One of the aspects of life we too easily overlook is the way healthy one-on-one contact makes people feel. There’s a reason why therapy sessions, massage appointments, romantic dinners, and countless other interactions are so widely desired. It feels good on a deep and primal level to have another person take interest and focus their sole attention on you.
■ Of course, there are exceptions: Invasive medical procedures, for instance. But even in the medical field, there’s very little that patients seem to want more than to just have someone make eye contact and listen empathetically. A recent article in the British Medical Journal called the “ability to demonstrate compassion and empathy” a “vital professional competency” for doctors.
■ The realization that we often have involuntary physical reactions to empathetic one-on-one attention is an important one to really internalize. It’s one of those important signs that we exist as both body and soul, no matter how mysterious the workings of that “soul” portion remain.
■ It’s not just doctors who need this reminder, either. The seductive quality of tools like chatbots lies not just in the tendency to validate what the human user expresses, but in giving the impression of the same focused, intimate attention of a one-on-one interaction with another human. The interaction may be synthetic, but it tickles some of the same sensations.
■ To those who are sufficiently aware of their surroundings, that synthetic “attention” isn’t very fulfilling. But as a society, we need to consider how much emphasis we place on making sure that people get the real thing from other real people. And we had better grapple with it quickly, because lots of people aren’t sufficiently aware of their surroundings, which can lead to problems exactly of the type Bill Gates flagged in his top three dangers of AI in his new essay.
■ These are not problems easily solved by institutions or rules. They are, however, extremely important for discussion among people who care about other individual people. The technology isn’t going to become worse, only faster and more convincing. The answers will need to come from people.