I find it interesting that such alert minds can be so unimaginative. Turkle has grown up in a world without general artificial intelligence and with only human minds to provide empathy, and seemingly cannot imagine how it will be for a generation growing up after the arrival of GAI.

Future AIs may, very well, be embodied. They may be very well able to imagine or experience ailments of the body. Hells, for all we know they may be able to scan our own brains and lift the subjective experience of being us on a hospital bed and experience our own suffering directly and subjectively. All of this may not come about but some of it is very likely. Once it has come about, there will in all probability be a human generation that has never known a world where humans are more empathic than machines.

I suspect that to such a generation, pouring out their hurt to a machine may feel very natural indeed.