{"product_id":"artificial-intimacy-9780316573962","title":"Artificial Intimacy","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the author of prescient best seller and classic \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eWe begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough.\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eartificial intimacy,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eour new AI. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle’s decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture,\u003ci\u003e Artificial Intimacy\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eArtificial Intimacy \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Turkle has spent decades studying how digital technologies isolate us from one another. Now, in her long-awaited follow-up to \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e, she offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI.\u003cbr\u003e  ","brand":"Little, Brown and Company","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46939126333618,"sku":"9780316573962","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0536\/7418\/0786\/files\/O_152d41c1-9230-48ce-9708-751b231aeead.jpg?v=1778644877","url":"https:\/\/shop.hachettebookgroup.com\/products\/artificial-intimacy-9780316573962","provider":"Hachette Book Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}