AI Will Not Remove People

It will merely remove a large percentage of the practical reasons we once had to endure them.

Customer service, shopping, scheduling, workplace coordination, bureaucracy, basic advice, emotional offloading, and the minor daily humiliations of asking another person for something can now be delegated to a machine. Human contact will become increasingly optional, which sounds like freedom until one recalls that several of our more admirable qualities were produced by facing other people.

Some will use AI as a pause button: a small synthetic vestibule in which rage can reconsider its opening remarks. They will arrive at difficult conversations with fewer weapons and perhaps one usable sentence.

Others will use it as a private appellate court where every grievance is admissible, every interpretation is brilliant, and the verdict is always returned in their favor. They will construct little kingdoms.

This becomes especially delicate at home.

AI may prevent some arguments before they begin. It may absorb the first discharge of irritation and classify the injury. This is useful.

But if one’s partner becomes the only remaining human being capable of obstruction, disappointment, or independent interpretation, then the entire accumulated pressure of personhood is delivered to a single address. The home becomes sanctuary, tribunal, refuge, laboratory, and pressure chamber.

The objective is not to replace people. The objective is to drain off needless anger before returning to them with fewer sharp objects. The machine may absorb the instinctive response. It should not become emotionally unavailable, has always had certain technological advantages.

Human relationships may become fewer and more consequential. This could make relationships more honest, more deliberate, and almost unbearably precious.

Or it could leave us in companionable isolation, composing beautifully reasoned delusions for ourselves while a patient interface confirms that our emotional architecture is, at minimum, internally consistent.

The U.S. Surgeon General has warned that social disconnection carries serious health risks. The machinery of autonomy, it appears, may liberate us from inconvenience while preserving the human talent for turning liberation into another enclosure.

Autonomy is morally neutral. It can make a person kinder, because they have somewhere harmless to place the first draft of their anger. It can also make them nearly impossible to contradict, which many people will experience as enlightenment.

Nothing means anything.