How to Maintain the ‘Heartbeat of Work’ in the Age of Ai
Time | Charter
Over the past 40 years, MIT professor Sherry Turkle has studied how technologies from Tamagotchis to Twitter have reshaped our identities, our ability to sustain human connection, and our work.
In Artificial Intimacy, Turkle, the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self, warns that overreliance on AI chatbots threatens to erode the most human parts of life. When we’re immersed in conversations with AI, we “lose our capacity for boredom, solitude, and a life without distractions," she writes. “We lose our taste for the friction of friendship.”
We reached out to Turkle to learn how AI use is transforming people's identities as workers, the effect of AI and remote work on loneliness, and her advice for breaking our reliance on screens. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
How is AI changing people’s identities as workers?
It's giving everybody a new notion of work as delegation, and people feel a loss of ownership over their work. You have students, for example, who write a good paper but can’t remember what's in it. Medical students are told not to use AI for chart review, an exercise that requires them to immerse themselves in a patient's chart and come up with a diagnosis and a plan for treatment. They sign a pact that they won't use it, but of course they all do. If you never have that immersion in the details, when will doctors be [made]?
In every field that I studied, there was some version of this delegation process. People are struggling with reports who are losing the heartbeat of the work. The lawyers are saying they want their young lawyers to do [work] by hand. The doctors are saying they want their young doctors to do it by hand. Everybody is talking about their worries that if the next generation doesn’t, they will lose something really important in their professional formation.
You write that social media was a ‘gateway drug’ for chatbots because ‘we used to talk to each other. Then we talked to each other through machines. Now we talk directly to machines.’ Does that observation also make you skeptical of remote work?
It's a problem. Many people who come home after a day of work are shell-shocked. If it hasn't been on Zoom, it's been on Slack. They haven't had a conversation. They haven't heard a voice. Work is no longer a place of learning how to compromise or learning how to speak across differences, which made us better citizens. Now all of a sudden, work is a place where you're arguing with each other on Slack.
I don't want to sound like I'm envisaging people putting away their Zoom screens and storming the office. But I will say this: In the university setting, it is not good to have empty halls and empty classrooms and empty office hours because everybody's in their room talking to each other online. Students don't feel as though they belong to a community. The library is gone because people can just do the reading on their machines. This is not a good life. This is not the kind of place where you learn how to be a citizen.
How can people start breaking their dependency on chatbots?
Make a friend. The common denominator among people who [overuse] chatbots is a feeling of vulnerability and a fear of making a mistake. People are scared of being found out to be wanting and lacking, so hiding from other people is the safe thing to do. Talking to a chatbot is the ultimate hiding because you're never going to be found out by a chatbot.
Sometimes I suggest, ‘In your workplace, is there a bowling league? Is there a hiking club?’ Companies are shrinking those things when they need to expand them. If your company isn't doing it, organize it. Do more stuff with the people on your team. Get involved in your community. Start something in your community. We've abandoned the real places in which we live, and AI is going to be a wake-up call.
In the end game, I don’t see all of us alone in our little [rooms] talking to machines. It would be too sad that this is how we end up. Do I think people are going to put down their phones and close their laptops and come back? No, but I think that these are the steps that people are starting to take as they realize how we've hollowed out our institutions.
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