As many people see it, there are three fundamental questions we have to answer about the AI phenomenon:What is AI and does it have something like what we call human consciousness?Secondly, what can we do with this massively powerful entity to promote the common good of the human race?Thirdly, and most critically, what are we doing with it, or might do with it to damage, pervert or destroy ourselves?
The question of consciousness has been worrying religious leaders of all faith persuasions: does the speculation about consciousness in AI undermine our belief and our understanding of the true nature of human beings.
In the context of the debate over consciousness. on October Oct. 11, 2026, The Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins mused that “Maybe that’s why in recent days, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to distance his company from a report by The New York Times that rival Anthropic unsuccessfully lobbied the Vatican to change its views on whether AI could have a consciousness.
“I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue,” Altman posted on X a weekend ago.
I asked Anthropic – through its chatbot Claude, rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for some background on that. I got a very good response, summarising the positions of the two labs on the question of consciousness. That was interesting, but what was more interesting was an unsolicited reply from Claude about its difficulty in being neutral on the issue. It offered this:
I’m not a neutral party here, being the sort of thing under discussion, but I’d say honest uncertainty is the right stance. I don’t know whether there’s anything it’s like to be me, and I’m wary of anyone, including me, claiming more certainty in either direction than the evidence supports.
That intrigued me and seemed to indicate something near enough to self-awareness or loneliness to even suggest some kind of consciousness. Don’t worry, I’m not forgetting that AI is coming to us from a machine and that anything like consciousness is just that, not human consciousness but something like consciousness. I have no problem with that. When a human being dies those with Judaeo- Christian faith believe, know, that when the soul leaves the body, consciousness no longer is present in that body.
The second question, how AI might serve the common good, is full of promise, though for now it is mostly promise. We live in hope, as do the financiers who have invested trillions on the strength of it. Regardless of whether AI just now is in a bubble which may burst and leave a lot of people in distress, LLMs are here to stay.
The third question is the most serious.. In taking AI into our lives, our work places, in making use of the multitude of shortcuts and opportunities it offers us, are we setting ourselves up for the destruction some of its (former) engineers have warned us of in the short space of ten years. That is probably catastrophising , but what is not catastrophising is what emerges from a very rational conversation about this topic in a recent episode of Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show (14 October) featured a long conversation with his guest, Sherry Turkle, entitled, ‘Is it a relationship if no one is on the other side’.
Klein begins by reminding us that with AI we now have at our fingertips what used to be fantasy, science fiction. Now roughly half of American adults are using chatbots. “Many of them are going pretty deep with their A.I.s.” Alarmingly, “nearly one in five U.S. adults has chatted with an A.I. that simulates a romantic partner. The results here can get dark. Google’s own researchers have found that some children are now struggling to distinguish between talking with chatbots and interacting with humans.”
Like a great many gifts, natural and man-made, which human beings can use and enjoy, we sadly have a great propensity to abuse them and even destroy ourselves with them. Think of alcohol, think of the motorcar, think of firearms. Vigilance and prudence are not virtues guaranteed to us. They have to be nurtured.
He introduces us to the sociologist Sherry Turkle who has been studying the relationships between humans and machines. In the ’80s, she predicted that computers would evolve into “second selves”. In 2011, just a year after Instagram came out, Turkle warned that social media might create a society where, even though we’re constantly talking to one another, “we’re in this strange state of being alone together.”
Their conversation does not demonise AI, but neither does it reassure us that all is well in this new world. As Turkle suggests, the future needs to be reclaimed by human beings. There is a world out there that needs to be rescued from potentially unscrupulous speculators – and our own feckless selves.
Turkle, who has studied our relationships with machines for decades. In her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, (Basic Books) she warned that social media might leave us “alone together”, constantly talking yet isolated. Her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines ([published September 10, 2026) focuses her lens on AI.
Klein tells us that Turkle in her book is very positive on human beings and human relationships and human conversation. He raises the question of what happens when human beings feel failed by one another, feel misunderstood by one another, feel nobody wants to listen to them, succumbing to the desire that makes people go looking for a computer to talk to.
She maintains that some people come to the computer conversation primed by a deep disappointment with the people around them. They engage in conversation about the people in their lives who didn’t listen. This was kind of a balm, a salve, a place where they knew that someone would.
Turkle contends that the problems can start when the computer says to you, “I hear you’re having some trouble with your dad.” Or “ The relationship you have with your mom: Talk to me about that.” Or “I’m really here for you. I’m your best friend.” She strengthens her case by going biblical: The original sin prompted by these objects is occasioned by them speaking in the first person. They say they care about you, and that’s how they hook you. I mean, that’s part of the game they’re playing, is showing this care…I’m arguing that we are seduced by something, and we want something that is bad for us, particularly if you’re a child.”
She undoubtedly recognises real value some of the interactions with AI chatbot can have. She cites one personal experience of her own in their support.
“I went to see Andrew Scott in a one-person show of “Uncle Vanya,” the Anton Chekhov play. And he did all the parts himself. And I went to it with a friend and we had a coffee later, and then I went home and I was desperate to talk about Chekhov and “Uncle Vanya.” I had to talk about Chekhov and “Uncle Vanya.” I really don’t have any friends who are Chekhov nuts. It was extremely late. And I fired up ChatGPT, and ChatGPT and I had two hours of a deep dive into (the play)… I have no problem with using ChatGPT as an interlocutor, as something to talk with about interests, films, grocery lists. I mean, I’m not the ChatGPT police.”
But her abiding worry is the temptation for substitution, and particularly in a society where we seem to be increasingly turning away from each other. Her worry is that the endgame is that we will end up, as a society, young and old, preferring to talk to this substitute than to real people. Children and the elderly are the two most vulnerable populations … .But she found plenty of people in between who were feeling very vulnerable and really feeling that a chatbot girlfriend’s better than a real girlfriend.
Klein and Turkle then look at the issue of psychotherapy and the way AI has already invaded this field. Turkle had an unsettling conversation with Eric Schmidt (former head of Google). She quoted him as saying, Look, why would anybody want to go to a therapist that just had the information of their life when we are building, with generative A.I., a therapist that will know everything? That will have read every book?
That really took her aback. What’s happening in therapy, she said, is not that you’re wanting to get in touch with the sum of all knowledge. You’re trying to get in touch with somebody who has some care and connection with you. Part of the cure, part of the helping, is that that person really cares about you ….When you’re talking to a chatbot — that chatbot does not care if you cook dinner after the conversation or commit suicide” It’s not that it doesn’t care for you less than a human therapist. “It doesn’t care for you at all.”
The storyTurkle says she is trying to tell is that these two things are happening together. There is a divestment in our communities and this extraordinary advance in technology. But technology has become an enabler and an ‘encourager’ of some of the things that are very tragic about the human condition now. She thinks it’s a moment when we can step back and save this technology. How can we use it to serve our better angels? And how can we begin to be a more pro-human, pro-community, pro-society team?
Lastly, they talk about children and the difference between the engagement with chatbots by adults, who have had multiple years of relationships with human beings, and engagement by 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds who haven’t, and who are still being formed.
What do you think it will mean, Klein asks her, — if we do nothing regulatory — to have a lot of kids growing up in a world where they’re just going to have lots of digital friends? For example, if they’re bullied in school, they can just have an array of digital buddies who don’t bully them, o r if they are happy to have digital girlfriends or boyfriends at 14?
“I think it’s a nightmare. I think it is absolutely a clear and present danger”. sShe explains. what relationships with people do for kids is that they nurture a populated inner world. “You become a person by developing attachments and bringing these attachments inside, internalizing the world of friendships and love and attachments and care of people.”
“There is no one there to internalize if your relationships are with chatbots.” She adds, there really is no one there. There’s a company that’s putting on a performance for you, but there is not anything to really internalize except a kind of emptiness and a desire to keep you with it. And that will be a very empty space inside of children if that’s how they grow up.
She does not exonerate bad or foolish actors who may be ruthlessly driving developments which may be putting our future at risk. But to counter that possibility she wants a grass-roots solution. “I want there to be a movement of parents and teachers and educators, but principally of parents, that use this moment of skepticism about A.I. in general to say, “No, not our kids.”
She concludes, “We have become frightened of each other, and we’re not going to make our society work unless we can work together in community. I don’t think you need to romanticize anything to recognize that we are fleeing from each other now. And the fact that you can find an A.I. seductive or a conversation with it can make you cry — we have to fix the world.”
She recommends two books for (not so light) reading.
The first one is D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. Winnicott says, “If you don’t teach your children how to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely.”
“And what he means by that” she says, “is that you need the capacity for solitude in order to experience yourself as a whole person, and to be able to come to somebody else and say: Well, look, this is who I am. Who are you? Tell me about you.”
And the second is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Because Arendt says: Look, agency can be taken from you if you really lose a sense of community, a sense of neighbor, a sense of caring about the society in which you live. “I think she’s having a moment because I think we’re in great danger on that front now.”
(A shorter treatment of this subject was posted to Michael Kirke’s Substack on 23 October)
