviews singled out as a "frank psychological expertise."

The stance Turkle takes is a warning. Where much of the current conversation around AI focuses on capability, her argument concerns attachment — that emotional reliance on AI is a cause and an effect worth examining, and that replacing human bonds with it is something to resist rather than welcome.

The reach of a book like this is likely to hinge on how the developers it interviews and the readers it addresses react to its case. It is an argument, not a product or a rule, and the body offers no measure of its reception beyond the review it cites.