There\u2019s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you think the L.L.M.s are sentient, \u201cthere\u2019s nobody there to see or hear you, or feel things about you, so in what sense could there possibly be a relationship?\u201d While drafting our article \u201cIn Praise of Empathic A.I.,\u201d my co-authors (Michael Inzlicht, C.\u00a0Daryl Cameron, and Jason D\u2019Cruz) and I were careful to say that we were discussing A.I.s that give a convincing impression of empathy. But A.I. companionship may work only if you believe, on some level, that the model actually cares, that it\u2019s capable of feeling what you feel.<\/p>\n
If future language models do achieve consciousness, then the problem vanishes (and new, more serious ones take its place). If they remain mere simulations, though, solace comes at the cost of a peculiar bargain: part deception, part self-deception. \u201cIt is one thing when loved ones die or stop loving you,\u201d the psychologist Garriy Shteynberg and his colleagues observed recently in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. \u201cIt is another when you realize they never existed. What kind of despair would people feel upon the discovery that their source of joy, belonging, and meaning was a farce? Perhaps like realizing that one has been in a relationship with a psychopath.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, the line between person and program is still visible\u2014most of us can see the code beneath the mask. But, as the technology improves, the mask will slip less and less. Popular culture has shown us the arc: Data, from \u201cStar Trek\u201d; Samantha, from \u201cHer\u201d; Dolores, from \u201cWestworld.\u201d Evolution primed us to see minds everywhere; nature never prepared us for machines this adept at pretending to have them. Already, the mimicry is good enough for some\u2014the lonely, the imaginative. Soon, it may be good enough for almost everyone.<\/p>\n
I teach a freshman seminar at the University of Toronto, and last semester we devoted a class to the question of A.I. companions. My students, by and large, sided with the critics. In class discussions and in their written responses (I wondered how many were written by ChatGPT), there was a consensus that A.I. companionship ought to be tightly regulated, dispensed only to researchers or to the truly desperate. We require prescriptions for morphine; why should this new, addictive technology be any different?<\/p>\n
I doubt my students will get their way. Perhaps A.I. companions will plateau, the way self-driving cars seem to have done. Still, if the technology does advance, it\u2019s unlikely that we\u2019ll tolerate strict government controls indefinitely. The appetite for these companions may simply prove too strong.<\/p>\n
So what kind of world will we inhabit when A.I. companionship is always within reach? Solitude is the engine of independent thought\u2014a usual precondition for real creativity. It gives us a chance to commune with nature, or, if we\u2019re feeling ambitious, to pursue some kind of spiritual transcendence: Christ in the desert, the Buddha beneath the tree, the poet on her solitary walk. Susan Cain, in her book \u201cQuiet,\u201d describes solitude as a catalyst for discovery: \u201cIf you\u2019re in the backyard sitting under a tree while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, you\u2019re more likely to have an apple fall on your head.\u201d<\/p>\n
But solitude isn\u2019t loneliness. You can be alone without being lonely\u2014secure in the knowledge that you\u2019re loved, that your connections are intact. The reverse is possible, too. Hannah Arendt once observed that \u201cloneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.\u201d It\u2019s bad enough to be alone on Valentine\u2019s Day; it\u2019s worse, somehow, to find yourself surrounded by canoodling couples. The most acute loneliness, I suspect, is the kind you feel in the presence of those you love. I remember, years ago, sitting in my living room with my wife and our two-year-old as they both refused to speak to me (for different reasons). The silence was almost physically painful.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to think of loneliness as simply a lack of being respected, needed, or loved. But that\u2019s not the whole story. The philosopher Olivia Bailey suggests that what people crave, above all, is to be \u201chumanely understood.\u201d Empathy, in this light, is not just a way of feeling but a way of caring\u2014a willingness to try to understand the particularity of someone else\u2019s emotions.<\/p>\n
That sort of understanding, as most of us learn, can be in surprisingly short supply\u2014not only because others don\u2019t care enough to try but because sometimes there\u2019s a gap that just can\u2019t be bridged. The philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy has written about being \u201cloved but lonely.\u201d After a stint in Europe, she returned home eager to share her new passions\u2014her complicated take on Italian futurism, the power of Italian love sonnets\u2014but found herself struggling to connect: \u201cI felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Creasy sees this kind of missed connection less as a personal failing than as an existential hazard. \u201cAs time passes,\u201d she notes, \u201cit often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did.\u201d In her view, loneliness is \u201csomething to which human beings are always vulnerable\u2014and not just when they are alone.\u201d Sam Carr agrees: loneliness, he says, is the default setting, and, if we\u2019re lucky, we find things along the way\u2014books, friendships, brief moments of communion\u2014that help us endure it.<\/p>\n
Maybe the closest most of us ever get to an absence of loneliness is at the start of a love affair, when both people are hungry to know and be known. But that\u2019s only the prospect of understanding, not the achievement of it. Sooner or later, even that feeling fades.<\/p>\n
If A.I. companions could truly fulfill their promise\u2014banishing the pain of loneliness entirely\u2014the result might feel blissful, at least at first. But would it make us better? In \u201cA Biography of Loneliness,\u201d the cultural historian Fay Alberti sees value in at least the fleeting kind of loneliness that you encounter during life transitions\u2014\u201cmoving away to university, changing jobs, getting divorced.\u201d It can, she says, \u201cbe a spur to personal growth, a way of figuring out what one wants in relationships with others.\u201d The psychologist Clark Moustakas, in \u201cLoneliness,\u201d takes the condition to be \u201can experience of being human which enables the individual to sustain, extend, and deepen his humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most obviously, loneliness could go the way of boredom. I\u2019m old enough to remember when feeling bored was just a fact of life. Late at night, after the television stations signed off, you were on your own, unless you had a good book or a companion around. These days, boredom still visits\u2014on planes without Wi-Fi; in long meetings\u2014but it\u2019s rare. Our phones are never far, and the arsenal of distractions has grown bottomless: games, podcasts, text threads, and the rest.<\/p>\n
This is, in some ways, an obvious improvement. After all, no one misses being bored. At the same time, boredom is a kind of internal alarm, letting us know that something in our environment\u2014or perhaps in ourselves\u2014has gone missing. Boredom prompts us to seek out new experiences, to learn, to invent, to build; curing boredom with games like Wordle is a bit like sating hunger with M&M\u2019s. As the psychologists Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson have observed, \u201cBlindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals.\u201d Maybe the best thing about boredom is what it forces us to do next.<\/p>\n
In a similar way, loneliness isn\u2019t just an affliction to be cured but an experience that can shape us for the better. John Cacioppo, the late neuroscientist who pioneered the science of loneliness, described it as a biological signal, akin to hunger, thirst, or pain. For most of human history, being cut off from others wasn\u2019t merely uncomfortable; it was dangerous. From an evolutionary perspective, isolation meant not just the risk of death but, worse, the risk of leaving no descendants.<\/p>\n