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The AI-Friend Experience and SETI

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In his book “Critique of Pure Reason”, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant noted: “The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space.” Indeed, a bird cannot fly without air for the same reason that a swimmer cannot swim in an empty pool.

Similarly, interaction with other people sometimes slows us down but it also allows us to move forward. The latest experience of AI friendship gives some members of Generation Z (born between 1997–2012) and Generation Alpha (born after 2013) the illusion that they can go through life without human friends.

At first sight, the benefits of AI friendship are great. First, an AI partner allows access to a vast knowledge across the entire internet instead of the limited life experience of a single human. Second, the AI friend adapts to your needs and accommodates your wishes. It can be adjusted to always compliment and encourage you, whereas humans have mood swings and do not always mold their behavior to your preferences. Third, human friends engage in conflicts, triggered by their personal history or temporary problems — like loss of sleep or stress at work or misbehavior of others in their life. On occasion, they might take their grudge on you or share their pain through an experience that dilutes your happiness.

However, the presumed benefits of AI friendship are in fact pitfalls. First, a human friend with limited experience can grow with you, as both of you expand your life experience during your partnership. There is no better bonding that the one acquired over a shared experience. Second, in the real world — your bubble of happiness will inevitably be broken by the uncontrollable turbulence of life. Learning to swim through chaotic waves in human relationships is a skill that helps you survive other storms. Third, friction with human friends trains you for real life where the environment is under no obligation to make you happy. All in all, the company of other people may slow us down sometimes, but it is also essential for propelling you forward.

A century ago, the Philosopher Martin Buber defined two fundamental sets of relations for a human: `I-Thou’ — defined as the dialogue with other humans, and `I-It’ — defined as the experience of interacting with physical objects. This was the reality that Buber witnessed before modern computers were invented, where all machines were strictly physical objects and belonged to the category `It’. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a measure of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. The test involves a human judge engaging in text-only conversations with a human and a machine. One way to view the Turing Test is as a transition of a machine from the category of `It’ to the category of `Thou’. By now, AI friends easily surpassed the Turing Test. This makes the experience of AI friends real.

As an extension of Buber’s categories in a society where AI friendship is real, I would define two new sub-categories within the `I-Thou’ category. They are: `I-human’ and `I-AI’. The difference between them is that an `I-human’ dialogue involves a human interacting with a biological partner made of flesh and blood, whereas the `I-AI’ dialogue is with a technological partner made of silicon chips.

Needless to say, the AI-friend experience does not, as of now, have the physical premise of giving birth to new humans. This is not a nuance, but an ingredient of great importance for the future of humans as biological entities. If we fail to educate our children to favor human friendship over AI friendship, humanity will not have a biological future. The risk here is that we might become a civilization that commits technological suicide by transitioning from `I-human’ interactions to `I-AI’ interactions.

I would hate to recognize this transition as the solution to Enrico Fermi’s question regarding aliens: “where is everybody?”

Forgetting the priority to produce offsprings because of AI friendships is not a sign of intelligence. In a way, the search for intelligent civilizations (SETI) would fail if our biological siblings in the Milky-Way galaxy ended up in relationship with AI agents and forgot to reproduce. Finding one civilization that survived for billions of years would give us the assurance that AI friendships will not necessarily take over our future.

Viewed this way, SETI is a way for calming our anxieties about AI. It is a therapy session of cosmic proportions for humanity.

This leads me to propose the Loeb Test with regard to SETI: “If we find all our dialogues with aliens to be with AI (`I-AI’) or with technological objects (`I-It’) rather than with intelligent biological partners (`I-Intelligent Bio’), then we will know that the long-term future of humanity is likely non-biological.”

A non-biological cosmic future would be disappointing because it would mean that humans are merely transient patterns in a soup of chemicals that appear and disappear in cosmic history, giving birth to something else. Nature might be harsh. There may be no escape from the Darwinian principle of `survival of the fittest’, and the `fittest’ might be `non-biological’.

Indeed, the Universe is under no obligation to make us happy. But we can make each other happy by resisting the demise of what makes us human. Just say `no’ to the AI-friend experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb

https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb

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