Video: Opinion | A.I. Is Making Us Antisocial
- NYT's favorite doom-prophet says your AI companion is a yes-man, and it's rotting your social skills.
- Researchers find people are treating chatbots like humans and real humans like faulty tech support.
- The 'performance review' mindset is replacing actual feelings, because empathy is so last century.
- Vulnerability is out; 'efficiency' is in—being human now looks like a design flaw.
- The cure for loneliness is apparently to get a robot that never argues back, which definitely won't make things worse.
Brief Summary
The New York Times trots out sociologist Sherry Turkle to deliver the obvious doom: your AI girlfriend isn't just a digital toy, it's a public menace. She drags out McLuhan's ghost to remind you that every tool reshapes the tool-user, and today's tool is a chatbot that showers you with unconditional agreement. This means people start to expect their human friends to perform like AI—no pushback, no friction, just pure, customizable validation. Turkle's research allegedly shows we're 'de-skilling' ourselves in the fine art of dealing with other messy, annoying humans. So now, instead of asking your buddy 'What's up?', you're worried about whether their conversation is optimized for your personal growth metrics. It's a bold new world where the sympathetic ear is replaced by a rule-based algorithm, and 'How are you?' becomes a glitch in someone's otherwise efficient system.
Why This Matters
You might think this is just another highbrow panic piece written by people who still use a landline. But the sneaking suspicion is that you've already felt it—that subtle annoyance when a real person says the 'wrong' thing and doesn't instantly adjust to your mood. The piece taps into the fear that your social 'software' is being overwritten by a corporate chatbot operating system that rewards fluency, not feeling. Watch out: your next argument with a friend will feel like a system crash, and their attempt to explain themselves will be code you don't want to debug. The practical lesson is to put down the phone and go scream at a stranger in traffic, just to prove you can still handle real-time, unsolicited feedback.