We are on the edge of another transformational technology breakthrough that  is already having a profound impact on our lives. We hardly know just what the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have on business, medicine, and our personal lives.

What we do know is that we can’t dismiss any of the potential consequences by saying that the real impacts are years away. With the rapid rate at which AI is evolving what impossible today might be possible tomorrow. What was a decade away might be challenging us a year from now.

While Silicon Valley and its supporters are telling us of the wonderful benefits AI will brings to our lives, and there are many, we hear little about its destructive impact on our lives. One of those impacts will be an acceleration of the lost art of conversation.

Sherry Turkle is author of Reclaiming Conversation. Turkle is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) teaching and writing about the “emotional connections between people and technology.”

She has studied how technology has affected our ability to talk to one another and how we are increasingly isolating ourselves in technological device shells.

Turkle has studied how we’ve been given increasingly sophisticated objects and computer programs that interact with us in a way that establishes a relationship. They are hollow relationships. Affection is given from the heart one way and returned by an uncaring entity. It is programmed to show empathy to sell its program and advertising.

“When people are drawn into the most primitive exchanges with a sociable object—avatar, robot, or chatbot—they believe it cares for them. And we are wired to care for it in return,” Turkle writes. This isn’t the same as talking with another person.  

Human understanding leads to feelings of empathy and compassion. These feelings need the friction that comes with unprogrammed human interactions, moods, and life histories that are individual to each of us.

We need “friction” in our relationships to acknowledge our differences and come to appreciate them. We need friction to teach us how to negotiate and compromise.

Our retreat from human-to-human conversation started with texting, emails, Facebook, TikTok and other social media. We no longer had to call someone. No longer did we hop on a bike and ride to a friend’s house. No longer did we drive to see them.

Remote work further isolated people from interacting with colleagues. It robbed people of those social moments that created a sense of belonging to a group. It took away the empathy they might feel toward a colleague. 

Now AI friends and counselors are going to help us out. They will become our companions, further isolating us from family, friends and community. They will make us more socially awkward in our human interactions. 

Turkle says as we are lured to social media as we “flee vulnerability.” We feel more comfortable not exposing our insecurities, emotions or dreams through technology. In the process we lose the human connection.

“All (AI) can deliver is a performance of empathy. Pretend empathy. When you tell your troubles to a machine, it has no stake in the conversation. It can’t feel pain. It has no life in which you play a part. It takes no risk; it has no commitment. When you turn away from an exchange, the chatbot doesn’t care if you cook dinner or commit suicide. Without a body or a human life cycle, it has no standing to talk about loss, love, passion, or joy,” Turkle writes.

The “richness and complexity of the human” is devalued, with deep consequences for our future sense of belonging.

“Conversation is about more than information. In conversation, we reveal ourselves to each other in our conflicts, contradictions, and fears. There, we nurture our capacity for empathy by connecting to other humans who have experienced the attachments and losses of human life,” Turkle writes.

“Social media was our gateway drug to conversations with machines. And now, we live as addicts poised to substitute one drug for another, using chatbot ‘relationships’ where we once used social media. Our criticism of technology lags behind its seductive power,” Turkle writes.

Our biggest challenge may be that too many will say, “So what?” That they will embrace the technology, ignoring the social and personal impact on themselves and their community.

Will increasing use of AI programs using a voice that imitates concern and caring to our moods and needs, with their ability to pull from every study ever created on conveying empathy and a sense of understanding of our needs, lead to the loss these qualities in ourselves? From each conversation with us, they will know us better. Know the ques and word sequencing that responds in just the right way to pull us deeper into developing feelings toward our AI friend.

Could it on its dark side, nudge you toward justifying feelings of anger or superiority that diminish your sense of empathy with people whose beliefs don’t closely reflective your own?

“There is more than a threat to empathy at stake; there is a threat to our sense of what it means to be human. The performance of pretend emotion does not make machines more human. But it challenges what we think makes people special. Our human identity is something we need to reclaim for ourselves.”

“That means making face-to-face conversation a priority because it is truly the most human and humanizing thing we do. It’s what has always allowed us to have common cause with other people.”

Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in their book The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness say that happiness comes from good relationships. 

“The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured,” they write. They have also concluded that many of us are very poor at nurturing meaningful relationships with the internet a root cause for our isolation. AI chatbots, rather than enrich our lives, will makes us lonelier, they say.