First published 2026
Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who spent decades studying how digital technology reshapes human behavior, turns her attention to AI chatbots that present themselves as best friends, lovers, and therapists. Her argument is direct: when people accept what a machine can simulate, they stop expecting what only a person can give. As of 2025, more than seventy percent of teenagers and nearly one in three American adults lean on AI for emotional support, and many now prefer those relationships over human ones. Turkle calls this artificial intimacy. The book traces the habit across an entire life, from a child's first bond with a responsive machine to the way people turn to chatbots at the end of life. She shows how chatbots train us to treat performed empathy as the real thing, and how that habit leaves us less able to tolerate uncertainty, hold hard conversations, or trust our own judgment. The book is both a warning and a guide for recovering the human capacities that machine relationships quietly erode.
Genres: psychology, social-science, non-fiction, technology, 21st-century, current-affairs
Vibes: analytical, cautionary, intimate, introspective, thought-provoking, urgent
Tropes: lifecycle-exploration, sociological-study, warning-narrative
Setting: United States
Period: 21st century, 2025
288 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company
Content warnings: addiction, mental-illness