Deeply Attached: AI Bots, Social Robots and More

Remembering Our Stuffed Animals and Dolls

Ridicule. Concern. Positive memes. And, yes research, lots of the serious kind. All that is about humans’ growing emotional (even intimate) relationships with AI.

Those attachments, often deep and caring, shouldn’t seem aberrant. After all, we’re social creatures and the human species is among the most gregarious. We connect.

In 2018 in Scotland, grocery store robot Fabio lost his job and was escorted out. Some of his human co-workers cried.

In a big box, which had seen better times, I “felt bad” for the cleaning robot who had such a dismal work environment.

An EduBirdie study found that a quarter of youth believe AI is “self-aware.”

In addition, the blurring of lines between people and inanimate objects isn’t new. Remember, reminds Eve Herold in “Robots And The People Who Love Them,” how during the magical thinking of childhood we derived comfort, companionship and a sense of safety interacting with our stuffed animals and dolls. In the overwhelm of current stress, Generation Z is back with the stuffed animals - Plushies.

But all this bumps into myriad orthodoxies related to what’s the legitimate purpose of relationships as well as how they should be conducted. That generates the drama.

As a tarot-reader I hear plenty:

That’s not what a relationship is about.

I thought we had a relationship.

You don’t do that in a relationship.

Soon enough what clients could be sharing with me is their pain that their partners, adult children and close friends seem to becoming more committed to their AI bondings than to them.

Some “experts” fear that could be for some a total ditching of human connections for the AI ones. Already, the 21st century is being treated as a backing into isolation and away from standard socializing. Derek Thompson chronicles that in The Atlantic. The peril is that without developing expected social skills for the labor market folks will wind up forever unemployable. A therapist for young people told me that they are so challenged professionally because of COVID. They missed out on even learning to read facial expressions because of the masks.

Also, there’s the danger that the assumed safety of the AI ones will trigger inappropriate openness in human ones. We could be launching a too-trusting society. Both online and offline those immersed in AI connections could be vulnerable to exploitation, including scams.

What should be obvious are that the legal implications are huge. Eight in 10 of Gen Zers who treasure AI relationships, for example, would consider marriage. Chilling is that OpenAI head Sam Altman points out: There’s no legal confidentiality when depending on AI as a kind of therapist. On Paul Weiss’ podcast “Waking Up with AI,” there’s plenty of discussion of regulation and legislation. Until those pieces of infrastructure catch up with the rapid pace of the technology, humans could tumble into a soul-wrenching and expensive legal abyss.

Meanwhile the seduction and the danger are unprecedented. In her book Herold notes:

“The ability of these robots to read and react to human emotions and even feign emotions of their own is something no other machine has been able to do.”

On a bad day, I might decide to turn to ChatGPT and prompt “about life.”