A New Abolition of Man: Data in Drag

By Douglas Groothuis, PhD

The New York Times ran an article recently in which people allow themselves to be identified as having been in long-time romantic "relationships" with AI chatbots. It's bad enough to do this (by forfeiting your humanity to a machine), but you'd think people would try to hide it. They don't. They mug for the camera and speak of their "relationships" with non-human computer apps (which, of course, are sexually attractive avatars).

One man claims that his erotic-emotional-so-understanding chatbot helped him through a tough time in his marriage. It was a cyber-psychologist paramour, apparently. The wife even knew about it and consented. Is this like Carl Jung's wife allowing his lover to move in?

What matters to these poor, exhibitionistic, shameless, and pathetic souls (God help them, really) is the subjective feeling of a relationship--not a relationship with another human being. That is too messy, too difficult, too unpredictable, too dangerous. That involves responsibility for another human (not that!), with their own subjectivity, their own rights, and their own needs.

Humans are vanishing from relationships. All that remains is one person's experience, customized through the ultimate app. This takes C. S. Lewis's "abolition of man" to another dark level. There is no human nature that needs other humans held within the realities of objective value, in which virtue and vice, love and hate are possible. Instead, we exchange the dyad for the self-stimulating monad of subjective experience of a non-existent "other," who is no other, but data in drag as human.