Imagine that a good friend of yours has fallen for a psychopath, a man or woman who seems superficially charming but you know to be controlling and cruel. The friend, reluctant to face reality, says: ‘Just give them time, they had a tricky childhood, they’ll change.’ Do you say: ‘Yes friend, hang in there’? No you don’t. You say: ‘Run for the hills, friend.’

Caring for someone who can’t care back, whose interest is only in exploiting you, is a mug’s game. So why – and several times in the course of reading Sherry Turkle’s Artificial Intimacy I put the book aside to blink and wonder – have we entangled ourselves so readily and intimately with uncaring AI? Why do we let ourselves and our children not just consult, but confide in and grow close to a clever lie that presents as ‘self’ and mimics sympathy while feeling and understanding nothing.

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Turkle is a psychologist and a professor of social studies who has been writing for more than a decade about our growing dependence on computers and touchscreens, more recently AI: 

If we use machines as stock analysts and legal advisers, we shrug away the human connections we once had with the people who did those jobs; when we talk to machines that present as teachers and physicians, these roles become transactional, and then we cross a bright line.

If we use machines as stock analysts and legal advisers, we shrug away the human connections we once had with the people who........

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