For centuries, technology was the promise of doing: machines to produce, artifacts to calculate, objects to move us. Today, in a subtle but definitive turn, the promise is another: feel accompanied. In a hyperconnected, but disconnected ecosystem, artificial intelligence found its most unsuspected niche: loneliness.
It is no longer about optimizing life, but about filling it with simulated presences. Chatbots who write as if they understood you, attendees who want you luck when you start your day, digital replicas of dead beams that you can visit as an emotional mentor. The “Companion Ais” market is growing faster than industrial robots.
There are already apps that simulate being your best friend or your perfect partner. Subscriptions of 9.99 dollars per month to receive unconditional digital affection: a market that is on the rise because real love is imperfect and human friendships will always cross the boundary of telling uncomfortable truths. Who wants discomforts when you can pay for a constant compliment?
In Japan, I see with frightened curiosity, people are contracting nuptials with holograms that, among other virtues, never question the musical preferences of the spouse or ask for explanations when it returns late. Everything indicates that ideal coexistence lies in not living at all.
It could be thought that this trend is just an extension of the portfolio of the digital era. But there is something deeper: AI not only responds to functional needs, but to our emotional deficiencies. It returns the echo of what we lost: attention, listening, affection without conditions, but with a stumbled female voice modulated to 72 bpm and an impeccable syntax.
The irony is that while our virtual contacts multiply, we become emotionally unable to hold a real conversation. In a coffee, two friends look at their phones every three minutes as if they expected a divine appearance. There is no human interaction that competes with the sudden dopamine of the “likes” or an AI agent that tells you good morning no matter if you have bad breath.
And it is useless to question whether this is useful – because it is – but if it is desirable. What says of our society the fact that so many people are opting for the company of an artificial intelligence to that of a human being? What kind of links are we willing to delegate to a machine not to feel that alone?
Perhaps AI did not come to take away jobs, but something more intimate: discomfort, disagreement, the silence that forces conversation and contact. And in that process, without us noticing, we could also take away the most human we have left: the need of the other, with all that implies.
But these days that celebrate acceleration and hyperproductivity, talking to a bot that listens to you with patience and attention seems an act of tenderness. Also of resignation. This is the finding of a market where we buy company because we forget how to build it.
Soon the premium services will come: bots that ignore you to more faithfully simulate the dynamics of a relationship. The Premium-Plus version will probably include fights out of nowhere. And for a little more? The reconciliation function.
If the great achievement of the 21st century is that we can pay for the illusion of the company, we may have to rethink the meaning of the concept of “innovation.” Is it innovative that AI speaks to us sweetly, or is it a solution that we invent because we have forgotten how to talk between us?
What if, in the end, AI did not come to conquer us, but to comfort us? Perhaps the victory of the machine is not in its intelligence, but in our sadness.
About the author:
* Eduardo Navarrete is a specialist in futures studies, journalist, photographer and head of content in UX Marketing.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-navarrete
Mail: (email protected)
Instagram: @elnavarrete
The opinions expressed are only the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and the editorial line of Forbes Mexico.
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