On October 14, MIT professor and bestselling author Sherry Turkle will join mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn for a live conversation at All Souls Church in New York City, celebrating Turkle's new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. The event, produced by Steve Stein and WisdomFeed Publishing, marks the third conversation between the two thinkers and their first in-person meeting.
Published September 29 by Little, Brown and Company, 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 rapidly entering everyday life, raising urgent questions about how people connect and what they lose when machines simulate human warmth.
Turkle and Kabat-Zinn first explored these themes in two online episodes of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast, discussing what happens as the analog world collides with the digital one. In their first 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 as conversational AI enters everyday life: "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?"
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. Kabat-Zinn founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his work has played a major role in bringing mindfulness into medicine, health care, and mainstream culture. Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and an internationally recognized scholar of the relationship between people and technology.
The conversation will take place at All Souls Church, 1157 Lexington Avenue, at 80th Street, before a live audience and via livestream. 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/.
This event matters because it brings together two leading voices on technology and mindfulness to address one of the most pressing issues of our time: how artificial intelligence is reshaping human connection. As AI becomes more integrated into daily life, questions about empathy, loneliness, and the future of relationships are no longer theoretical. The conversation aims to help individuals and society navigate the ethical and emotional challenges of a world where machines increasingly simulate intimacy. For businesses developing AI companions, mental health professionals, and anyone concerned about the quality of human connection, the insights shared by Turkle and Kabat-Zinn could influence how we design, regulate, and engage with these technologies.
