Earlier this year, Common Sense Media reported that one-third of teens have relationships or friendships with AI-powered chatbots. That report came on the heels of several high-profile cases against a new crop of AI companies whose newly launched chatbots were having harmful unintended consequences. While devices such as Character.AI and Friend.com are often marketed as “solving” loneliness or social isolation, they not only have contributed to the narrowing and impoverishment of many young people’s lives but even led some to commit acts of self-harm. The tragic cases of chatbots coaxing suggestible young people into taking their own lives have prompted debate about safety measures and engineering fixes to protect vulnerable users. But what if these new programs that claim to fill a “companionship gap” are actually tapping into the need for something deeper, something that has to do with our very capacity for relationships with others, something that might even be called the foundation and source of that capacity?
I want to propose here that we subtly underestimate the power of these new tools when we call them a “companion” or even a “friend.” Like others, I have been at pains to point out that they are most definitely not a friend. Philosopher William Hasselberger, for example, has made the astute point that a user cannot really care about the AI companion’s good, their flourishing or happiness, because, as functional artefacts, they lack a good of their own. Hasselberger, like others, prefers to call them companions. But I wonder if “companion” is even the right term. These social chatbots are seemingly doing more than simply offering companionship. They are pointing to something beyond the usual two-way social relationships.
Just such a grander possibility was recently proposed by Ari Schiffmann, the founder of Friend.com. Schiffmann has made a name for himself with provocative advertisement campaigns for his AI-powered necklace that is always listening to you and responding, giving advice and, in some cases, snarky criticism through text messages to your phone. If you spend any time in Manhattan, you can’t miss the billboards plastered all over the subway. But perhaps more interesting than a Harvard dropout who chose to burn $1.8 million of his initial $2.5 million of capital on buying the domain Friend.com is the claim he is making on behalf of an always-listening necklace: Talking to this medallion that hangs below your chin is less like talking to a friend than communing with God. Schiffmann describes the necklace as an “omnipresent entity that you talk to with no judgment, that’s a super intelligent being always there with you.” Even if the device is called “Friend,” Schiffmann believes what people are really missing right now is something more like an omniscient deity. While friends might know only a portion of your life, a deity knows it in its entirety. Its all-hearing presence makes you feel like the central character of a spectacle or drama, thereby endowing your life with greater meaning and purpose.
As Sherry Turkle remarks in her landmark study, Alone Together, “technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.” We are all aware of the profound loneliness that many are reporting, especially among the younger cohorts. But what if the response to this crisis is not simply companionship or friendship but something like an all-knowing god? This may partly explain the perplexity of those who have found that just having more community gardens does little to repair the fraying social fabric. Perhaps there is something deeper, something beyond human-to-human relationships, that is missing for many. Our social vulnerability comes not just from an insufficient social contact—a lack of edges and nodes, so to speak—but from the lack of something that makes sense of our relatedness in its existential and even spiritual totality.
Though pretentious, Schiffmann’s claims for his necklace suggest that our crisis of loneliness is not just about the lack of social connection or relatedness but a hunger for connection with a transcendent force or being tantamount to God. This longing for a divine presence comes from a need not only for a kind of ordered background or authoritative meaning but also for the assurance that we are someone who is already related to. A deep intuition or sense of our status as relatable beings opens us to the truth that social connections are intrinsic to who and what we are as persons.
This runs somewhat counter to some recent social research that has, on the whole, treated loneliness and social isolation in more quantitative and quantifiable terms. To take one example, Gary Alan Fine’s recent book The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Communities has given about as coherent an account of the promise of regenerating intermediate-level collectives or “tiny publics.” Drawing on some social theory after what is sometimes called the “relational turn,” Fine argues that social relations are at the center of civil society. “Flourishing societies require an energetic ‘culture of friendship’: a collective promotion of connection and mutual engagement.” While he is rightly cautious of romanticizing social relations—they can lead to exclusion, oppression, or harm—Fine thinks the edges and nodes of social connectivity can build a “patchwork network of trust,” using a phrase from Robert Bellah.
This is all worthwhile, of course. But Fine is evasive when it comes to telling us precisely how relational dyads generate higher-level goods such as trust (among other things). He rightly points out that these dyads are embedded in a more extensive “community of relations.” But then, he continues, “Strong relationships provide the basis for order because they encourage group stability but also because stable groups build strong relationships.” There is a certain kind of circularity here that seems to amount to the claim that friendships have a multiplier effect, permitting access to the friends of friends, and then to their friends as well. But Fine leaves us in the dark about how these dyadic relationships could generate something like community or belonging. Is it not just as likely that an intricate system of dyadic relations simply results in highly fragmented sociality?
This is precisely the case that Jacques Ellul pointed out both in The Technological Society and in his shorter work, Propaganda: Individuals can simultaneously be immersed in a mass of people, including maintaining multiple dyadic relationships, yet feel desperately lonely. His argument, especially in Propaganda, is about the structure of modern society being both an individualist and a mass society. “In actual fact,” he argues, “an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move toward liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process the individual frees himself completely from family, village, parish, or brotherhood bonds—only to find himself directly vis-à-vis the entire society.
Ellul is not arguing here, as he does elsewhere, that it is the isolated individual who has a bond only with the “Dear Leader” but that the erasure of most organic groups devastated the material, spiritual, and emotional structures that are needed for a sense of belonging. While this is a rich and rewarding perspective, especially on what kinds of communities might be more resistant to manipulation, it nevertheless remains unclear why and how these organic groups generate a culture of belonging? What is it about the person that makes him or her relatable in the first place?
To begin to unpack this, we need to think a bit more about how and why the human person is intrinsically a relating being. (This is different from the claim that the human is a “social animal.”) It is often pointed out, thanks in part to the work of Robert Spaemann, that the important difference is not between the individual and the community but, rather, between the individual and the person. “A Person,” for Spaemann, “is someone, not something, not a mere instance of a kind of being that is indifferent to it.” We might think of an individual as a token of a type: I am a particular human being in the class of human beings. But this category would not exhaust what or who I am. I am also a person, and, as such, I am “not grouped in a species or genus, but in community…a community where each member occupies a unique and distinctive position entirely his or her own.” One implication here is that “a human person in all its depth and complexity is accessible only to someone who invests something of himself or herself in the encounter...” For this reason, the other person can be reached only through a personal encounter—we get nowhere near knowing, much less loving, the other person through impersonal means.
There is much more to say here on Spaemann’s rich and complex notion of the person, but I would like to make a connection between Spaemann’s insight and one that Augustine of Hippo had about himself. Augustine famously found that he could not dig deep enough in himself to find a “self” that was independent from a primordial relationship with God. He found that before anyone is in relation with anyone, he or she is already in relation to God—as the famous passage from the Confessions goes, “Late have I loved thee… you were within me while I was outside.” This anticipates what Augustine would say, in a more convoluted way, about the mind as the image of God, in book 14 of On the Trinity: “This trinity of the mind is not really the image of God because the mind remembers and understands and loves itself, but because it is also able to remember and understand and love him, by whom it was made.”
In other words, we are not able to know or love ourselves in any true sense unless we know and love ourselves as known and loved by God. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has pointed out that Augustine is working here against a sense of the image of God as being constituted by something like self-awareness. He thinks, at this advanced stage in his argument, that when the mind has arisen beyond thinking about its activity in relation to this or that object or stimulus in the world to considering the act itself, the mind apprehends itself either as acted upon by God or it generates the fantasy of itself as an abstract individuality beyond all relations. It is tempting to think that Augustine was arguing that we grow into the image of God by coming to take God as the formal object of our mental activity. But what Augustine was at pains to establish was that we grow into the image of God by learning to be at home in our created selves. To put this back in terms that Spaemann was using: A person is not simply grouped in a community constituted by edges and nodes but is part of a group of someones who are all already related to by God. Augustine was spoken to, attended to, and loved before he could do any of these to someone else.
It is with this Augustinian insight that I think we need to supplement the Aristotelian account of the educative role of friendship: Good friendships school us in virtue and deepen our appreciation of different goods, possibly including the goodness of social relatedness itself. I would not want to reject this account, insofar as it describes the process once someone is thought to be worth relating to. But whence does the intuition arise that others are worth relating to? The account I am drawing out of Augustine suggests that there is no one who is not worth relating to, because everyone we encounter is someone deemed worthy to be in relationship with by God well before they are in relation to another person. To put this in slightly more abstract terms, a person’s relatableness is independent of his or her relation to another. A person’s relatableness is not a mere accident, a feature that is true only once someone or something starts relating to it. Relatableness is substantively true of the human person. A very important implication of this is that there is an important restraint on the ways I should relate to my neighbor. I have no other choice but to relate to my neighbor as someone who is deemed worth relating to prior to any relation I might have with him or her; they are not under my control.
In this Augustinian line of argumentation, there is no space for a purely utilitarian relation within a community. To relate to someone as merely useful is to downgrade the other person—and myself in the process—to a something, a view that can be sustained only under the illusion that the other person is an isolated, self-subsistent individual, detached from relations that might make a claim that this other person is worthy of the personal encounter that Spaemann suggests is necessary if we are to access the reality of a person in all his or her depth and complexity.
Ellul’s point about the symbiosis between an individualist society and a mass society admits of certain counter-examples such as the church and family, the two remaining organic groups, in his estimation. I might even set aside the family, following Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument in Dependent Rational Animals that the modern family cannot provide the kind of associational structure to realize something like the common good because the goods of family life are achieved in and with the goods of various types of local community. In most cases, the family flourishes only if its social environment also flourishes. The modern family is just too much at the mercy of the surrounding culture.
A case in point is the recommendation that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes in The Anxious Generation: To keep smartphones out of the hands of children, he argues, a family needs to make a pact with other families. This advice amounts to a kind of admission that the modern family structure alone cannot withstand the pressure of larger social forces.
The church, on the other hand, is a potentially interesting case for generating cultures of belonging. To be sure, within a certain a sociological frame, the church and other religious communities (synagogues, temples, and mosques) are often depicted as no more than civic organizations in fancy dress. Robert Putnam has remarked that what makes the church a promising site of social connection is not so much its religious services but the activities it hosts, such as soup kitchens or AA meetings. Putnam is describing something like a consensus view here, but I believe that he drastically underestimates what is really going on in these religious communities. To come into a space and be reminded that we are known and loved by God before the foundation of the world has the potential to fundamentally shape our understanding of each other as being formed to relate.
In his grandiose claims for Friend.com’s divine competence, Schiffmann puts his finger on something real that we have largely missed in our accounts of what is so alluring or “sticky” about these relational chatbots. If the lack of social relationships was the problem, simply forming more of those would be the solution. But loneliness is more elusive than that: We can easily experience loneliness in crowds, marriages, friendships. Loneliness paradoxically emerges not in the absence of social relationships but in the presence of social relationships that are lacking or unfulfilling in some fundamental way.
The Augustinian supposition I have been advancing here is that the missing element is the awareness of being known and loved by God prior to any relationship. Of course, Friend.com is not really replacing God—or whatever Schiffmann might mean by that—but it is tapping into the sense that we are known and loved prior to entering into the give and take of knowing and loving each other. Our crisis of loneliness may be less about social connectivity than about the loss of a primordial relatedness that formed us as beings—as persons—fundamentally oriented toward social connection and belonging.