We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

Summary

There’s 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, “there’s nobody there to see or hear you, or feel things about you, so in what sense could there possibly be a relationship?” While drafting our article “In Praise of Empathic A.I.,” my co-authors (Michael Inzlicht, C. Daryl Cameron, and Jason D’Cruz) 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’s capable of feeling what you feel.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. “It is one thing when loved ones die or stop loving you,” the psychologist Garriy Shteynberg and his colleagues observed recently in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. “It 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.”For now, the line between person and program is still visible—most 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 “Star Trek”; Samantha, from “Her”; Dolores, from “Westworld.” 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—the lonely, the imaginative. Soon, it may be good enough for almost everyone.I teach a freshman seminar at the University of Toronto, and last semester we devoted...