#501 — The Performance of Empathy

Sam Harris speaks with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy https://link.amazon/B0dKdRCEn. They discuss the early optimism of the internet, the attention economy, the loss of solitude and boredom, the decline of empathy, whether the performance of empathy can ever be enough, AI as therapist, the first-person pronoun as the "original sin" of generative AI, humanoid robots and consciousness, loneliness among older people, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:24Sam Harris?

  I'm here with Sherri Turkle. Sherri, thanks for joining me.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 0:28Sam Harris?

  It's great to finally connect with you. I don't, am I right in thinking that we have not met anywhere, not at a TED conference?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  No, I think this is the first time.

• 0:36Sam Harris?

  Okay, well, great. Well, I've been an admirer of your, you know, the perspective you've given on technology for many years now. You've written many books. The latest is Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. And we'll get to AI, which is your focus there. But I mean, you've been thinking about our relationship with technology, you know, as instantiated by computers and smartphones and social media for a long time. If you were going to compare the world of today to, say, 1975, right? When most people had nothing more than, you know, a television set and a landline. How do you think we're doing? I mean, how do you perceive the effects of information technology and all its guises

• 1:21Sam Harris?

  permeating and subsuming human culture to the degree that it has?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think I'm going to narrow that question down to my field of expertise, which is the development of the person and how the person situates themselves in society in terms of feeling a sense of agency, a sense of community, et cetera. And there, there's been a remarkable deterioration in how we relate to each other, in our confidence in relating to each other. We've developed a feeling of vulnerability so that we want to escape into our phones or don't text, don't talk, just text me, don't text me, I'll talk to a, I'll talk to an avatar. I mean, first, we talked to each other.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  In 1976, we talked to each other, and then we talked to each other through machines. And now we're kind of dropping the middleman, which is the story of my new book, and we just are willing to just talk to the machines themselves. So that's really a downgrading in our kind of capacity and interest to deal with the rough and tumble and vulnerability of dealing with other people. And similarly, we've retreated from our communities. When 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

• 2:49Speaker 02

  was, "Use the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real." That was the slogan of the early personal computer people. Whereas Mark Zuckerberg now, talking about Meta, basically says, "People would like to have 15 friends, but that's unrealistic. They're too busy. The demands of their jobs are too jobs or too great." So they can maybe have two or three friends, and he'll give them the extra 12 or 13 friends as avatars, as programs, as chatbots that'll be tuned to them. So even there, you see a kind of willingness or a corporate interest in, in saying, "Well, we're not really going to be members of our community.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  We'll even drop the real people to just look at screens." So I think it's a, you know, when I began looking at this phenomenon, I was, I was optimistic about using the virtual to improve the quality of life.

• 3:45Sam Harris?

  Can you recapture some of that optimism? And what was your first interaction with the internet like? I mean, were you an early user of, like, were you on the well with lots of people?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, I, the people who I was, I wasn't myself, I was on the well, but I wasn't an active user of the well. But I studied the well, and I hung out with those people. And the, the idea really was to create community online that would translate into more and better community offline. And 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. And that was their mantra, "Improve the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real. Make the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real."

• 4:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, now there's, there's kind of retreat from the real and a sense that if your best friends are chatbots, if you turn away from the, the kind of biological people in your life to the, to the easier to deal with virtual people, well, that's kind of understandable because real life is very hard. So actually, in this book, I, 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. It's a disaster for politics. And I say, "Don't abandon the real now." You know, reality really needs you. This is not a good time to abandon the real.

• 5:20Sam Harris?

  So what's the evidence?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And I feel that very strongly.

• 5:22Sam Harris?

  So what is the evidence that we have lost many of these capacities?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Were you saying, what, were you saying, "Why was I optimistic?"

• 5:29Sam Harris?

  Well, no, I mean, I just, I, I love to listen to, I mean, I often listen to people speaking from the period where the, most of us were just getting online. I mean, like, there are people, I'm, I'm fans of various people who, I'll read their books or a list, there's an endless number of, you know, YouTube conversations and lectures you can hear from people in, let's say, you know, 1994, who were, you know, early adopters online. I'm thinking of someone like, you know, Terrence McKenna, who, you know, for all of his, you know, quirks as an, as an intellectual, he was quite brilliant and quite prescient with respect to, you know, many of the cultural changes that would, would soon follow once so much of culture went into cyberspace.

• 6:13Sam Harris?

  But 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." Like, on some level, what could be wrong with this?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I think, I 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. So for example, Facebook, I remember when I first heard about it, you know, grandmas look at 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.

• 7:13Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Unthinkable. And so there was every reason to feel, my goodness, I guess the word intrinsic would come up, you know, how can it be bad to connect the world with each other? Well, here's how it can be bad. American corporate culture actually thought of some ways to make it bad.

• 7:32Sam Harris?

  How can we make this bad?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Right. I mean-

• 7:35Sam Harris?

  Banner ads and, and algorithms.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Powerful minds went to work immediately.

• 7:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  And you can make it bad if you make attention the most important thing about it, keeping people staring at their screens. And then you say, "Well, how do you do that?" You make people angry and then keep them with their own kind, silo them with their own kind. That turns out to be like a really powerful way to keep people at their screens. Now, 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. On 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 being, not getting nervous

• 8:25Speaker 02

  about the rough and tumble of the world as it is. And 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? So something that sounded like a great, a great thing, it didn't take very long for it to be a toxic thing. And that's even before we get into the things that I'm kind of a specialist in, which is that you lose the capacity for solitude, that people really need the capacity for solitude in order to have mutuality.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  You know, you need to feel, "I know who I am. I'm comfortable with who I am. And then I can, in that comfort with who I am, I can say, 'Well, who are you? And I'd like to know you, and here's who I am, and let's have a relationship.'" If you don't know who you are, essentially, you, you approach another person and say, "Tell me who I am." And that's a disaster in terms of mutual friendship. So we gave up that. We gave up our capacity for boredom, which is so important developmentally. People need to be able to let their minds wander and have a moment of kind of inner peace.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  In order for really their neurons, for basically for the brain to develop an autobiographical sense of self, the brain needs that downtime that comes with boredom. Well, people get anxious if they're not being constantly stimulated. So we're really taking away very important and taking away solitude and taking away the capacity for boredom, where we're taking away very important signal developmental possibilities that we need. So all of these things are not good.

• 10:21Sam Harris?

  What's most been most informative of your view of all that we're losing here? Is it just, is it your interaction with students at MIT over the years? Or is it the research literature such as it is?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  No, 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.

• 10:48Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  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. And then I have, you know, a wide reading in the research literature in 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. That, you know, actually, there's a great story about empathy.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  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 gonna say. In other words, the job of doing the empathic work was starting to feel scary, like too much to do. And at that time, I read a study by a brilliant, a very quantitative study by a very brilliant psychologist named Sarah Conroth.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  And 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. And I said to her, and she says, I'm very depressed about it. And I said, well, what are you gonna do? I'm depressed too. And she said, I'm gonna build empathy apps for the iPhone. In other words, I'm gonna build technology for the iPhone that I hope will give people practice in empathy, you know, tell stories and how do they feel and how do they? And I thought to myself, this is a very bad time we're going into, where technology helps to create a problem. And then we look to technology to help us solve the problem.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  And at the time, I said to her, and I've said it many times in my writing, I say, but we are the empathy app. People are the empathy app. And she laughed, I mean, she knew what I was saying, but, but basically, she did develop these empathy apps for the iPhone. And that's kind of where in the same place today, the, you know, Facebook and social media and chatbots have done so much to increase the crisis and loneliness. And then all the programs say, well, here, we're gonna give you chatbots to fix the problem and loneliness. You're lonely? That's great, we'll throw a chatbot your way.

• 13:33Sam Harris?

  Well, let's linger on empathy for the moment because, I mean, first of all, you can mean two things by the term. I mean, there's a, there's an emotional strand of empathy and then there's a cognitive one. So you're cognitively being able to understand other people's experience is one thing. And that's, you know, it's obviously a necessary piece of our cognition. I mean, this is, you know, otherwise known as theory of mind, and some people have obvious deficits in that. But then there's the, the emotional permeability that we have to one or another degree where we care about, you know, we, you know, when someone's sad, you know, and we, and we see the, the external effects of their sadness, there's an emotional contagion component

• 14:17Sam Harris?

  which, you know, we, we, their sadness begins to feel like our own. And, I mean, some of that's good, some of it is, it is the stuff of which, you know, real intimacy is, is made and also just the appreciation of, you know, vicarious lives through art and, you know, film and et cetera. So it's, we enjoy emotional contagion, but there's, there are also clearly pathologies of it, right? And, 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. I mean, there's a kind of, I mean, every, at the center of every moral panic is just

• 14:56Sam Harris?

  the kind of unreasoning zeal provoked by certain images being taken, you know, as seriously as they can, right? And who knows, who knows even what the images actually depict in the real world, right?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Well, I, I have a narrow definition. I think it's dangerous personally to have that inclusive of view of what empathy is.

• 15:19Sam Harris?

  How do you think about empathy?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I 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. And then as you get bigger, you start to have more agency, but you still remember and have some of the anxieties of all those years when you were little, to look forward to things, to lose someone, to be rejected. I mean, all of the things in a human life, I think when two human beings face each other,

• 16:05Speaker 02

  they connect on these, I don't call, think of it as contagion, I 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. Now, I think that that is only good. And the, what you see online, which is whipping people up into a kind of, you know, almost pornographic, I mean, you know, every, every art form, every trick is being used to incite

• 16:47Speaker 02

  violence, incite hatred, incite tribal feelings. I 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. The thing that we're losing, that I think social media and chatbots are undermining, is really much more that person-to-person empathy where, where you really care about other people and you feel in a kind of community with them. And my point in artificial intimacy is that chatbots can't do that.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  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. So they can have information about all these parts of the human life, but they're not, they haven't lived it, they don't feel it. If I, they're not, they don't have the equipment to empathize. So 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

• 18:12Speaker 02

  performance of empathy by a program becomes empathy enough for them.

• 18:16Sam Harris?

  Well, 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 top of the AI.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting to talk about because I think it is the question.

• 18:29Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Because 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. Because of its literature searches and, you know, it's sort of reading all the literature and, but I don't think, I, I think that's a, you know, empathy can have, the way empathy has two parts, is the way in which people, when they love each other, have two parts. There's the cognitive part, my God, I admire you and you're beautiful, you know, there's that, there's the, there's the cognitive things, you know, we want the same, we have the same values.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And then there's the whole body experience, falling in love, wanting to be close to the person, wanting to hold their hand, wanting to touch them, make love to them. I mean, and you, you could say, well, let's just separate out the cognitive part from like all the other stuff. But it turns out that love doesn't work that way. And I don't think empathy works that way either.

• 19:31Sam Harris?

  But don't you think we could be humbled by a complete understanding of the way empathy and sympathy and compassion and love work and how they're contingent upon certain surface features that can be emulated by machines ultimately? I mean, so let's just imagine, we get out of the uncanny valley and we have humanoid robots that just, I mean, we have Westworld essentially, right? I'm sure you saw Westworld, right?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Many times, many times.

• 19:58Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of those seasons were great.

• 20:03Sam Harris?

  And so just imagine, I mean, if you compare a perfectly tuned humanoid robot to an imperfect person, 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, I mean, 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? Because they're incapable of it. Or, um, you know, somebody who's just, uh, you know, for whatever reason, just not very charismatic. And we have, we have the charisma function turned up to 11 on our perfect bot.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you can feel things that aren't there. In other words, you can feel that someone is performing empathy and is doing this, this is no fantastic performance taking place. But in fact, the robot doesn't, the robot or the chatbot or the, doesn't care when you turn away. Let's just take chatbots for a minute because we're with the chatbots now.

• 21:10Sam Harris?

  But we could, we could make it seem to care, right? Like all of this is just what we, it doesn't matter what we build.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Right. But the question is whether or not it matters, whether it's performing, seeming, or actually caring. So I wanna, I wanna just back up to what you said because I think that it's a, it's very provocative. My position is, is that the performance of empathy is never empathy enough. Because if you have a person, I think it's important to take out of this equation, people with dementia, people with Alzheimer's, people with, uh,

• 21:40Sam Harris?

  Parkinson's or anything.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Certain Parkinson's, I was thinking of Parkinson's, but the kinds of Parkinson's that bring you dementia.

• 21:46Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Because it's sort of, I'm willing to take out of the equa, I think it's important to take out of the equation, people who are, really have had the parts of the brain that allow them to do some of the empathy work removed. And take a person whose life history and whose family values and whose way of being brought up has not made empathy and listening and conversational skills and reading faces a very big part of their life. I mean, we know a lot of people like that.

• 22:18Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And then you say, well, let's compare that person, which I thought you were sort of trying to do, with a really fabulous chatbot robot, you know, the most finely tuned. It's the one that Eric Schmidt is, you know, it's, it's his favorite one for having, for having chats. And my feeling is, is that the most imperfect person has lived a life and knows pain and knows fear and knows what it is to, you know, to be little and maybe fears death and doesn't want to be sick and was worried about their children. And no, no chatbot feels that.

• 22:59Speaker 00

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• 23:08Speaker 02

  I think of myself as the front lash of the backlash. I think I make a very strong argument that this is not good for us. It's not good for our kids. That they have trouble enough. They're frightened of relationships. They're, they're not good at talking. They haven't been given practice. They're on their screens too much.