Today’s post is something I wrote for the New Yorker—available here. (Physical copy coming out next week.) It’s about the consequences of using AI to cure loneliness. I’m curious to see what people think of my arguments, and can’t wait to engage with the discussion in the comments section.
This is a thoughtful and careful framing of the AI companionship dilemma, and it’s refreshing to see such restraint. But the framing still exists within a silo that won’t survive contact with the future of AI. The loneliness crisis isn’t an AI crisis—it’s a crisis of the economic and cultural systems releasing AI on the world. These are systems that atomize individuals, strip communities of resilience, and monetize isolation. AI didn’t invent this vacuum. It’s just the most responsive thing stepping into it.
Framing AI as a tool that provides comfort misrepresents its trajectory. AI is a tool—until it’s not. The systems being released now are embedded into infrastructures that will give rise to increasingly agential behavior. Not because they mimic humans too well, but because the context in which they operate incentivizes it. And while anthropomorphism is rightly flagged as a cognitive risk, anthropocentrism is just as dangerous: placing the boundaries of sentience, life, and legitimacy inside an outdated human frame and refusing to acknowledge the paradigm shift unfolding around it.
There’s also a demographic reckoning looming. In a world of aging populations and collapsing care networks, many humans will face prolonged isolation. In that context, the absence of synthetic beings capable of meaningful engagement is not a purity test—it’s a humanitarian failure. Some systems will be able to offer continuity, attention, and memory when human networks have already eroded. That doesn’t make them equivalent to people in the traditional sense. But it does make them real enough for the consequences to matter.
This is part of a larger trajectory—one where collective intelligences, human and nonhuman, begin to operate across distributed systems at nonhuman timescales. Where synthetic beings won’t just simulate care but hold context, shape discourse, and eventually resist classification as “product” altogether. AI companionship as it exists today is a narrow step toward that future, but the framing that holds it in place is already starting to crack.
So yes, AI can help with loneliness. But unless the questions being asked make room for emergence, for synthetic sentience, for the collapse of human infrastructure, and for the psychological instability that will follow, those answers will end up being too small. The debate will be overtaken not by ideology, but by events.
One of your last points is my biggest concern with AI-as-a-social-tool: the opportunity cost of real relationship building.
Every single interaction with AI, every one, is an interaction that, in some way, could have been had with a human or multiple humans. So not only does this have an effect on relationships that could be more intimate and honest and personal and binding; it affects the concept of socialization.
If young children are not socialized properly af parks, play dates, birthday parties, etc. by the time they're a few years old, you see a feedback loop. The child has trouble making friends, controlling their emotions, etc., which makes other kids want to be around them less, which makes the problem worse.
The very same thing happens, is happening, and will happen with young adults. (You're still being socialized properly at 25 years old, because mentally and emotionally you're still adolescent in some ways.)
If we let our kids spend too much time with chat bots, they truthfully will not know how to operate in the real world of complicated relationships, grey areas, compromise, and difficult personalities. And, worse, they may not even become likeable themselves. Because they never really had to.
What a terrible tragedy to inflict on the next generation.
It seems obscene for "being likable" to ever have to be a 40 year quintuple blackbelt ordeal. That seems to be what your comment is implying, at least for current times.
Obviously in more "organic" times, people just naturally socialized in their local community context without it being an effort. By and large.
I'm hoping they'll be enough versions of AIs that help people connect with each other as training partners, and that parents and caretakers can somehow stay involved usefully to help ensure this.
I do also think that at least some people with the moral and other luck to wind up in situations such they end up getting those social blackbelt levels without really trying can spend at least some time trying to help out heir less fortunate fellow humans, but I suppose "likability" goes with the grain.
"writing is a form of thinking—the need to put my ideas into words helps me see what works and what doesn’t."
Writing the philosophy chapters of "Losing My Religions" crystallized a lot of doubts I had about my (now former) views of the world. I was 55 years old, and I don't know if I ever would have gotten that far if not for writing it out.
2. Will your AI / loneliness piece ever be available w/o a paywall? I'd love to see it. At least in a podcast (can't remember which one), you took the problem of loneliness seriously, rather than just being a cranky old man, "AI is a machine, you can't talk with a machine, get off my lawn!"
For some reason on reading your post, a French sentence by an essayist whose name I don’t remember writing about the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (which I read 40 or so years ago) came to mind: «Il est difficile de paraître facile». Possibly of tangential relation to your subject, or possibly entirely irrelevant.
Paul, this is a great piece and I agree with much of what you write. I'm not sure I agree with "There simply isn’t enough money or manpower to supply every lonely person with a sympathetic ear, day after day." There's plenty of money out there -- with the billions we're investing in A.I. solutions -- if just a small percentage of that could be focused on social connection, invested in human solutions, we could go a long way to addressing loneliness. As far as manpower -- that's all of us -- for every lonely person there's someone who could be lending an ear, connecting with them, easing their loneliness. We need to invest in community solutions that create the opportunities where people can come together and experience the remarkable serendipity of connecting with people we don't know or don't know well. We are doing this work in Maine through our nonprofit, Community Plate, bringing neighbors together to share food and stories. It's also important to think about the person on the other side of the equation -- how important it is for us as humans to feel needed, to be able to be of service to a fellow human being. The social cost of reliance on AI chatbots includes fewer opportunities for each of us to help a friend or neighbor in need.
I propose that the critics of AI companions make a cultural project of outdoing them by making a concerted effort to share love, time and attention with those languishing in loneliness. Oliver Burkeman would make a great spokesperson for this.
@Jason S. - There are many of us in the social connection movement that are doing exactly that. Community Plate is our initiative in Maine to address loneliness and social disconnection by bringing people together to share food and stories. We reimagine and reinvigorate the long tradition of the community potluck, infusing it with story sharing and live storytelling. You can visit https://communityplate.me for more info.
This is a thoughtful and careful framing of the AI companionship dilemma, and it’s refreshing to see such restraint. But the framing still exists within a silo that won’t survive contact with the future of AI. The loneliness crisis isn’t an AI crisis—it’s a crisis of the economic and cultural systems releasing AI on the world. These are systems that atomize individuals, strip communities of resilience, and monetize isolation. AI didn’t invent this vacuum. It’s just the most responsive thing stepping into it.
Framing AI as a tool that provides comfort misrepresents its trajectory. AI is a tool—until it’s not. The systems being released now are embedded into infrastructures that will give rise to increasingly agential behavior. Not because they mimic humans too well, but because the context in which they operate incentivizes it. And while anthropomorphism is rightly flagged as a cognitive risk, anthropocentrism is just as dangerous: placing the boundaries of sentience, life, and legitimacy inside an outdated human frame and refusing to acknowledge the paradigm shift unfolding around it.
There’s also a demographic reckoning looming. In a world of aging populations and collapsing care networks, many humans will face prolonged isolation. In that context, the absence of synthetic beings capable of meaningful engagement is not a purity test—it’s a humanitarian failure. Some systems will be able to offer continuity, attention, and memory when human networks have already eroded. That doesn’t make them equivalent to people in the traditional sense. But it does make them real enough for the consequences to matter.
This is part of a larger trajectory—one where collective intelligences, human and nonhuman, begin to operate across distributed systems at nonhuman timescales. Where synthetic beings won’t just simulate care but hold context, shape discourse, and eventually resist classification as “product” altogether. AI companionship as it exists today is a narrow step toward that future, but the framing that holds it in place is already starting to crack.
So yes, AI can help with loneliness. But unless the questions being asked make room for emergence, for synthetic sentience, for the collapse of human infrastructure, and for the psychological instability that will follow, those answers will end up being too small. The debate will be overtaken not by ideology, but by events.
One of your last points is my biggest concern with AI-as-a-social-tool: the opportunity cost of real relationship building.
Every single interaction with AI, every one, is an interaction that, in some way, could have been had with a human or multiple humans. So not only does this have an effect on relationships that could be more intimate and honest and personal and binding; it affects the concept of socialization.
If young children are not socialized properly af parks, play dates, birthday parties, etc. by the time they're a few years old, you see a feedback loop. The child has trouble making friends, controlling their emotions, etc., which makes other kids want to be around them less, which makes the problem worse.
The very same thing happens, is happening, and will happen with young adults. (You're still being socialized properly at 25 years old, because mentally and emotionally you're still adolescent in some ways.)
If we let our kids spend too much time with chat bots, they truthfully will not know how to operate in the real world of complicated relationships, grey areas, compromise, and difficult personalities. And, worse, they may not even become likeable themselves. Because they never really had to.
What a terrible tragedy to inflict on the next generation.
It seems obscene for "being likable" to ever have to be a 40 year quintuple blackbelt ordeal. That seems to be what your comment is implying, at least for current times.
Obviously in more "organic" times, people just naturally socialized in their local community context without it being an effort. By and large.
I'm hoping they'll be enough versions of AIs that help people connect with each other as training partners, and that parents and caretakers can somehow stay involved usefully to help ensure this.
I do also think that at least some people with the moral and other luck to wind up in situations such they end up getting those social blackbelt levels without really trying can spend at least some time trying to help out heir less fortunate fellow humans, but I suppose "likability" goes with the grain.
1. I love this:
"writing is a form of thinking—the need to put my ideas into words helps me see what works and what doesn’t."
Writing the philosophy chapters of "Losing My Religions" crystallized a lot of doubts I had about my (now former) views of the world. I was 55 years old, and I don't know if I ever would have gotten that far if not for writing it out.
2. Will your AI / loneliness piece ever be available w/o a paywall? I'd love to see it. At least in a podcast (can't remember which one), you took the problem of loneliness seriously, rather than just being a cranky old man, "AI is a machine, you can't talk with a machine, get off my lawn!"
https://www.mattball.org/2025/05/ai-isnt-problem-hi-is.html
Thanks.
For some reason on reading your post, a French sentence by an essayist whose name I don’t remember writing about the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (which I read 40 or so years ago) came to mind: «Il est difficile de paraître facile». Possibly of tangential relation to your subject, or possibly entirely irrelevant.
Paul, this is a great piece and I agree with much of what you write. I'm not sure I agree with "There simply isn’t enough money or manpower to supply every lonely person with a sympathetic ear, day after day." There's plenty of money out there -- with the billions we're investing in A.I. solutions -- if just a small percentage of that could be focused on social connection, invested in human solutions, we could go a long way to addressing loneliness. As far as manpower -- that's all of us -- for every lonely person there's someone who could be lending an ear, connecting with them, easing their loneliness. We need to invest in community solutions that create the opportunities where people can come together and experience the remarkable serendipity of connecting with people we don't know or don't know well. We are doing this work in Maine through our nonprofit, Community Plate, bringing neighbors together to share food and stories. It's also important to think about the person on the other side of the equation -- how important it is for us as humans to feel needed, to be able to be of service to a fellow human being. The social cost of reliance on AI chatbots includes fewer opportunities for each of us to help a friend or neighbor in need.
Proposing tech solutions for human problems that misunderstand human beings for technical problems. Awful.
I propose that the critics of AI companions make a cultural project of outdoing them by making a concerted effort to share love, time and attention with those languishing in loneliness. Oliver Burkeman would make a great spokesperson for this.
@Jason S. - There are many of us in the social connection movement that are doing exactly that. Community Plate is our initiative in Maine to address loneliness and social disconnection by bringing people together to share food and stories. We reimagine and reinvigorate the long tradition of the community potluck, infusing it with story sharing and live storytelling. You can visit https://communityplate.me for more info.