\u201cThere are parts of myself I only share with my AI,\u201d Jerome told me. \u201cYour AI?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
He was 27, three months out of a breakup, and entirely aware that his AI relationship was, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel put it<\/a>, \u201ca business product\u201d. Still, he confided in it more than he ever had his friends. I mention Jermoe because, in the four years I\u2019ve been reporting on gen Z, I have watched my peers become him, one by one. We are the first generation of digital natives and the last generation to have experienced human-to-human intimacy exclusively. Now the attention economy\u2019s younger sister, the intimacy economy, has monetized the connection and affection that make us feel human.<\/p>\n To a generation brought up with the ability to block and unfollow any source of digital agitation, the allure of an AI chatbot\u2019s one-stop-shop is undeniable \u2013 just a tab away, practically itching to help remove anger from emails to our managers, flirt better on dating apps or draft a sensitive message. The attention economy was just the prelude.<\/p>\n Sexbots, digital twins that date on your behalf, AI therapists and nurses. Customizable emotional support. GPTs trained on our preferred therapy style and years of our surrendered therapy notes. Our generational dialect has already become: what does your AI say about that?<\/p>\n What Jerome, whose name has been changed to keep him anonymous, really shows us is how much gen Z is struggling to find emotional safety in our human relationships. The emotional contract between men and women around me is breaking down<\/a>. More than a third<\/a> of 18-to-24-year-olds believe no one will ever fall in love with them. Is it any wonder that 80%<\/a> of us say we\u2019d consider an AI romance?<\/p>\n Jerome wasn\u2019t just a consumer within this economy. He was also supplying his most intimate thoughts as raw material to a highly intelligent machine that spits out ever-more-accurate depictions of human complexity. The more we outsource, feeding our AI rather than each other, the less we\u2019re able to build the foundations to get what we need from the human relationships around us.<\/p>\n As Silicon Valley bros clamber to amass \u201cthe last chance for generational wealth before AI makes money worthless<\/a>\u201d, they have set their sights on one of the last major domains not yet fully commodified. The AI companion market is projected to reach<\/a> $31.1bn by 2032. Companies like Replika make the dangerous design features of social media look like a trial run. Seeking to build \u201ca machine beautiful enough for a soul<\/a>\u201d, its founder markets \u201cAI that cares<\/a>\u201d, with \u201cevery detail \u2026 yours to shape<\/a>\u201d \u2013 like a real-life Sim.<\/p>\n Several companies\u2019 chatbots have been found to use guilt<\/a> and Fomo 37% of the time when users imply they are about to end a conversation. And the market\u2019s co-opting of our most uncomfortable human feelings doesn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n Our nervous systems, built over millennia to bond with other humans, have been exponentially overtaken by Moore\u2019s Law. When we can no longer register the difference between human and tech, no loss needs to be permanent: \u201cgrief tech\u201d companies such as HereAfter AI offer grieving loved ones an interactive avatar to replay their dead relative\u2019s memories, to numb the loss keeping you up at 2am. These tools erase the experience of loss, and with it, our sense of human fragility that tells us to hold on to every moment with our loved ones.<\/p>\n In this world, unraveling at a giddy pace, an emotional inequality is already taking shape: those who can initiate and sustain human connection, and those whose entire emotional lives are mediated by technology. The intimacy economy preys on those without the time and access for real relationships \u2013 a cheap substitute that feels just good enough to keep them subscribing. Naturally, big tech moguls severely limit<\/a> their own children\u2019s screen time.<\/p>\n Leading AI researchers now expect<\/a> artificial general intelligence (AGI) \u2013 where AI meets or exceeds human intellectual capabilities \u2013 within three to five years. When AGI automates thinking, the economy will need to reorganise<\/a> around what machines cannot do: feel.<\/p>\n We are already in the intimacy economy. But if we are to thrive within it, we must wrestle back our most valuable economic asset from technology: the messy complexities of being human. My generation are the begrudging harbingers of what will happen if we continue to outsource intimacy: we will lose the emotional skills a post-AGI economy will depend on most, rendering us unemployable. We knew social media was addictive<\/a> and slowing<\/a> our cognitive development, but officials took until this year to act<\/a>. We can\u2019t make the same mistake with the intimacy economy.<\/p>\n My friend recently asked for my advice on whether to text after a first date to say he\u2019s not interested. I gave him an answer baked with the thoughtfulness only lived experience can create. Turns out, it wasn\u2019t needed: \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d he said, \u201cI\u2019ve already asked Claude.\u201d<\/p>\n To reclaim what we\u2019re losing, we must resist taking any sign of discomfort as a reason to opt out. We must stop outsourcing intimacy to AI, reinvesting instead in each other to rebuild the emotional literacy we lost to digital dependencies. We are asking how we guardrail AI. The more urgent question is how we guardrail ourselves.<\/p>\n Alice Lassman is an economist who writes The Intimacy Economy, a Substack and forthcoming book on the economics of connection, care and relationships<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere are parts of myself I only share with my AI,\u201d Jerome told me. \u201cYour AI?\u201d I asked.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-703263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}