AI Cannot Be Your Friend

And understanding why matters.

Two quick notes.

First, my usual Monday Aristotle post will be out on Tuesday or Wednesday this week. Remember that on August 18 at 8 PM Eastern we have a members-only Zoom call to discuss the book.

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Visiting a Friend

A woman is on a hike. She’s visibly straining — the hike has obviously been a challenge for her, but the sort of challenge that feels good. She’s happy to have to have made it to her destination. She lets out a yell – really more of a woo – to celebrate.

And then she has a conversation with her AI friend.

This is the opening scene to the reveal trailer for Friend, a new AI wearable that is supposed to be a kind of companion for the lonely, perhaps even a technological solution to the loneliness epidemic.

I wrote about Friend last week, actually, when I discussed the role of Aristotle in the Anthropocene — the period of history we inhabit which is primarily defined by humanity’s role in defining our environment. I tried to be a bit cute about the matter, arguing that there is a parallel between the ecological Antropocene and the modern social order, and ultimately arguing that what we needed in this time was a reminder of how to be human. And that is what Aristotle is particularly good for.

But since we are reading Aristotle together on Walking Away, and soon we’ll be reading Book VIII in which Aristotle writes about friendship, I wanted to make the point a bit more bluntly: if you understand what friendship is, then you can see that AI (at least as it presently exists) cannot be your friend.

Back in February, I started to write a little bit about friendship, and the piece I produced was on Aristotle, with a small reference to Michael Oakeshott’s ‘On being conservative’ as a balance.

First, I noted that friendship is a serious problem, but it is a problem which has not been taken seriously:

Friendship is a subject which we have largely dismissed as a subject of serious study. What could be more plain and simple? Could anything be said about the matter that was not banal? But it is also a matter of extreme importance in our time. In 2019, before the pandemic and the life-altering lockdowns, 22 percent of my generation said they have no friends. Members of every generation report increased loneliness.

Then, I noted that friendship clearly mattered to Aristotle because he devoted a third of his discussion of the ethical life to friendship. We will discuss his view of friendship in more detail in a few weeks, but today we need to at least understand his three-fold distinction between types of friends. Here’s what I wrote:

First, we have friends of utility. A friend of utility is a friend that one has because they provide something for you: social connections, material wealth, opportunities for career advancement. These friendships are brittle and often asymmetric. One friend typically provides more value than the other, at some point it becomes pointless for one friend to continue the friendship. When circumstances change, the friendship rarely adapts. Instead, it ends.

Second, friends of pleasure. These are friends who provide you with pleasure, broadly construed. Aristotle believes that these are especially prevalent among the young, who tend to pursue pleasure more zealously than the old. Like friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure are unstable. What provides pleasure for me now may not later — beauty fades, my interests shift, and the craving for more intense and concentrated pleasures grow.

Third, we have friends of virtue. Aristotle also calls these ‘complete’ friendships. These are friendships in the fullest sense of the term. Friends, in this scenario, are perfectly alike in virtue. This kind of friendship is highly restricted. Those who are not sufficiently virtuous, whom Aristotle calls ‘base’, are unable to form these kinds of friendship. Only the virtuous can have full and complete friendships, friendships which go beyond utility and pleasure.

While Aristotle makes this distinction, I have always suspected that Aristotle really believed that true friendship is restricted to the third kind of friendship. Friendships of utility and pleasure are not really friendships in the true sense of the term.

This is why I brought Oakeshott into the conversation in the previous essay. Oakeshott emphasizes that friendships are a special sort of relation, for they are relationships which are ‘engaged in for their own sake and enjoyed for what they are and not what they provide.’ He contrasts this with an economic relation (his example is a butcher). You go to a butcher because you need meat; if the meat ceases to be quality or the cuts aren’t well-made, you will go to a new butcher. Butchers can be discarded easily. True friendships cannot.