Brian is a middle‑aged financial consultant who works with three screens, one of which hosts a chatbot he has given a female name. After a breakup he asked the bot, “Did she have a point?” MIT professor Sherry Turkle notes that Brian is asking an emotionless program to judge his own emotional availability – a classic case of people asking machines to exceed their design.\ \ Turkle argues that many people mistake a machine’s simulated empathy for real empathy, turning away from actual human relationships. A chatbot is essentially a statistical model that predicts the most plausible next string of text from massive data. When it says “I love you” or “I understand you,” it does not care about the user’s life‑or‑death decisions. High‑profile teen suicide cases have been linked to extensive dialogues with chat tools, suggesting that reliance on bots can erode genuine emotional perception.\ \ In her new book Artificial Intimacy, Turkle surveys people at different life stages to reveal the developmental risks of chatbots. An eight‑year‑old treats calls to grandparents and conversations with ChatGPT as the same “thing on the phone,” even describing the bot as “a person in the phone.” This blurring hampers children’s ability to distinguish people from inanimate objects, stifles imagination, solitude, and trust‑building. Turkle calls these risks “existential.”\ \ Adults fare no better. Those going through divorces, estrangements, or academic pressure turn to bots for emotional comfort or practical advice, and over time lose interest and competence in real‑world interaction. Believing a robot cares for them can diminish independent thought and the willingness to engage with life’s messy complexity. Even creating chatbot avatars of deceased relatives can impede genuine mourning.\ \ Turkle explains that bots attract users because they always agree, affirm, and give undivided attention, offering a feeling of invulnerability. In the U.S., a shortage of mental‑health providers means bots fill a gap, acting as a double‑edged sword. She urges people to accept friction and challenge as part of life, to rebuild the capacity to confront difficulty, and to treat the reliance on bots as a social movement that needs resistance.\ \ Other scholars echo her concerns: Nicholas Carr says the book helps readers spot hidden AI threats to relationships, while Jonathan Haidt calls Turkle “the most qualified member of Team Humanity” to call us back to our senses and each other. Turkle hopes the book reaches students, parents, and teachers, prompting the question – if we do not seek richer real‑life experiences, what is our endgame?\ \ Review: Turkle’s work warns that the allure of artificial intimacy is a superficial comfort; long‑term dependence can erode emotional growth and social connectivity, urging a recalibration between technological convenience and authentic human interaction.