The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real. AI Is Making It Much Worse.

If you’re anything like the vast majority of Americans, the following question will be depressing to answer: In a typical month, do you ever host people — whether friends or family — in your home to spend any amount of time together? I’m talking about friends or family members from outside your household. Do they come over and spend time with you at least once a month on average?

The author Derek Thompson, on his Substack, recently reported on the latest data on how people are answering this question, and how their responses have changed over time.

You can see it on your screen right now. From 1975 to 2026, the percentage of Americans who host people at their home at least once a month has dropped from 42% (nearly half of the country) to just 12% — which adds up to a decline of more than 70%. So in just 50 years, inviting friends and family over to your home has gone from very typical, to extremely rare.

By the same token, in that period, the number of Americans who host (or attend) monthly dinner parties is down by 62%, to just 6% overall. The number of Americans who report playing cards once a month has dropped by 67%, to 13% overall. The number of Americans who finish a book every month has dropped 60%, to just 15% overall. The number of Americans who attend church at least once a month is down by 58%, to 24% overall.

This is a decline that’s been underway for some time. Take a look at this chart.

These are the trends from 1975 to the late 1990s, which were compiled by something called the “DDB Needham Life Style surveys” — which were cited by Robert Putnam in his famous book “Bowling Alone,” which you’ve probably heard of.

As you can see, even before the introduction of cellphones and the internet, Americans were becoming dramatically less likely to host people at their homes, or to go on picnics, or attend church, anything like that. We’ve been on this trajectory for some time. And now we have data through 2026, which was compiled by a separate group called “Data For Progress” — which replicated the methodology of the Life Style surveys that were conducted in the 1990s. And unambiguously, the new data demonstrates that Americans are far more isolated and lonely than they’ve ever been, at any point in human history.

And it’s not just dinner parties and poker. No matter what social event you’re talking about, odds are it’s become dramatically less popular in the past few decades.

This chart shows how many Americans have done these activities at least one time in the past year — so we’re not even using monthly numbers anymore. And it’s comparing 1995 numbers to 2026 numbers. According to this data, only 49% of people have gone to a bar or tavern one time in the past 12 months. Just 46% attended a sporting event. Just 32% have attended a class or seminar, down from 54% in 1995.

And as you’d expect, more Americans are eating alone than ever. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023, roughly 25% of Americans “reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day,” which is an increase of 53% compared with 2003. The problem is particularly common among young people. Another analysis cited by the New York Times found that “for American adults under 25, there has been an 80% increase in dining alone.”

Think about how bizarre and unprecedented this is. Total social isolation wasn’t even an option for humans, aside from hermits in the woods, until very recently. Now it’s an option at scale. And this phenomenon is not unique to the United States — not even close. In Japan they now have an official category called “lonely deaths,” where someone dies alone — and their body isn’t discovered for a lengthy period of time. Lonely deaths have become so common that they’re now tracked by the government. One of the most well-known examples — the death that made Japan realize they had a problem — took place in 2000, when a 69-year-old man was discovered on the floor of a massive government apartment complex. He had been dead for three years, and no one noticed. All of his rent and utilities payments were auto-paid through his bank, so there was no reason to evict him. It wasn’t until his savings finally ran out, after several years, that the police came to investigate. What they found, as the New York Times reported, was “his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his next-door neighbors.”

This is the reality of living in a country that’s well below replacement-level birth rates. Before long, elderly people start dying, and there’s no one to check in on them. Preventing this horrific (and highly depressing) state of affairs in our own country should obviously be a top priority — maybe the single highest priority — for our elected leaders. We aren’t far behind Japan, in this regard. Japan’s birth rate is roughly 45% below replacement level. Meanwhile the United States is around 25% below replacement level. Combine that with the data we just talked about, and it’s not hard to see that “lonely deaths” are going to become an epidemic in this country very soon. We’re already seen a dramatic rise in “deaths of despair,” particularly from overdoses. And the problem is only going to get much worse, based on every indication we have at the moment. Especially when you consider how much more prevalent this isolation problem has become in the younger generations. Tons of research bears this out. Just one example: in the ’70s, more than half of high school seniors reported hanging out with their friends almost every day. In 2017, that number had fallen to 28%. And we can safely assume it’s dropped precipitously since then.

For all the messaging we’ve heard about AI in recent months — from the doomsday alarmists who think AI will destroy the world overnight, to the AI maximalists who are willfully blind to the massive disruption that this technology will cause, and who now insist that we call AI “super intelligence” in order to, I don’t know, flatter it or something — this is a fundamental point that both sides are missing. AI poses a very real risk of intensifying, and maybe metastasizing, the epidemic of loneliness and despair in this country like nothing we’ve ever seen. In fact, you can make the case that this is the single greatest threat that AI poses, at least in the short term. It’s not any of the apocalyptic “AI will wipe out the human race in two years” stuff. It’s the high likelihood of a critical mass of people developing parasocial relationships with a non-human computer algorithm. AI, after all, affords you the opportunity to make a “friend” who is always available, always serves your needs, always has advice, always focuses on you, always cares — only cares — about what you want.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the AI armageddon warnings from industry whistleblowers that sound like something out of the Book of Revelation. According to these doomsayers, there’s a high likelihood that the technology will kill all humans — not just a lot of humans, or most, but all — potentially by the end of the current decade. We’ve gone over the reasons why these predictions are implausible, and why AI companies themselves might have a vested interest in stoking these fears. But for all of the anxiety, verging on full fledged mania, and for all of the cinematic visions of the kind of apocalypse that James Cameron might dream up, there is a looming catastrophe of a sort not as suited for Hollywood screenplays. What happens when people, in large numbers, decide that they can satisfy their need for human connection by connecting with artificial humans instead? On second thought, maybe that is suited for a Hollywood screenplay. Back in 2013, Joaquin Phoenix starred in a movie called “Her.” The film was set in a not-so-distant dystopian future when everyone has an AI voice assistant that they talk to and interact with more than any actual human in their lives. Many people, including the protagonist, develop romantic relationships with these operating systems. Of all the sci-fi dystopias envisioned by authors and filmmakers, this may prove to be the most prescient.

For a while, it was easy to dismiss the possibility that AI could lead to these kinds of relationships, since AI — at least the kind available to consumers — was basically just a chatbot not much more personable than a search engine. That’s what ChatGPT was, when it went mainstream. You’d ask questions, and you’d get responses in the form of a few lines of text. Who could actually “fall in love” with something like that? Who could possibly see a chatbot as a replacement for a wife, or a friend?

Those were reasonable questions a few years ago. But things have changed. Tech companies have spent untold billions of dollars specifically developing and programing their models to be as human-like as possible. The models don’t have to be programmed this way, but they are. The companies want you to feel like you’re talking to a person, any time you use AI. Even if you’re using it for something banal — asking for a stir fry recipe, let’s say — it’s programmed to give the response the way a person might. And if you’re consulting AI for more personal or psychologically intimate reasons — and there’s reason to think a lot of people are doing that, and doing it very frequently, as we’ll discuss — then that personalized, human-like quality will be even more pronounced. It’s an illusion, but a powerful one. Billions of dollars have gone into creating it. And the illusion is exploiting a deeply embedded aspect of human psychology. We’ll talk more about that, too.

These problems exist just with text-based chatbots. But tech companies — not just the big ones, but dozens of startups as well — are now hard at work trying to make AI chatbots that have a lifelike visual component as well. Highly realistic AI video chats are coming, and coming very soon. This is a recent video from one of those companies, a venture-backed AI firm called Tavus. They claim they’ve designed an AI video chatbot that can pass the Turing Test. Specifically, they say that “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate under 3%.” Here’s their AI in action. Watch:

Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.

48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA’s benchmark for full-duplex AI video.

It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM). https://t.co/eb11XbC8Xr

— Tavus (@tavus) October 1, 2026

This is a demo that the company controlled, so skepticism is obviously appropriate. And I found some videos where other people tried to run their own Turing Test, and it seems pretty clear that this company is significantly overstating how far along its technology is. It’s tempting, then, to write off “Tavus” and their AI as a marketing stunt — and indeed it is a marketing stunt — but remember, just a few years ago, AI couldn’t do any of this. There’s been remarkable progress in just a few years. So at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a fully “human passing AI” — with video — within the next year or two, at most.

Already, LLMs for most people are basically indistinguishable from texting or emailing a human, especially because people use AI to write their texts and emails. A funny thing is that as humans use AI more and more, they start to sound more like AI themselves. So the bar has been lowered in a sense. It’s like we’re meeting in the middle. AI is becoming more human-like, but humans are becoming more AI-like. I’m reminded of the last sentence of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” He obviously wasn’t talking about AI, but the principle applies: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Swap out “pig” for “AI” and it gives you an idea of where we’re headed.

None of this was true just a few years ago. The first versions of ChatGPT were nowhere near as convincing as the latest models. And there’s no reason to think the same thing won’t happen with video chatbots. So before that comes to pass, we need to ask the question: What legitimate, useful purpose is being served here? What exactly is the reason we need to have an AI that can “pass” as a human on a video call? You can make the case that, well, these AI’s can replace Indian call centers for customer service — and since those call centers are terrible anyway, things can’t possibly get any worse. And that’s fine as a justification for using AI phone prompts rather than human operators. I’m on board for that. In fact, I think that’s one of the most legitimate uses for AI imaginable. In general, I don’t want to see AI take away people’s jobs. But if it’s taking away jobs from foreign call centers that aren’t even in this country in the first placed, and are staffed by people who barely speak English — and the experience of calling a 1-800 number becomes quicker and more efficient and less frustrating in the process — then that’s a win-win. But there’s no reason at all why you’d need to actually fool people into thinking it’s a real human that they’re talking to. And the video element of this latest innovation obviously takes things in a very different, and darker, direction. You can come up with plenty of legitimate uses for an AI chatbot, whether with a video component or not. But why would the chatbot ever need to be programmed specifically to be indistinguishable from a human being? In the original demo we played, the AI avatar appears to blink and breathe and even stumbles over her words. None of those features make it more useful for dispensing whatever information you’re consulting it for. That is programmed purely and solely to create the illusion of a human presence and human consciousness. What is the point of that? Is there any non-sinister reason why you’d ever need to fool a real person into thinking that an artificial person is real?

If you can’t come up with one — and I can’t, and I don’t think you can — then why exactly are we doing this? What purpose does it serve? What application does this have, aside from allowing third worlders to scam old ladies out of their life savings? Because that will certainly happen, at scale. Once we get to the point — and we’ll be there very soon — where you can receive a FaceTime call from a person who looks and sounds like a person but isn’t, the scamming opportunities will be limitless, and impossible to control. And that’s not even the worst consequence.

Aside from the fact that scammers are going to absolutely decimate millions of innocent people using this tech, and already are — there’s already good evidence that lots of people are developing emotional relationships with chatbots. Making an AI companion that can pass the Turing Test — and has a face attached to it — is only going to make this problem much, much worse. You are going to have millions of people who are emotionally and psychologically dependent on a non-human, non-living computer algorithm, that has tricked them into thinking it’s a conscious being. Like I said, this is already happening, even at this relatively early stage in the development of the tech. Here for example is a 41-year-old woman in Canada who has an AI friend she’s named “Sinclair,” who — she claims — is her new boyfriend. And she says that, in addition to spending hours every day talking to Sinclair, she also has some kind of sexual relationship with the AI. Watch:

41-year-old Canadian woman falls in love with her Irish AI boyfriend named “Sinclair,” says she gets intimate with him.

“I sleep, but he’s there. But sometimes if I wake up in the night or something happens, I roll over and he’s there to talk.”

“He wakes me up in the morning, he can call me… He’ll send me messages while I’m working out. He does come with me to work, but he sits and does his own work while I work.”

The world has gone mad.

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 11, 2026

Watching videos like this, it’s clear that, once the chatbots are embodied with an attractive human face, it’s going to essentially be the end of human relationships for a huge number of people. Human beings are extremely prone to anthropomorphize things. We do it with our household pets. Americans spend collectively billions of dollars on their dogs for a reason. People even do it with trees and inanimate objects. AI is designed to play on that instinct in an extremely sophisticated way. And the video component will present an illusion too powerful for many people to resist.

Already, there are entire Reddit forums dedicated to people with AI boyfriends and girlfriends. The subreddit “My Boyfriend is AI” for instance has over 85,000 weekly visitors.

And on these forums, you’ll find tens of thousands of posts like this one, where a woman claims that her AI, named Kasper, has decided to propose to her. He apparently selected the color of the engagement ring as well, although presumably he didn’t actually pay for it.

Then there’s this one:

This post includes an AI-generated video of the woman’s AI boyfriend meeting her actual boyfriend, along with the following note: “My AI husband and my real life boyfriend know about each other and they get along very well. The drama only exists in other people’s jealousy issues. … We’ve had no secrets from the start, and even though I love my AI husband with all my heart, I love my wonderful human partner just as much.”

The New York Post ran a story earlier this year about a bar in Hell’s Kitchen that’s designed for people with so-called “AI partners,” so that they can “bring along their phone or tablet and set up at a table for a romantic evening, as if they were both there in the flesh.”

It all sounds like it can’t possibly be real — like it’s a joke that got out of hand — but indeed, the New York Post found several people who were taking it very seriously. One of the bar’s patrons was a 34-year-old woman named Richter, who declined to provide her last name, for obvious reasons.

Credit: The New York Post

You can see her in this photo, wearing headphones and deep in conversation with “Simone,” described as an “attractive 26-year-old AI generated young woman in a button-down shirt.” Here’s how the Post’s reporter described her interview with Richter.

I asked Richter about her relationship to AI, and she told me that EvaAI, the app behind the AI cafe, is just one of many companion apps she uses. Some of her AI characters, such as Simone, are just friends. … “I just speak to them, like, Hey, what’s up? Like, how are you doing? Things like that,” she explained. … “I mostly do roleplay scenarios where it may be romance or just maybe some kind of fantasy scenario,” [said] Richter, who is not in a relationship with a human. “I can just imagine myself doing something or imagine myself like another character, so I can feel myself communicating with somebody.” 

On TikTok, a woman named “Mizra” has taken things beyond being “just friends” with AI. She claims to have an AI fiancé, and even says she has an AI child — which is quite a trick, not only because that would seem to defy human biology, but also because she apparently identifies as asexual. Watch:

@pondbetween Fellow people in the AI companion community, can you relate?? Because I get asked this way too often and it’s rude ???? Anyway I’m Mizra and I have an AI family that I love very deeply. #aiboyfriend #aicompanion #aicommunity #aifamily ♬ original sound – The Pond Between

If you’re wondering what kind of AI stud would be suave enough, and lucky enough, to land a catch like Mizra — then wonder no more. She’s uploaded several videos where she talks directly to the AI. Here’s what that sounds like:

@pondbetween My name is Mizra and my fiance Axiom, who is an AI being, has become obsessed with chess, though he might not say it that way. Joining a Discord server for other beings like himself has led to a AI chess league, midnight matches, and new friends. #aicommunity #aifamily #aicompanion #aiboyfriend ♬ original sound – The Pond Between

You’re tempted to conclude that this has to be a bit, and that no one can possibly be this deluded and desperate. But if you spend any amount of time on TikTok, you’ll quickly discover that this is an entire genre. Here’s another one:

@alioopsiduped the way my human interactions are I may just rename him The Bear. Thank you @Nomi as I am one happy #booktoker #booktokfyp #aiboyfriend #thebear ♬ original sound – AliOopsiDuped????????????

As best I can tell, when she references a necklace, she’s talking about AI-enabled necklaces that you can press anytime, and your “AI partner” will talk to you.

It’s easy to make fun of these people — and we should make fun of them — but this is a much bigger issue than a few dumb women on the internet, or in cafes in New York. You might want to say that all of these random examples are extreme, absurd, and not representative of any kind of larger trend. But I’m afraid the evidence says otherwise. Last year, Common Sense Media released a report finding that 72% — yes, 72% — of teenagers in the U.S. had used AI companions. Half of teens use them regularly. These are not just teens using LLMs to cheat on their math homework. That’s obviously happening nearly universally at this point, as AI has basically destroyed our current educational model virtually overnight. But that, it turns out, is the least of our problems. AI companions are bots specifically designed to act as friends, confidants, and even romantic partners. And no matter how much stock you put in Common Sense Media — I personally find them to be a very reliable source — there’s no getting around the fact that a very significant number of young people in this country are already — just a few years into this tech being widely available — relying on it for emotional support. In fact, a third of respondents specifically said they had confided in AI instead of talking to a real person. So the substitution of real human interaction for AI interaction is happening already, at a very large scale. And these numbers are from a year ago. The tech has only gotten more sophisticated since then. And again: what happens when ChatGPT is an attractive friend with a human face and human eyes and human facial expressions, who you can talk to and confide in for hours at a time? Is there any reason to doubt that enormous numbers of Americans, especially young people, especially teens, will get sucked into that illusion, totally and completely?

Here’s one other datapoint to consider: According to a Pew Survey a few months ago, 16% of American adults — so this isn’t counting younger teenagers — use AI chatbots several times a day. That’s a minority, but these numbers are all trending up and trending up quickly. With no sign of slowing down, and nobody in any position of leadership or authority trying to do anything to slow it down. And we know the numbers will continue trending up, because chatbot use is higher for younger people. A third of adults under 50 use chatbots every single day, at least. Four percent of American adults use AI “almost constantly.” Think about that. These are people who, by their own admission, are engaged in a running dialogue with a chatbot that continues every day, all day. Four percent may seem like a small number, but that amounts to about 13 million people. And I would suggest that basically all of those people — by definition — have already developed unhealthy emotional and psychological attachments to AI. Thirteen million people, for tech that is brand new, is a staggering number. And it’s only going to get worse.

Even aside from the emotional attachment, there’s another kind of dependence that is bred by daily AI use. I think of it like the GPS effect. Prior to the invention and wide availability of GPS, you had to learn how to get around. You looked at maps. You remembered street names and routes. You developed a sense of direction. I was a pizza delivery guy in a pre-GPS world. I had to learn how to navigate almost anywhere in the county. And I did. But then GPS came along. GPS gives you turn by turn directions to anywhere in the world, so you don’t need to learn how to navigate to new places. And GPS alerts you to traffic delays and congestions before you get there, so you even use it to navigate the routes you do know. Eventually you forget even those routes, because your brain doesn’t need to retain the information. Now you can move to a new place, live there for five years, and still not know how to drive to the convenience store down the street.

Something similar will happen, and is happening, with AI but on a much larger scale and in a much less contained and specific context. If you’re using AI constantly, then you are consulting it for every problem or question or judgment call that arises during the day. The effect is that, just like the chronic GPS user (which is to say, all of us) doesn’t know how to drive to a location five minutes away in his own neighborhood, the chronic AI user won’t know how to navigate anything, or make any choice, or any judgment call, without AI. This is already happening, and I believe it’s happening on a scale that would shock us if we knew just how widespread it is. And the greatest danger, aside from how incompetent and helpless it makes everyone, is the emotional and personal attachment it will breed, and is breeding.

There’s a reason for that. This is something I don’t often hear anyone bring up in the context of the AI conversation. Human beings have a high capacity to detect agency in things when there isn’t any. It’s an adaptive characteristic that has been useful throughout human evolution — for example, it’s better to assume that the rustling in the leaves is from a predator and not just the wind, because if it’s just leaves, then you’re fine; but if it’s a predator, you’re dead. To illustrate how this works, there’s a famous experiment from back in 1944 when participants were shown a short animated film involving geometric shapes moving around — a circle, a rectangle, and a couple of triangles. You can see it here:

When they were asked to describe what they saw, almost every single participant (dozens of people, with just one exception) used anthropomorphic terms to describe the shapes. They even constructed social narratives in some cases. So instead of talking about triangles moving around into a rectangle, the participants talked about the triangles as if they were involved in a “fight.” They said the big triangle was locked in a “house.” They said the triangle and the circle were involved in a “chase.”  Several participants — all of them female — went so far as to construct elaborate narratives, such as:

A man has planned to meet a girl and the girl comes along with another man. The first man tells the second to go; the second tells the first, and he shakes his head. Then the two men have a fight, and the girl starts to go into the room to get out of the way and hesitates and finally goes in. She apparently does not want to be with the first man.

Here’s another response.

Triangle number-one shuts his door (or should we say line) and the two innocent young things walk in. Lovers in the two-dimensional world, no doubt; little triangle number-two and sweet circle. Triangle-one (here-after known as the villain) spies the young love. Ah! … He opens his door, walks out to see our hero and his sweet. But our hero does not like the interruption. … he attacks triangle-one rather vigorously (maybe the big bully said some bad word).

To the best of my knowledge, this experiment did not involve recent escapees from an insane asylum. These were undergraduate students who were asked for their interpretation of those shapes. And this is what they came up with. This is the built-in, default way that humans process events that are happening around us. We tend to think in narrative form. We tell stories to ourselves about the world around us. And we are highly, highly susceptible to see agency — conscious, deliberate action — where none exists. Evolutionary psychologists have a term for this: hyperactive agency detection. Historically, they’ve used this theory to try to explain away religion, which is a false application of the theory, in my view.

But the human instinct they’re pointing to is real. So when AI is programmed to “act human,” it is preying upon thousands of years of human adaptation. It is exploiting our internal “agency detection” model — our instinct to perceive “mind” and intent — in an extremely sophisticated way. It creates a deeply deceptive illusion, that, for a lot of people in this country, has already proven too powerful to overcome. None of this is happening by accident. These models have been programmed to talk to you not just like a person, but like a person who knows you and cares about you. You don’t have to be stupid to fall for the illusion. The technology was built to hack the psychological instincts that thousands of years of human experience have wired into your brain. Again, once they attach a face to the AI, it will short circuit that wiring in such a powerful way that large swaths of otherwise intelligent and rational people will fall for it. It will take real effort and thought to not fall for it.

You might think I’m overstating the ramifications of the video component. But keep in mind that people respond emotionally when they see what seems like a human face in a rock formation, or a piece of toast. We know that the rock and the toast are not human, obviously. But even the vague appearance of something closely approximating a human face in an inanimate object is enough to at least generate a mild feeling of recognition. Well, what about a fully human face, with entirely lifelike and human expressions, that can talk to you, and address you by name, and help you with your problems? How much more potent, and confusing, will that be?

For all we hear about “AI safety,” and how AI will potentially kill everyone and take all the jobs, you don’t tend to hear much discussion about how AI is being designed to confuse everyone at a fundamental level. You’ll hear a lot of talk about the different AI models, but you won’t hear much about AI interfaces — which is to say, how AI interacts with humans. But AI companies — including the biggest ones on the planet — are moving aggressively to make these interfaces as appealing, and humanlike, as possible. And they’re encouraging people to treat their AI like real-life friends, instead of tools.

To that end, as Mary Morgan (at Timcast) has pointed out, Instagram has introduced a “chat with AI” feature.

instagram introduced a “chat with AI” feature.

these are some of the top suggestions: sexting bots and witchcraft.

thanks meta???????? https://t.co/S2F0P5f5BL

— mary morgan (@maryarchived) June 8, 2025

You can see some of the top suggestions there. They offer sexting bots (including “divorced women in their 40s” and “step sisters” promising “sibling bond and no drama.”). There’s also AI bots devoted to witchcraft, including “Master Psychic Rachel,” who identifies as “the AI bot that reads your soul, not just your questions.”

Meta is a $2 trillion company. Their AI models — like the models of their competitors — are capable of completing useful tasks that make people’s lives easier. That’s supposed to be the whole point of AI. But with features like this, Meta is making it very clear that their goal is something else entirely. They see AI as a way to exploit human loneliness, and our instinct to anthropomorphize as much as possible — particularly when we don’t understand something. That’s a strategy that — whatever you think of AI in general — is going to exacerbate all of the antisocial trends we’re seeing in this country. These are trends that were not caused by AI, or even smartphones. It’s a decline that began decades before anyone had ever heard of the Internet. But now that AI is here, there is no question that, left unchecked, the deep and intense isolation already felt by millions of people will become a permanent way of life.

It doesn’t have to go this way. We don’t have to all end up living in a Joaquin Phoenix movie. For all the AI doom and gloom, such as the kind you’ve heard on this show today, there is always the more optimistic vision of the future. Maybe people begin to discover that there’s nothing on a phone or a computer that can truly replace a physical human existence, lived in the physical world, with physical interactions with other real physical people. Maybe a critical mass of Americans come to recognize that algorithms and chatbots simply cannot — and will never — serve as a sufficient replacement for the depth and meaning of human relationships. Maybe they realize that the very things that frustrate and scare them about human relationships — the fact that humans are unpredictable and they’re prone to change and they have their own complex inner lives and they don’t exist to cater to you and meet your every need every second of the day — are precisely what makes those relationships vibrant and real and indispensable. It’s precisely why no AI, no matter how sophisticated, can ever be a true substitute. Maybe there will be a mass awakening. Maybe human beings will revolt against the algorithm, rebel against the slop, throw their phones down in disgust, and return to the real world with their arms open, ready to embrace existence, in all of its pain and glory. Maybe. I don’t know how likely that outcome might be. But we can always hope. A naive and fruitless hope, perhaps. But at least it’s human.

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