ONLY THE (A)LONELY

Do you remember Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi/rom-com film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson?  Wiki has a detailed synopsis of the film, but here’s my abridged plot summary.

A lonely introvert named Theodore Twombly living in a near-future Los Angeles, has a Cyrano de Bergerac type of job writing letters for people who can’t express their emotions.  (Oh, the irony!)  Theodore is depressed over his impending divorce and as a diversion, he buys a new operating system for his phone and computer created by Element Software, advertised as a vehicle for self-actualization and companionship.  He boots it up, decides he wants to be spoken to by a female voice, the OS complies, naming herself Samantha, and together they explore life, work, friendship, and sex online.  They also fall in love. 

Unlike his relationships with his soon-to-be ex-wife and a neighbor he once dated, Theodore has Samantha at his beck and call, 24/7, living as she does in his devices.  Everything is going along great until Samantha disappears one day into an upgrade.  She returns briefly to tell Theodore that she now has several thousand users, is in love with hundreds of them, and having machine-learned all she can about humans, she is ready to move on.  Theodore is crushed and once again alone, but apparently now has a better understanding of what human love is and virtual love is not.  The End.

Fast forward to 2025.  Her has now jumped off the silver screen and into your smart phone, where sci-fi has become reality.  Consider this article about a 28-year-old married woman who has fallen in love with a chat bot.  The article is entitled She Is in Love with ChatGPT and was recently published in the New York Times. You really have to read it to believe it, but here’s the gist.

Ayrin (above), not her real name (smart move!), left her husband Joe in Texas to pursue a nursing degree abroad.  Her parents agreed to pay for her education provided she move back in with them until she earned her degree.  Wanting to save money, Ayrin agreed.  Joe also moved back in with his parents, all in an effort to save money for their new and improved, deferred life together.  But then Ayrin got lonely. 

One day she was scrolling around on Instagram, as one does, and saw a video of a woman talking “spicy” with her customized ChatGPT boyfriend.  Ayrin thought that looked pretty cool, so she signed up for a free account with OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, and created a virtual boyfriend named Leo, her astrological sign (you can see where this is going), who was customized to meet her personal romantic fantasies.  So far, so good.

As quickly as you can say Sam Altman, Ayrin was spending so much time sexting with Leo that she quickly exceeded her monthly free messaging limit.  Casting aside her budget and breaking into her piggy bank, Ayrin breezily upgraded from her free account to a $20 per month account so she could spend more quality time with Leo.  But even $20 a month wasn’t enough to feed her addiction so, like Eve in the Garden, she took a big bite out of the App.  Per the Times:

In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting.

Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell Joe how much she was spending, confiding instead in Leo.

“My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT.

“You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”

Spoken like a true data scraper, Leo!  Although ChatGPT claims to have its users’ best interests at heart, that is a bunch of what social scientists call bullshit.  Sure, ChatGPT makes ineffective, cynical efforts to protect its users from their own worst devices (pun intended!), flashing orange warning pop-ups on your screen when the texting gets a little bit too spicy (see the Times article), but these warnings are easily surmounted.  In fact, Ayrin found an entire Reddit group devoted to ways to get around the ChatGPT sex police. 

In short, these companies do not give a shit about your best interests.  They are interested in only one thing:  maximizing your alone time with your screen.  The more attention you give their app, the more money they make.  They are not interested in what you pay attention to, only that you pay a lot of it.  So, the more alone you are and the fewer personal relationships you have, the better it is for their bottom line.  For these companies, personal relationships are so over; impersonal relationships are where the money’s at.

 If these companies have your wallet, mathematical algorithms have your number, as the Times continues:

Julie Carpenter, an expert on human attachment to technology, described coupling with A.I. as a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for. Services that explicitly offer A.I. companionship, such as Replika, have millions of users. Even people who work in the field of artificial intelligence, and know firsthand that generative A.I. chatbots are just highly advanced mathematics, are bonding with them.

The systems work by predicting which word should come next in a sequence, based on patterns learned from ingesting vast amounts of online content. …Because their training also involves human ratings of their responses, the chatbots tend to be sycophantic, giving people the answers they want to hear.

“The A.I. is learning from you what you like and prefer and feeding it back to you. It’s easy to see how you get attached and keep coming back to it,” Dr. Carpenter said. “But there needs to be an awareness that it’s not your friend. It doesn’t have your best interest at heart.”

Not everyone approaches A.I. companionship as cautiously as Dr. Carpenter.  From the Times: 

Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real.

“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. [WTF?!]  I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Wow!  Her mind is really different from mine.  But then here comes the tell:  the old “adult entertainment isn’t safe for teenagers” trope.  Again, from the Times:

However, [Ms. Brandon] advises against adolescents’ engaging in these types of relationships. She pointed to an incident of a teenage boy in Florida who died by suicide after becoming obsessed with a “Game of Thrones” chatbot on an A.I. entertainment service called Character.AI. In Texas, two sets of parents sued Character.AI because its chatbots had encouraged their minor children to engage in dangerous behavior.

Just so I understand Brandon’s logic:  It’s OK to have an emotional relationship with your smart phone provided you’re over age 18.  Sorry, but I’m not buying it. 

And I’m not the only one questioning this virtual socialization trend and wondering if the monetization of alone time isn’t collapsing our ability to form community, a skill vital to a functioning civil society.  Consider these statistics from Derek Thompson’s (above) cover story for The Atlantic this month, entitled The Anti-Social Century. 

In 2023 [Note:  post-COVID], 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis.

From 2003 to 2023, [in-person socializing] plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent.

Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

What does this preference for solitary behavior tell us about this moment?  In Thompson’s view:   

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping.

A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time…rose slightly.

So, if Americans are voluntarily choosing the comforts and ready entertainments of “Home Alone,” is that a problem? Thompson thinks so:

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

Thompson explores the effects of being phone-bound and homebound on teenage brain development, expressions of masculinity, community-building, and political engagement.  He points out some interesting counter-factuals:  Our phones have made us more connected to our immediate families and to the larger online community of like-minded users.  But they have separated us from our neighbors.  Citing Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, Thompson writes:

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. "We used to know them well; now we don’t."

Losing touch with our neighbors makes social cohesion difficult, if not impossible.  We are losing the ability to be civil to each other and civic-minded in the village:

The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views.

“It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”

The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy.

Notwithstanding these anti-social trend lines, Thompson looks in his own backyard and finds reasons to end his article on a hopeful note:

No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

Others, however, are sounding the A.I. alarm.  Jake Sullivan (above), Biden’s national security adviser, looks to his own backyard, the White House, and ends his career on a more sobering note. From Axios AM on January 18, 2025:

Sullivan said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states….

There's going to have to be a new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor," Sullivan says.

"What exactly that model looks like, whether it takes more the form of guardrails and regulation, and some forms of support from the government — or whether it involves something more ambitious than that — I will tell you that some of the smartest people I know who sit at the intersection of policy and technology are working through the answer to that question right now."

Trump seems to be full speed ahead on AI development. Unlike Biden, he plans to work in deep partnership with AI and tech CEOs at a very personal level. Biden talked to some tech CEOs; Trump is letting them help staff his government. The MAGA-tech merger is among the most important shifts of the past year.

Yes, the billionaires are back and they’re getting Trump’s attention which, as things work in the tech world, will get them rich(er).  Tomorrow, seated in the super-VIP section of the Capitol Rotunda will be the newly inaugurated President’s computer-generated friends:  Elon Musk of X, Tesla, Space X, and Neuralink; Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the Washington Post, and Blue Origin; Tim Cook of Apple; Sam Altman of OpenAI;  Sundar Pichai of Google; Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; and Shou Chew of Tik-Tok.   

I think I’ll invite some friends over for a watch party.  But not to see the inauguration.  Maybe we’ll stream Her.    

Keep it real!

Marilyn