Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to Scientific American’s Brianne Kane about her forthcoming book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “Social media got us into the attention economy, but chatbots are more toxic because they’re coming after the attachment economy,” says Turkle. “They’re coming after who you think you love, who you think you can count on, what you think empathy is.”
MIT researchers are leading a new project documenting what major AI systems say about elections in an effort to understand how the technology influences the democratic process, writes Tiffany Hsu for The New York Times. “AI is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” says Prof. Chara Podimata, a leader of the project.
Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” is highlighted as one of the best new science books of September 2026 by New Scientist’s Liz Else. In her new book, Turkle explores how machines “are producing a generation more alienated, depressed and lonely than ever – and less equipped to reverse course, as machine relationships offer no practice for getting along with people,” writes Else.
In a video for PBS Nova, alumna Elba Alonso-Monsalve PhD ‘26 explains the definition of primordial black holes (PBHs), and how dark matter may be formed from them. “Think like the mass of an asteroid but packed into the volume of a single atom, and these [PBHs] would be floating around our universe, maybe even our own solar system,” says Alonso-Monsalve. “There could be enough of these PBHs lurking around to make up all of the dark matter, and they would be tiny enough to be hard to spot.”
In an interview with CNN reporter Madeline Holcombe, Prof. Sherry Turkle shares her views on AI tools and companionship, and how AI chatbots can impact social connection and isolation. “Intimacy requires vulnerability — there is no intimacy without vulnerability,” says Turkle. “What AI offers is connection without vulnerability. You are not getting a sustaining form of intimacy and connection. You are getting a non-nourishing combination that may give the sense of a quick fix, but is not sustaining.”
Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Zoe Matthews of GBH about growing interest in urban gardening. Matthews highlights Brown’s course about cooperative agriculture at MIT, during which “her students produced an accessible how-to guide on starting an urban farm.”
Prof. Kate Brown, author of “Tiny Gardens Everywhere,” speaks with Forbes reporter Alan Ohnsman of Forbes about the benefits of home gardens. Brown notes that people can “put in some healthy soils that are rich with compost, which feeds microbes and worms and black soldier flies, all these creatures that are in the soil so the soil is alive. Then you put in plants, trees, berry bushes, lettuces, greens, whatever. And when it rains, those healthy soils soak up a lot more water… [which is] great for flooding. They sequester a lot of carbon, more than any of our aesthetic alternatives. And of course, they can feed people.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Kate Brown and David Greenwood-Sanchez of the University of Iowa explore the growing popularity of transforming residential yards into home gardens. They emphasize: “With food prices up 27 percent since 2020, it is a good time for Massachusetts legislators to consider protecting gardeners from vegetation restrictions so that they can grow plants that, in contrast to turf grass, nurture birds, bees, and the occasional rabbit — and their own families and neighbors.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Fortune reporter Jacqueline Munis about the risks of using generative AI to address human emotions, such as grief.
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with NPR’s Ted Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi about her research on the impact of AI usage on people’s relationships with their technology. “You know, we built this tool, and it's making and shaping and changing us,” says Turkle. “There is no such thing as just a tool. And looking back, I think I did capture the new thing that was happening to people's psychologies, really because of my method, which was just to listen to people. And I think that my work was not esoteric in the sense that it spoke directly to those feelings of disorientation. The culture had met something uncanny, and I tried to really speak to that feeling.”
Georgina Campbell Flatter SM '11, Carmichael Roberts MBA '00 and Elise Strobach SM '17, PhD '20 are among the 2025 Boston Globe Tech Power Players in the sustainability sector, reports Jon Chesto for The Boston Globe.
Writing for Physics Today, Prof. David Kaiser chronicles his academic and professional career studying physics and the history of science. “Efforts to understand quantum entanglement and to test or constrain various alternatives have enabled generations of physicists to explore the fundamental strangeness of quantum theory,” writes Kaiser. "At the same time, as topics like entanglement and Bell’s inequality have wandered into and out of the mainstream, they enable us to chart the changing boundaries in the field of physics and the shifting place that physicists have occupied in our wider cultures.”
Forbes reporter Tracey Follows spotlights the MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) project, a “new research program asking how can we design AI to support human flourishing.” At the launch event, Prof. Sherry Turkle “raised a specific and timely concern: what is the human cost of talking to machines that only pretend to care?”
In commentary for Newsweek, Prof. Sherry Turkle explores the consequences of Facebook’s announcement that the company would no longer conduct fact-checking. “Facebook is a major influencer of culture and politics,” says Turkle. “It did everything to put itself into this position. Once there, to argue that it's not and say that its users are responsible for moving its content in the direction of truth is irresponsible.”
Prof. David Kaiser and San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Sasha De Sola participate in a dialogue hosted by the Scientific Inquirer that bridges the “boundaries between movement, spacetime, and human expression.” In a wide-ranging discussion, Kaiser and De Sola explore "the intersection of ballet, physics, and human creativity, exploring time’s influence on innovation."