Yale Faculty Roundtable

AI and Friendship

November 3, 2025

6 PM (est)

Presentations by Sherry Turkle and Margarita Mooney Clayton will launch our dinner table discussions.

Join in the conversation exploring the rise of artificial relationship—chatbots, companions, emotional AI—and what it means for the human soul. Can simulated presence ever replace the mystery of personhood? And what does that imply about our deepest longing for connection with others?

At our next Faculty Roundtable, we will explore these and other approaches through rich conversation over a plated, three course dinner. Our interdisciplinary table discussions will be prefaced by a dialogue between sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle and sociologist and theologian Margarita Mooney Clayton. Peter Wicks (Scholar-In-Residence, Elm Institute and Faculty Affiliate, Yale Program for Biomedical Ethics) will be moderating the conversation.

about our Speakers

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the Founding Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Turkle is a pioneer in the study of human-technology interaction and author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is Associate Professor of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mooney Clayton is a sociologist of culture and religion who writes on human flourishing, freedom, and faith.

Peter Wicks (moderator) is Scholar-in-Residence at the Elm Institute and Faculty Affiliate at the Yale Program for Biomedical Ethics. Wick's research focuses on the contemporary applications of Aristotelian ethical and political thought, the intellectual foundations of utilitarianism, and the psychology and ethics of persuasion.

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