Frictionless Connection, Atomized Lives

Two recent New York Times pieces published in the same issue describe different aspects of what may be the same large social transition. Jesse McKinley's  “America Is Atomizing” portrays a country losing the institutions and physical settings that once routinely threw different sorts of people together. We increasingly sort ourselves into smaller cultural, political and lifestyle enclaves, while much of daily life—shopping, entertainment, work and communication—can now be conducted without encountering anyone we haven't already chosen. We aren't merely “bowling alone”; increasingly, we don't have to go bowling at all.

A second opinion essay by Alice Lassman, “I’ve Seen How A.I. Changes Young People’s Social Lives,” describes the next technological step. AI is becoming what the author calls a kind of “social sealant,” occupying the small spaces and uncertainties within relationships. Young people can ask a chatbot what someone meant by a text, how to answer it, whether a friend is angry, how to approach a romantic interest, or how to navigate an uncomfortable conversation. AI can provide useful rehearsal, reassurance and advice, particularly for people who are lonely, anxious or socially inexperienced.

But the conjunction of these trends raises a more interesting question. Human relationships have always required tolerating friction: awkwardness, misunderstanding, boredom, disagreement, waiting, compromise and the possibility of rejection. Those inconveniences are not merely defects in social life. Negotiating them is how we learn to read other minds, regulate ourselves, accommodate people unlike ourselves and construct durable relationships.

Digital technology has steadily offered ways of removing that friction. We select our news, entertainment, purchases, communities and partners rather than encountering whatever happens to be nearby. Algorithms further refine the selection. AI now offers to smooth the remaining rough edges inside the relationships themselves. The individual benefits are obvious. The collective result may be less so.

An AI companion is endlessly available, attentive and adaptable and makes few reciprocal demands. Actual people are none of those things. The danger is therefore not principally that people will suddenly abandon humans and fall in love with machines. It is that repeated experience with frictionless artificial interaction could subtly recalibrate what we expect from human interaction, making ordinary people seem unnecessarily difficult.

Thus the paradox: technologies designed to connect us can make contact with other humans increasingly optional. AI may genuinely alleviate loneliness and help people manage relationships, and research already suggests such benefits can occur. But societies also depend on interactions we did not choose—with neighbors, colleagues, relatives, fellow citizens and people whose opinions annoy us. Research on remote communication suggests that when those accidental encounters diminish, social networks can become more politically homogeneous.

Perhaps the scarce resource of the coming AI age will therefore not be connection but unoptimized human contact: situations in which other people remain stubbornly autonomous, unpredictable and inconvenient. Some degree of social friction may turn out to be not a bug in human relationships, but one of their most important features.

[The above text was composed by ChatGPT in a back and forth chat, and I did a few further edits and additions.]

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