it still means something to be human.

Talk to It, James Gleick (New York Review)

Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has chronicled our tumultuous relationship with computers across more than forty years, sees “a long-standing fantasy, shared by science fiction and engineers, that AI will offer a perfect companion that knows everything about you. It will be there for you and ask nothing in return.” Her wise new book, Artificial Intimacy, expands on themes she began developing in The Second Self (1984) and sounds an alarm: “We are on a path to forgetting what it is to be human.”

[…]

… it still means something to be human. We have knowledge and feelings that come from experiences in a physical world and interactions with our fellow creatures. We engage with reality in a way that an algorithm cannot. The distinction between real and virtual still matters:

When people talk about how relaxing it is to talk to a chatbot, it’s because the real slips away. To act in the world, you need to deal with its friction: almost everything takes conflict, negotiation, compromise, and time.