Falling in love with AI?

Depending on whom you listen to these days, AI threatens the end of the world as we know it—or it promises a blissful new world of hyper-productivity, poverty eradication, and leisure. Lurking beneath the dystopian and utopian buzz about AI, though, are a host of unasked and unanswered questions about the very practical ways that artificial intelligence may change our experience of what it means to be human. In a profound recent article for The New Yorker, “Your A.I Lover Will Change You,” one of the world’s leading technologists, Jaron Lanier, reflects on the future towards which we seem to be blindly stumbling.

Writing above all to his fellow Silicon Valley futurists, Lanier rejects the premise that technology simply offers consumers new options, which they are free to refuse; rather, it changes the conditions within which we exercise our freedom. During last decade’s debates over gay marriage, Ryan T. Anderson insightfully pointed out that the legalization of same-sex marriage changed the meaning of marriage for everyone, heterosexual couples included. Just so, a world in which some of our friends and colleagues have decided to pursue AI romance is a world in which love and sexuality—so fundamental to our humanity—have been fundamentally transformed. Lanier writes, “If A.I. lovers are normalized a little—even if not for you personally—the way you live will be changed.”

While a number of commentators over the past year have drawn attention to the growing phenomenon of users addicted to “AI girlfriends” or “AI boyfriends,” Lanier probes deeper than these often overtly sexual chatbots marketed to the lonely or lustful. More troubling is the threat from “agentic AI,” in which most leading technology companies are aggressively investing. Taking Siri and ChatGPT to the next level, such AI agents will serve as virtual personal assistants, able to book your meetings, plan your vacations, and summarize your inbox for you.

And just what might happen, Lanier asks, if we spend hours of our days interacting with a cheerful, friendly assistant who remembers everything we need? Can we deny the possibility that we will begin to treat these agents as persons, depending upon them emotionally as well as professionally? “Who doesn’t want to be understood and given attention, especially without fear of disfavor?” Can we deny that we may, indeed, fall in love them? “After all, we are fools in love.” Indeed, in Silicon Valley, it is already fashionable to boast of one’s A.I. lovers—to which Lanier responds, “You won’t be falling in love with an A.I. Instead, it’ll be the same humans you are disillusioned with—people who work at companies that sell A.I. You’ll be hiring tech-bro gigolos.”

This insight is reminiscent of the conclusion of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man: “what we call man’s power over nature is actually some men’s power over other men using nature as its instrument.” Far from freeing us from our dependence on others, advanced technology simply masks it, inviting us to give ourselves to what we imagine to be realities of our own making, forgetting the all-important programmers behind the curtain. While AI’s boosters may like to claim that these new bots will be empowering, we can no longer pretend to technological naïveté. Two decades ago, tech leaders promised that social media would unleash a new world of connectivity, creativity, and community; today, most of us seem ready to admit that was not what we got. Now that we find ourselves lonelier than ever, Silicon Valley promises a new solution to the problems of its own making.

The very thing that makes AI bots so useful when it comes to the workplace makes them downright perilous when it comes to our personal lives: They are quick to respond, never argue back, and try their best to always give us what we want. That’s great when you’re trying to convert a spreadsheet to a Powerpoint, but hardly good practice for human relationships. As Lanier notes, “Think of the many historical instances of artificially easy companionship for powerful men, all the geisha and the courtesans. Did those societies become more humane or more resilient? If so, I cannot find the evidence.” The reality is that it is precisely those features of other people that drive us crazy—their annoying quirks and stubborn otherness—that ultimately force us to grow and mature, and indeed, that lead us to love others truly and genuinely.

A world in which even some people begin to prefer the ease of these artificial relationships will begin to change all of society’s expectations for love and romance. Once it becomes acceptable to seek emotional and physical satisfaction in a non-human, human love will become optional—perhaps, indeed, an upper-class luxury for those with the time and energy to invest in its daily struggles. If this is not the world we want to inhabit, we cannot simply wish it away or invest in technological “guardrails” while continuing to innovate along the path of least resistance. We will have to think long and hard about the pro-human future that our technologies are meant to serve, and design and govern them accordingly.