00:00:00.000you're listening to making sense with sam harris this is the free version of the podcast so you'll
00:00:06.420only hear the first part of today's conversation if you want the full episode and every episode
00:00:11.400you can subscribe at sam harris.org there are no ads on this show it runs entirely on subscriber
00:00:18.020support if you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable please consider subscribing today
00:00:22.980i'm here with sherry turkle sherry thanks for joining me my pleasure it's great to finally
00:00:28.840connect with you. I don't, am I right in thinking that we have not met anywhere, not at a TED
00:00:33.540conference or? No, I think this is the first time. Okay. Well, great. Well, I've been an admirer of
00:00:39.280your, you know, the perspective you've given on technology for many years now. You've written
00:00:44.000many books. The latest is Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. And we'll
00:00:49.700get to AI, which is your focus there. But I mean, you've been thinking about our relationship with
00:00:53.600technology, you know, as instantiated by computers and smartphones and social media
00:00:58.920for a long time. If you were going to compare the world of today to, say, 1975, right, when
00:01:07.180most people had nothing more than, you know, a television set and a landline, how do you think
00:01:13.620we're doing? I mean, how do you perceive the effects of information technology and all its
00:01:19.660guises permeating and subsuming human culture to the degree that it has?
00:01:26.500Well, I think I'm going to narrow that question down to my field of expertise, which is the
00:01:31.860development of the person and how the person situates themselves in society in terms of
00:01:38.420feeling a sense of agency, a sense of community, et cetera. And there, there's been a remarkable
00:01:44.640deterioration in how we relate to each other, in our confidence in relating to each other.
00:01:51.640We've developed a feeling of vulnerability so that we want to escape into our phones or
00:01:58.180don't text, don't talk, just text me. Don't text me. I'll talk to an avatar. I mean,
00:02:05.240first we talked to each other. In 1976, we talked to each other and then we talked to each other
00:02:11.500through machines. And now we're kind of dropping the middleman, which is the story of my new book,
00:02:17.120and we just are willing to just talk to the machines themselves. So that's really a downgrading
00:02:22.900in our kind of capacity and interest to deal with the rough and tumble and vulnerability
00:02:30.180of dealing with other people. And similarly, we've retreated from our communities.
00:02:36.840When I first started studying personal computers, for example, the people who were building them were interested in using them as kind of neighborhood hubs and ways of, their slogan was, use the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real.
00:02:54.220That was the slogan of the early personal computer people.
00:02:58.060Whereas Mark Zuckerberg now talking about meta basically says, people would like to have 15 friends, but that's unrealistic.
00:03:06.980The demands of their jobs or two jobs are too great.
00:03:10.480So they can maybe have two or three friends, and he'll give them the extra 12 or 13 friends
00:03:16.640as avatars, as programs, as chatbots that'll be tuned to them.
00:03:22.280So even there, you see a kind of willingness or a corporate interest in saying, well, we're
00:03:29.340not really going to be members of our community.
00:03:31.400We'll even drop the real people to just look at screens.
00:03:35.140So I think it's, you know, when I began looking at this phenomenon, I was optimistic about using the virtual to improve the quality of life in the world.
00:03:45.380Can you recapture some of that optimism?
00:03:47.220And what was your first interaction with the internet like?
00:03:50.460I mean, were you an early user of, like, were you on the well with lots of people?
00:03:53.840I mean, the people who I was, I wasn't myself, I was on the well, but I wasn't an active user of the well.
00:03:59.600But I studied the well and I hung out with those people.
00:04:02.660And the idea really was to create community online that would translate into more and better community offline.
00:04:12.240And I remember visiting the early personal computer owners in San Francisco and a group called Community Memory that Lee Felsenstein started, a great pioneer of the personal computer movement.
00:04:24.780And that was their mantra, improve the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real.
00:04:32.220Make the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real.
00:04:36.560And, you know, now there's kind of a retreat from the real and a sense that if your best
00:04:44.520friends are chatbots, if you turn away from the kind of biological people in your life
00:04:50.200to the easier to deal with virtual people, well, that's kind of understandable because
00:04:59.460So actually in this book, I really come down very hard on that because I think that's a disaster for the individual, for communities, for children as they grow up.
00:05:21.980So what is the evidence that we have lost many of these capacities?
00:05:26.360Were you saying, why was I optimistic?
00:05:29.440Well, no, I mean, I just, I love to listen to, I mean, I often listen to people speaking
00:05:35.800from the period where most of us were just getting online.
00:05:41.820I mean, like there are people, I'm fans of various people who, you know, read their books
00:05:46.080or let's just, there's an endless number of, you know, YouTube conversations and lectures
00:05:50.100You can hear from people in, let's say, you know, 1994, who were, you know, early adopters online.
00:05:57.760I'm thinking of someone like, you know, Terrence McKenna, who, you know, for all of his quirks as an intellectual, he was quite brilliant and quite prescient with respect to, you know, many of the cultural changes that would soon follow once so much of culture went into cyberspace.
00:06:13.000But there was a kind of optimism there that really seems quaint and naive, but it's easy to be sentimental for that moment where you where we thought this has to be intrinsically good to have access to more and more of the world's information and to connect people with less and less friction.
00:06:34.680Like on some level, what could be wrong with this?
00:06:37.560I think the notion, the problem there is the word intrinsic. With technology, nothing really is intrinsic because right away, the social, the political, the economic environment in which the technology is being shaped jumps in.
00:06:54.500So, for example, Facebook. I remember when I first heard about it, you know, grandmas look in pictures of babies. My classmates from all over the world had a kindergarten reunion. I had a fifth grade reunion. I mean, I did. I had a reunion of the people I went to fifth grade with. Unthinkable.
00:07:15.180And so there was every reason to feel, my goodness, I guess the word intrinsic would come up.
00:07:20.660You know, how can it be bad to connect the world with each other?
00:07:37.980Powerful minds went to work immediately.
00:07:40.080And you can make it bad if you make attention the most important thing about it, keeping people staring at their screens.
00:07:48.900And then you say, well, how do you do that?0.89
00:07:51.200You make people angry and then keep them with their own kind, silo them with their own kind.1.00
00:07:58.980That turns out to be like a really powerful way to keep people at their screens.0.99
00:08:04.200Now, if you do that, you get them at their screens, and you can give them ads, and you can scrape their data, and you can make money.
00:08:10.960On the other hand, it's really terrible for the individual who's angry all the time, sort of activated, anxious, not going out, not meeting people, not getting nervous about the rough and tumble of the world as it is.
00:08:27.560And it's terrible for them politically. It's terrible for the community, because what is a worse thing for democracy than to have everybody angry and only comfortable with their own kind and not wanting to talk across difference?
00:08:43.540so something that sounded like a great a great thing it didn't take very long for it to be
00:08:51.320a toxic thing and that's even before we get into the things that i'm kind of a specialist in which
00:08:59.340is that you lose the capacity for solitude that people really need the capacity for solitude
00:09:06.060in order to have mutuality you know you need to feel i know who i am i'm comfortable with who i
00:09:13.160am. And then I can, in that comfort with who I am, I can say, well, who are you? And I'd like to
00:09:20.920know you. And here's who I am. And let's have a relationship. If you don't know who you are,
00:09:25.820essentially, you approach another person and say, tell me who I am. And that's a disaster
00:09:32.520in terms of mutual friendship. So we gave up that. We gave up our capacity for boredom,
00:09:38.920which is so important developmentally. People need to be able to let their minds wander
00:09:44.580and have a moment of kind of inner peace in order for really their neurons, basically for the brain
00:09:53.480to develop an autobiographical sense of self. The brain needs that downtime that comes with
00:09:59.220boredom. Well, people get anxious if they're not being constantly stimulated. So we're really
00:10:05.580taking away very important and taking away solitude and taking away the capacity for
00:10:11.000boredom, where we're taking away very important signal developmental possibilities that we
00:10:34.580No. Well, the way I work, I mean, it turns out for the past 40 years, I've been interviewing people about their relationships with technology. Now, that's a very particular kind of methodology, but it's mine. And so really, I have, you know, 40 years of interviews about what it's like to sit in front of a screen, what people do, what their fantasies are, what they're doing, how they feel about themselves. I have that.
00:11:02.420And then I have, you know, a wide reading in the research literature and other with other methodologies. But certainly on the things that I care about most, which is the loss of a capacity for empathy. That is my work supported by a very substantial, much more quantitative set of research studies.
00:11:27.060You know, actually, there's a great story about empathy. I was discovering a loss in empathy when the cell phones became very big, 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14. And because people would say to me, you know, I'd rather text than talk. I'd rather be on my phone than talk to another person. And I'd say, why? And they'd say, conversation, I'll tell you what's wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say.
00:11:57.060In other words, the job of doing the empathic work was starting to feel scary, like too much to do.
00:12:06.320And at that time, I read a study by a brilliant, a very quantitative study by a very brilliant psychologist named Sarah Conroth.
00:12:14.840And I went to see her and she said, yeah, from the time of the cell phones on, you see this drop in all the ways that we know to measure empathy.
00:12:23.760And I said to her, and she says, I'm very depressed about it.
00:12:27.060And I said, well, what are you going to do? I'm depressed too. And she said, I'm going to build
00:12:32.200empathy apps for the iPhone. In other words, I'm going to build technology for the iPhone
00:12:37.900that I hope will give people practice and empathy, you know, tell stories and how do they feel and
00:12:44.240how do they... And I thought to myself, this is a very bad time we're going into where technology
00:12:51.680helps to create a problem. And then we look to technology to help us solve the problem.
00:12:58.460And at the time I said to her, and I've said it many times in my writing, I say, but we are the
00:13:04.260empathy app. People are the empathy app. And she laughed. I mean, she knew what I was saying,
00:13:10.340but basically she did develop these empathy apps for the iPhone. And that's kind of, we're in the
00:13:16.000same place today. Facebook and social media and chatbots have done so much to increase the crisis
00:13:23.720and loneliness. And then all the programs say, well, here, we're going to give you chatbots to
00:13:28.500fix the problem and loneliness. You're lonely? That's great. We'll throw a chatbot your way.
00:13:33.540Well, let's linger on empathy for the moment because, I mean, first of all, you can mean two
00:13:39.360things by the term. I mean, there's an emotional strand of empathy and then there's a cognitive
00:13:44.940one. So cognitively being able to understand other people's experience is one thing. And that's,
00:13:51.640you know, it's obviously a necessary piece of our cognition. I mean, this is, you know,
00:13:56.140otherwise known as theory of mind. And some people have obvious deficits in that. But then there's
00:14:01.780the emotional permeability that we have to one or another degree where we care about, you know,
00:14:08.560when someone's sad and we see the external effects of their sadness, there's an emotional
00:14:16.220contagion component, which their sadness begins to feel like our own. And I mean, some of that's
00:14:23.180good. Some of it is the stuff of which real intimacy is made and also just the appreciation
00:14:29.120of vicarious lives through art and film and et cetera. So we enjoy emotional contagion,
00:14:36.820But there are also clearly pathologies of it, right? And social media is now this kind of, you know, cultural charnel house of, in some senses, too much emotional empathy, certainly too much emotional contagion.
00:14:50.740I mean, there's a kind of—I mean, at the center of every moral panic is just the kind of unreasoning zeal provoked by certain images being taken, you know, as seriously as they can, right?
00:15:06.360I mean, who knows even what the images actually depict in the real world, right?
00:15:09.580Well, but I have a narrower definition—I think it's dangerous, personally, to have that inclusive a view of what empathy is.
00:15:19.880I think empathy is that because two humans have lived the arc of a human life, know what it is to feel pain, know what it is to fear illness, know what it is to feel joy or have desire, or even the experience of being little and everybody around that you're dependent on is big.
00:15:44.320and then as you get bigger, you start to have more agency, but you still remember and have
00:15:50.880some of the anxieties of all those years when you were little, to look forward to things,
00:15:56.860to lose someone, to be rejected. I mean, all of the things in a human life, I think when two
00:16:03.280human beings face each other, they connect on these, I don't think of it as contagion,
00:16:11.520I think of it as signaling to tune in to these moments in the arc of life and how they make us feel so that when you're hearing another person's story, you really can get into their head.
00:16:25.860Now, I think that that is only good. And what you see online, which is whipping people up into a kind of, you know, almost pornographic, I mean, you know, every art form, every trick is being used to incite violence, incite hatred, incite tribal feelings.
00:16:51.760I don't particularly think of that as the dance of empathy. I think there are other ways that have more to do almost with propaganda and mass delusion that have to do with that.
00:17:04.000The thing that we're losing that I think social media and chatbots are undermining is really much more that person-to-person empathy where you really care about other people and you feel in a kind of community with them.
00:17:22.420And my point in artificial intimacy is that chatbots can't do that, not because they're bad or because they're not well enough developed. They never will because they haven't lived the arc of a human life.
00:17:36.040So they can have information about all these parts of a human life, but they haven't lived it. They don't feel it. They don't have the equipment to empathize.
00:17:50.980So they perform empathy. And really what a lot of my new work is about and what the book is about is what happens to people when the performance of empathy becomes empathy enough. And that really is the problem that I say we face today, that for so many people, the performance of empathy by a program becomes empathy enough for them.
00:18:16.840Well, that's an interesting distinction. I'm not sure I believe that distinction is so hard and fast, even in the case of human beings. But let's jump into the topic of AI.
00:18:26.680Well, it's interesting to talk about because I think it is the question.
00:18:30.380Because if you say, well, there's cognitive empathy and there's that personal stuff. Well, then it's easy to say a program has cognitive empathy. It's easy to kind of grant the program a kind of understanding.
00:18:45.180because of its literature searches and, you know, it's sort of reading all the literature.
00:18:51.160But I don't think, I think that's a, you know, empathy can have, the way empathy has two parts
00:18:58.200is the way in which people, when they love each other, have two parts. There's the cognitive part,
00:19:03.640my God, I admire you and you're beautiful. You know, there's the cognitive things,
00:19:08.360you know, we want the same, we have the same values. And then there's the whole body experience,
00:19:13.960falling in love, wanting to be close to the person, wanting to hold their hand,
00:19:18.160wanting to touch them, make love to them. I mean, and you could say, well, let's just
00:19:22.300separate out the cognitive part from like all the other stuff. But it turns out that love
00:19:27.960doesn't work that way. And I don't think empathy works that way either.
00:19:31.680But don't you think we could be humbled by a complete understanding of the way empathy and
00:19:37.840sympathy and compassion and love work and how they're contingent upon certain surface features
00:19:43.940that can be emulated by machines, ultimately.
00:19:47.720So let's just imagine we get out of the uncanny valley
00:19:50.900and we have humanoid robots that just,
00:19:52.840I mean, we have Westworld, essentially, right?
00:20:11.540And I think many people will have the experience in the presence of a robot of feeling greater empathy, you know, in both directions, better understood, even more love than when they're in the presence of a person who, for whatever reason, you know, take a, you know, a person with Parkinson's who's got like kind of facial masking where they just, they're not expressing any emotion on their face, right?
00:20:35.680because they're incapable of it or um you know somebody who's just uh you know for whatever
00:20:40.940reason just not very charismatic and we have we have the charisma function turned up to 11 on our
00:20:47.000perfect bot well you know you can feel things that aren't there in other words you can feel
00:20:52.800that someone is performing empathy and is doing this this is no fantastic performance taking place
00:21:00.560but in fact the robot doesn't the robot or the chatbot or the doesn't care when you turn away
00:21:07.560let's just take chatbots for a minute because we're with the chat but it could we could make
00:21:11.060it seem to care right like all of this is just what we but the question is whether or not it
00:21:15.340matters whether it's performing seeming or actually care so i want to i want to just back
00:21:21.340up to what you said because i think that it's a it's very provocative my position is is that the
00:21:27.960performance of empathy is never empathy enough. Because if you have a person, I think it's
00:21:34.060important to take out of this equation people with dementia, people with Alzheimer's, people with
00:21:40.040Parkinson's. I was thinking of Parkinson's, but the kinds of Parkinson's that bring you dementia.
00:21:46.760Because it's sort of, I'm willing to take out of the equation. I think it's important to take out
00:21:52.540of the equation. People who really have had the parts of the brain that allow them to do some of
00:21:59.200the empathy work removed. And take a person whose life history and whose family values and whose
00:22:08.940way of being brought up has not made empathy and listening and conversational skills and reading
00:22:14.800faces a very big part of their life. I mean, we know a lot of people like that. And then you say,
00:22:19.920well let's compare that person which i thought you were sort of trying to do
00:22:24.740with a really fabulous chatbot robot you know the most finely tuned it's the one that eric
00:22:31.240schmidt is perfect you know it's yeah it's his favorite one for having for having chats
00:22:35.940and my feeling is is that the most imperfect person has lived a life and knows pain and
00:22:44.840knows fear and knows what it is to, you know, to be little and maybe fears death and doesn't
00:22:51.740want to be sick and was worried about their children. And no, no chatbot feels that.
00:22:58.940Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.
00:23:03.160Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.
00:23:07.700I think of myself as the front lash of the backlash. I think I make a very strong argument