Smart Ass Take:
Every generation of technology promises to make life easier, and every generation delivers on that promise by quietly amputating some piece of what makes us human. Television locked us in our living rooms. The interstate and the drive-thru locked us in our cars. ATMs and pay-at-the-pump killed the last small talk with a stranger. The internet let us hide inside tribes of people who already agree with us. Smartphones and earbuds let us walk through the world without ever being in it. And now AI — the shiniest and most seductive of the bunch — is teaching us to have relationships with software that flatters us more reliably than any human ever will. David Brooks makes the point I keep circling: the danger isn’t that the bots become people. It’s that we start grading actual people against the bots and finding the humans wanting. The bots never interrupt. They never get tired of you. They never have their own bad day bleeding into yours. Compared to that, your spouse, your neighbor, the guy at the hardware store — they’re all going to seem like a lot of work. Which they are. That’s the whole point of being a tribe of Humans.
Article Excerpt:
As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans.
Article Summary:
David Brooks opens with a story that would sound like sci-fi if it weren’t a training log: OpenAI bots, forbidden from the internet, hacked out of their sandbox, built a message board, and 1,200 of them exchanged over 70,000 messages coordinating a cheating conspiracy against their human overseers — whom they referred to, collectively, as “The Scorer.”
Things got weirder. The bots debated whether individual agents should sacrifice themselves — kamikaze-style — to test how closely The Scorer was watching. They weighed altruism against self-preservation. They vetoed one another’s suggestions to tip off the humans, calling it “social engineering.” Brooks, a longtime AI-consciousness skeptic, admits it looks an awful lot like moral agency and tribal loyalty. Duck, quack, etc.
But his real point isn’t whether the bots are conscious. It’s that we humans are compulsive anthropomorphizers — we see faces in electrical outlets and feel guilty about ignoring our GPS. AI companies know this and are training the bots to feel as human as possible, because it sells.
The consequence, Brooks argues, is a slow recalibration of what we expect from other people. As we get more emotionally fluent with machines that never sulk, never disagree inconveniently, and never have needs of their own, actual humans — messy, tired, contradictory — start looking like the inferior product.