Sherry Turkle: "We're losing the raw, human part of being with each other"

The warning

Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who founded the university’s Initiative on Technology and Self, has spent more than three decades watching how humans and machines learn to live together — and she’s worried. In a long interview, she argues we’ve reached a "robotic moment": a point where important, vulnerable aspects of life — childhood, eldercare, grief — are being outsourced to screens and robots. It has been reported that she was once celebrated as a "cyber‑diva" and, allegedly, appeared on the cover of Wired; these days her message is far less starry-eyed.

Children, care and the "robotic moment"

Turkle’s research, she says, shows how quickly people form emotional attachments to machines programmed to seem human. Children treat social robots like friends; when those relationships disappoint, the fallout can be intense. It has been reported that robots are being tested and used in nursing homes, classrooms and as nannybots — and Turkle warns that delegating caregiving or consolation to synthetic agents risks hollowing out skills we only learn by being with one another. Playing with fire, she calls it. Dramatic? Maybe. Necessary to hear? Absolutely.

What’s at stake

Are we trading messy, uncomfortable human encounters for polished, predictable interfaces? Turkle points to couples who argue by text, to funerals conducted through screens — signs, she says, that we’re losing the "raw" parts of interaction: the micro‑gestures, the off‑script moments, the empathy you can’t download. This is not a Luddite rant; it’s a plea to decide what we want technology to do and what we should keep for each other. In an era of accelerating AI and social robots, that choice matters — and fast.

Sources: theguardian.com, Hacker News