Your New A.I. Lover

It must have been a slow day at The New Yorker. The venerable and august magazine just ran a bizarre article about finding an artificial lover, that is, having a romantic relationship with an app, one possessed with artificial intelligence.

Jason Lanier seems to be fully familiar with the inner and outer workings of A.I. I cannot say the same. He and his cohorts sit around worrying about what will happen when we have romantic relationships with bots, with inhuman creatures that are programmed to make us feel good. Or to make us feel loved.

Apparently, young people will accept systematically being lied to by an app. And they will call it love.

One understands that there have already been A.I. therapists, with mixed results, but what does it mean to have a romantic relationship with a robot? How can you go out on a date with a bot? How can you become intimate with a bot? Isn’t there a point where the exercise becomes self-defeating?

Lanier does not mention it, but certain members of the male sex have already developed relationships with over-sized dolls or manequins. They even take them out and become intimate with them. I will leave that to your imagination.

One understands that you and your A.I. lover are not going to reproduce. Lanier does not consider the point, but surely it is as relevant to romance as is the kind of ego massage provided by bots.

And, what happens when you try to explain to your friends and family that you are now totally and completely in love with a computer app? Are we simply talking about a new fetish?

Proponents of these new relationships imagine that they are going to cure us from our inability to get along with other people. The astonishing part of Lanier’s article is that he does not seem to understand the role that social rituals, like family dinners, play in teaching us social skills.

Among the greatest problems that Americans have today is social isolation. Falling in love with a bot does not make you less isolated socially. 

Our world is filled with people who suffer from social isolation. They seem to have a marked tendency to act out their distress, as though they were living out a grand historical drama, hysterically. 

We would do well to learn how to value social connection. Surely, it is more important than learning how to interact with an app. That is, with something you cannot touch or smell or taste.

Now, you will think that young people are already prone to fall in love with images they see on their screens. You will think that social media provides a vast number of possible human relationships. You might note, in passing, that young people are already tiring of dating apps.

And yet, I do not need to tell you that people have a strong tendency to lie, to dissimulate, to fabulate when they are on social media. You might be falling in love with someone, only to discover that he or she is not who he or she says he or she is.

The virtue of meeting someone through friends or relations is that they have been vetted. Someone, be it your neighbor or your aunt, knows the person and knows the family. This means that you are not flying blind. The new person might not be quite as attentive as an app, but still, you will be investing in a possible future, not being exposed as a dupe.