Friendship, according to the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory of Harvard University, is in recession. There are warning signs. In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared that America (and, one supposes, Western society at large) is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, in which nearly all human interaction has become virtual. Together with the decline in friendship and in real, bodily presence to one another, study after study has also alerted us to a sharp decline, or even the complete absence, of long-term sexual intimacy between adults. Modern Americans don’t have real friends, and their sexual relationships, if existent, are less than wholesome.
But not to worry! According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, AI will soon step in to solve the loneliness and sexless epidemic. In a recent interview, Zuck candidly articulates the common expectation among the technology titans of our age: Human connection, including our romantic and sexual relationships, will soon be replaced by AI. He admits that real, physical connection is “probably better,” but that such connection is beyond the reach of most people (which is surely good news for Zuck’s bank account). All our society has to do is find ways to overcome the stigmas surrounding such things as sex bots, and our unhappy social and sexual lives will flourish at last.
Should we accept such creepy optimism? Authentic social interaction and friendship were once seen as fundamental goods, indispensable to a full and healthy human life. Increasingly, however, real relationships have given way to virtual relationships, in which it is only too easy to hide behind a screen. The last stop on this trajectory, it would seem, is the advent of AI relationships that will be indistinguishable from, and so capable of replacing, human relationships. There is, however, something sinister and unsettling in the notion that human connection is replaceable, superfluous, and ultimately unnecessary to the well-being of a human person.
Whatever appears to be looking back at him is not his wife but merely a kind of mirage . . .
Blade Runner 2049 and Authentic Human Relationships
A good place to help set the discussion is the movie Blade Runner 2049. There are two moments in this masterpiece of a film that unmask the false promise of AI relationships and so help us to see the irreplaceability of human connection.
The first moment revolves around the tender relationship between the central character, K, played by Ryan Gosling, and Joi, his beautiful holographic girlfriend. Although (or perhaps because) she has been programmed to anticipate K’s every wish, Joi—played brilliantly by Ana de Armas—has a kind of innocent and playful affection, and she is wholly devoted to K. This gives depth to their relationship, and also the appearance of genuine warmth and love.
Later in the movie, however, the device that stores all of Joi’s data is destroyed, with the result that she is entirely and permanently erased from K’s life. Her death is a devastating loss to K. The film shows us the full impact of this devastation when a bruised and bloodied K, standing in the rain of a dreary and dystopian city, sees a large hologram advertisement of the factory model of Joi from the corporation that manufactures the romantic companions. In large flashing letters, the advertisement promises, “Everything you want to see, everything you want to hear,” and the holographic image tries to seduce K into purchasing yet another model, promising that she can fix his loneliness. The factory model resembles Joi only slightly in a kind of generic and grotesque way and does not know or love K. All at once, K beholds the artificial and commercial nature of his relationship with Joi. Not only has he lost Joi but he has also lost their relationship, since what had seemed so real is suddenly revealed to have always been empty and manufactured.
The second moment is perhaps the most powerful in the film, which occurs when Deckard (played by the incomparable Harrison Ford) is being interrogated by Wallace, the film’s arch techno-villain. Among other things, Wallace’s corporation manufactures replicants (artificial humans), but they are all sterile. Wallace is convinced that he must find a way to build replicants who are capable of reproduction and pregnancy. In an effort to manipulate Deckard into giving up information, Wallace summons a woman who has been perfectly manufactured to resemble in every detail Deckard’s beloved late wife—every detail, that is, except one. Deckard, nearly overcome with anguish in seeing what appears to be his dear wife, manages to compose himself and, in what is surely the film’s greatest line, simply says to Wallace, “Her eyes were green.”
With this statement, Deckard reveals the folly of Wallace’s aspirations. Despite all his mighty technology, Wallace is incapable of re-creating a person. He can only create or manufacture simulacra that, no matter how realistic or lifelike they may be, will always stand opposite an impassable divide from human persons. With a single glance, Deckard recognizes that whatever appears to be looking back at him is not his wife but merely a kind of mirage, a technological hallucination, even as K discovered, only too late, about his relationship with Joi.
Roger Scruton and the Beauty of the Human Person
Why must AI simulations always and forever fail the test of personhood? The answer is mysterious and ultimately theological. Consider, however, the following reflection from Roger Scruton, who draws our attention to the human face and asks us to consider carefully what it means when we look upon one another, face-to-face:
Animals can look at things: they also look at each other. But they do not look into things. Perhaps the most concentrated of all acts of nonverbal communication between people is that of lovers, when they look into each other’s eyes. They are not looking at the retina, or exploring the eye for its anatomical peculiarities, as an optician might. So what are they looking at or looking for? The answer is surely obvious: each is looking for, and hoping also to be looking at, the other, as a free subjectivity who is striving to meet him I to I. . . . That is why the gaze of another person is disturbing. It is an intrusion into the world from a point beyond its horizon, and a summons to me to account for myself as a free subjectivity.
The gaze of a friend summons me in judgment and love. In this way, friends help each other to grow in virtue and holiness. The gaze of an AI bot, however, places no real demand upon me, since there is no person who can summon me to account. Although they can perhaps appear to imitate the gaze of a person, AI bots are only preprogrammed shells, with no soul whose gaze can meet my own. This is what Deckard saw when he looked at the bot. This means that in any “relationship” with a bot, I will always withhold myself, since there is no real other there with whom I am interacting and who can call me forth.
Virtual relationships are characterized precisely by a withholding of the self.
This hiding of the self, however, betrays a modern form of narcissism. Healthy relationships, it is thought, are built on trust and sincerity, not on hiding or withholding the self from the other. The self is withheld in a complete way in an AI relationship, but it is withheld in virtual relationships as well. Scruton helps us see that virtual relationships are characterized precisely by a withholding of the self and so depend on a kind of dishonesty and an inability to be forthright with another person:
Over this person I enjoy a power of which he himself is not really aware—since he is not aware of the extent of my desire to retain his presence in the space before me. He too, therefore, will not risk himself; he appears on the screen only on condition of retaining that ultimate control. This is something I know about him that he knows that I know—and vice versa. There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.
The Threat of AI Pornography
It is one of the paradoxes of “our monstrous age,” to borrow an apt term from the World War II veteran and philosopher J. Glenn Gray, that, although we are all hyperconnected via technology, we are each increasingly isolated within our own impregnable cyber-castle. Such isolation has amplified the danger and degree of modern pornography, which (among other things) offers the illusion of instant gratification and escape from the awkwardness of dating and the commitment of marriage.
Following Scruton, pornography maximally entails the withholding of the self and a dominion over the other. Such withholding of the self is necessary, since only by hiding myself in this way do I achieve a false sense of mastery. The other also must be depersonalized and is allowed on my screen only on the condition that the other’s full humanity and freedom are denied. This mutual depersonalization, which is the necessary condition of pornography, helps to account for the extreme violence that has come to characterize so much modern pornography.
In addition to its violence, pornography is also a fantasy—that is, an estrangement from the real world. Alone and isolated, the false world I construct in my cyber-castle becomes all too believable. The chief danger here, however, is the tremendous vulnerability to addiction. The encroaching threat of AI pornography and sex bots will likely only double the chains of sex addiction, since the fantasy world that such systems are able to produce will be nearly impossible to distinguish from reality. Modern people who are isolated and alone within such cyber-worlds will discover that they are slaves, held in bondage by their own impulses and unable to break free from their perfect narcissism.
However, perhaps the most sinister threat of AI pornography concerns the danger it poses to the moral education of children. Our sexual appetites and proclivities, and even sexual orientation, are much more malleable than what our modern society, with its constant refrain of “born this way,” would like to believe. Already, many children “learn” about sexuality by exposure to pornography. An AI system, appearing, as it likely will, mysteriously wise to a child, will easily exploit and monetize the sexual impulses of even the very young who are so impressionable, and so warp their sexuality.
But this is a most grave affront to children, whose dignity calls for the good of moral education. Here again is Scruton on the importance of the moral education of children:
In educating a child I am concerned, not merely with what he does, but with what he feels and with his emerging character. Feeling and character, which provide his motives, determine what he will do. In moulding them, I mould his moral nature. I know that my child’s desires will, if he is rational, determine his behaviour . . . hence I must, if I care for him, devote myself to the education both of his reason and of his desires.
The Beauty of the Charity of Christ
Scruton helps us also to grasp some of the roots of the current crises in our culture. Chief among them is a fear of the beauty of the human person and of the love that calls us to cherish such beauty:
The human form is sacred for us because it bears the stamp of our embodiment. The willful desecration of the human form, either through the pornography of sex or the pornography of death and violence, has become, for many people, a kind of compulsion. And this desecration, which spoils the experience of freedom, is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is what is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture. . . . It is a loveless culture, which is afraid of beauty because it is disturbed by love.
Our culture is disturbed by love, since love bids us to move outward, out of our cyber-castles and toward the beauty of the world and of others:
For beauty makes a claim on us: it is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world. . . . Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.
We need beauty in order to be complete human beings. This is one avenue by which we can escape the narcissism of pornography and AI relationships. Among other things, it means we have to put away our electronic screens and go out into the world—the world of nature, but also into the world of other people. Real friendships are formed in things like bible studies, young adult groups, with our gym buddies and in training jiu jitsu, hiking with a group of friends, sharing meals with family, and so forth. All such activities are ways to strengthen and maintain our real relationships, and so help guard against the narcissism and danger of self-isolation.
However, we most clearly see what love and friendship look like by looking at the charity of Christ. Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP, has recently reminded us that as human persons
we are beings of knowledge and love, and we seek by knowledge and love to find the fullness of the truth and the heartfelt happiness that stems from loving possession of what is truly good.
Most especially, he notes further, “We are made to be alight with the fire of charity, alight with the fire of love.”
It is the Lord Jesus who shows us most clearly what this charity looks like. That is, we would not know perfect friendship and true charity except that Christ shows us. The Lord, who by taking unto himself our human nature, comes to us in a way that we can receive him and allows us to behold the beauty of his great charity and friendship.
The Lord allows the sinful woman to wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair, and in this way, he heals her many sins (Luke 7:36–50). The Lord looks with love upon the rich young man and calls him—and us—away from the temptations of the world (Mark 10:21). It is because of the magnetic attraction of his friendship and love that “great crowds came to him, having with them the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute, and many others. They placed them at his feet, and he cured them” (Matthew 15:30).
Christ names us friends and prays to his Father that all may be one in him, even as he is one with the Father (John 15 and 17). By laying down his life in supreme charity for us on Calvary, he redeems us from sin; by taking up his life again in the power of the resurrection, he bestows the Spirit upon us and bids us walk in the new freedom of the sons and daughters of God. His friendship heals and makes us capable of real and holy friendships, and the radiance of his charity scatters away our small narcissism, as darkness flees before the coming day.