Analysis of Turkle’s Argument

As more people are growing up with artificial intelligence by their side, we’re starting to see robots become more realistic and indistinguishable from humans. One could argue that the youth in the newer generation, who are being disproportionately affected by these innovations, are beginning to have a warped sense of what can feel emotion, believing that machines can actually be their friends and display empathy. In “There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy,” Sherry Turkle recognizes the dangers of putting our faith in artificial empathy and highlights how this mistake will be detrimental to society.

Turkle commences her article with a personal experience from her own life, explaining that a 16-year-old girl has already given up on humanity and has put her faith in robots. According to Turkle, the girl was “considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future” with the reasoning that “it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that.” The girl has lived her whole life seeing the flaws of humanity, like heartbreak, abandonment, and broken promises, while also seeing that machines like Siri are flawless companions that will do anything you ask without leaving you or breaking your heart. Turkle believes that this viewpoint was prescient and rare at one point but is now becomes a relevant and topical issue. This is a call to action for the reader, emphasizing that people are already putting too much trust and confidence in the idea that robots can’t hurt people in the ways that humans do. 

Building off that idea, Turkle complements the anecdote with her rationale behind her argument. In her third paragraph, Turkle explains that robots are designed to perform and emulate emotions, but they cannot actually feel emotions. She claims that this girl is under the false impression that Siri, a machine that can carry conversations and exhibit emotions, was “a thing that could understand her,” when in reality it is just executing lines of pre-written code. As stated by Turkle, “These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child, or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships… They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them.” Turkle is extending the thought that robots do not know what human emotion is like and they have never experienced human emotion, so they are incapable of expressing real emotion.  They cannot simply be “programmed” to feel empathy because they have no human experience with love or loss; they are just doing what their programmers coded them to do. In this effort to describe her rationale, Turkle attempts to persuade the reader that lines of logic similar to that of the 16-year-old girl are unrealistic and even harmful.

Not only does Turkle elaborate on her reason to believe that putting our faith in robotic empathy is dangerous, but she also challenges the opposition’s reasoning with a counterclaim. In paragraph 10, she argues the irrationality of her colleagues’ beliefs. She testifies, “I stand accused by my happy technologist colleagues and their unrelenting enthusiasm. Accused of what? Species chauvinism, I suppose. My colleagues make assumptions about the future of being human with which I am not comfortable.” Turkle argues that the implications of putting our faith into robots will be detrimental to our civilization. She claims that her colleagues want to progress technology to the point where we merge our brains and bodies with robots to better benefit humanity. Turkle disagrees with this because she believes it is a dangerous risk to trust technology enough to incorporate it into our own brains and bodies. This is an effort to discredit proponents of the idea that technological cyborg advancements will benefit humanity, persuading the reader that Turkle’s argument is safer and stronger than the opposition’s argument.

To conclude, Turkle makes an effort to persuade the audience that putting our trust in robotic empathy would be a detrimental mistake that could be extremely harmful to humanity. She begins her argument with a personal example of a 16-year-old girl who confides in robots like Siri over real people. Turkle then asserts that this girl has a warped sense of what can feel emotion and what can understand her, and provides her reasoning to believe this. After that, Turkle dismantles a counterargument by declaring that it is a dangerous risk to put our faith in robots because of the possibilities that could arise from robotic and cybernetic innovations.