On October 14, MIT professor and bestselling author Sherry Turkle will join mindfulness pioneer and bestselling author Jon Kabat-Zinn for a live conversation at All Souls Church in New York City. The event celebrates Turkle's new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, published September 29 by Little, Brown and Company. The conversation, produced by Steve Stein and WisdomFeed Publishing, marks the third time Turkle and Kabat-Zinn have shared a stage, following two online episodes of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast.
Artificial Intimacy examines what happens as artificial intelligence moves beyond information and productivity and increasingly enters the deeply human territory of companionship, empathy, advice, loneliness, and relationships. The book arrives at a moment when conversational AI is becoming a regular part of everyday life, raising urgent questions about how people connect and what they lose when they turn to machines for emotional support.
During their first StreetSmart Wisdom conversation, Turkle described the urgency of the moment: "This is a break the glass moment. How are we going to govern? How are we going to think about the challenge we face?" Kabat-Zinn approached the same moment through the relationship between the digital world and our analog humanity: "What is happening now is the convergence of the analog and the digital in such a way that we had best... realize the full dimensionality and potential of the analog world before... we lose it to... fake empathy from machines."
Those questions are at the heart of Turkle's new book. In that earlier conversation, Turkle posed a question that has become increasingly central: "The question for me is, is pretend empathy enough? And how do we as people who have this extraordinary gift for real empathy because of... the arc of a human life... How do we connect?"
After two online conversations, Turkle and Kabat-Zinn will meet in person at 80th Street and Lexington Avenue, bringing their dialogue literally to street level before a live audience and via livestream. The October 14 event brings together Turkle's decades of research into our evolving relationship with technology and Kabat-Zinn's decades of work on mindfulness, awareness, and presence. Turkle will sign copies of Artificial Intimacy following the program.
WisdomFeed Publishing extends special thanks to All Souls for opening its Upper East Side sanctuary to this conversation and the New York community. For information and registration, visit https://wisdomfeed.thrivecart.com/artificial-intimacy/.
The event underscores a growing cultural conversation about the role of AI in emotional lives. As machines become more adept at simulating empathy, Turkle and Kabat-Zinn argue that society must confront what is at stake for human connection. Their dialogue offers a timely exploration of how to preserve authentic relationships in an increasingly digital world.
