#501 — The Performance of Empathy

Sherry Turkle joins Sam Harris to discuss her new book, Artificial Intimacy. The conversation revisits the early hopes for the internet and how the attention economy has reshaped solitude and boredom. They take up the decline of empathy and ask whether an empathy performed by AI could ever substitute for the real thing. Topics include AI as therapist, Turkle's claim that the first-person pronoun is the 'original sin' of generative AI, humanoid robots and consciousness, and loneliness among older people.