How AI Is Quietly Changing What It Means to Be Alone
Addendum to Derek Thompson's "The Anti-Social Century"
Journalist Derek Thompson has a must-read essay on The Atlantic’s February cover: The Anti-Social Century. It’s a broad look at the trends that have defined America’s society (also Europe, I can attest to that) for the last 30 years, especially “rising solitude” as he puts it. I don’t want to do Thompson’s work a disservice by summarizing it half-heartedly so I urge you to go read it (after you read this).
I won’t go over his ideas in detail but build on top of them by focusing on what’s coming from AI. Things will get even worse if we don't first recognize the challenge and then set out to solve it. I see two possible paths ahead. One leads to a garden. The other to a desert. The garden demands collective awareness and action; the desert, nothing—it’s the default, the path we’re already on. And it’s where we’ll remain unless, as Thompson, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and others have long warned, we correct the wrong turns we’ve taken.
If you know how the world works—namely, its immense inertia—you’ll forgive me for not being as optimistic as I’d like in this post. Meta’s AI-generated content creators, which I discussed recently, are just the latest piece in a much larger puzzle. Meta has shelved the project temporarily due to backlash, but they’ll be back—this time wiser from their mistakes, our energy to resist slightly depleted, and their bottomless coffers, well, still bottomless.
If you prefer my more optimistic side, I can give you a silver lining: the world may have immense inertia, but as the saying goes, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the Earth.” Just don’t expect anyone to give you that lever—you will have to fight for it.
Thompson’s essay starts with an anecdote in a Mexican restaurant that I experienced myself a month ago, across the pond. My friends and I went to dine before Christmas at a place in our town called Soul Pizza. I remember one of them saying, quite sure of himself, that we wouldn’t get a table without a reservation. We all agreed in silent resignation but went anyway, just in case. We could always try someplace else. But not a soul was there. Irony was on our side. We ordered our calorically-delicious food and waited. And waited. And waited. How could an empty restaurant be so slow?
Then I saw them, the pile of delivery pizza boxes on the counter, reaching near the ceiling. I hadn’t noticed them; it looked like a column because of how tall it was. The same thought struck me that struck Thompson in that small Mexican restaurant: The place was empty but the business was actually booming. Just not in the same way it once used to. When weeks after that dinner I read his essay and noticed the parallel, I found it funny; until I realized it wasn’t a coincidence. It was a sign of the times. What happened to him happened to me because it’s happening everywhere, from small Mexican restaurants in North Carolina to rustic pizzerias here in Madrid, Spain.
I think of it—of the great time I had with my friends chatting and laughing, the amazing Fantasia I had (that's the name of the pizza, don’t be weird) and the emptiness of such a nice spot—and imagine all the many delivery boxes sitting in some nook of just as many solitary rooms spread across town. Why are so many people ordering food? It's convenience. It’s the TV, it’s Netflix, it’s computer games, and it’s our ever-more-powerful phones. It may as well be a new physiological condition still to be determined by WHO that makes us run away from the sun, like vampires living in Yuma, Arizona. No wonder there's a lack of vitamin D epidemic. Thompson builds his robust story out of both anecdote and data: We don’t go out. We don’t meet with people. As he recalls from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: We are hardly living up to our reputation as “social animals.”
Steve Salis, a restauranteur in Washington, D.C., tells Thompson he thinks “people feel uncomfortable in the world today.” That’s a powerful phrase. I work from home so it resonates with me. I go out much less than I once used to. Just like the people who don’t bother heading down to Soul Pizza, I barely set foot on the street most days. I have to shower and dress up and that’s just too much friction unless something great is waiting on the other side of this cold weather. Sometimes not even then. Don’t get the wrong impression of me—I love to go out. My life has simply switched from being aligned with that as default to turning it into a deliberate choice. We, social animals, hate deliberate choices.
Part of that is my job but not all of it. There’s a powerful reason that affects me as a writer but also everyone else, remote worker or not: not long ago, the world outside had so much more to offer—leisure, plans, places, people—than the world inside. I’m not sure it does now. The space within these four walls and ceiling—what we call home, a rather modern concept—has grown larger. Without moving an inch. The number of devices you own—also books but let’s be real, you’re not reading as much as you used to—measures how seamlessly your home has replaced the outside world (your screen time stats don’t lie). The choice for a perfect Saturday afternoon is clear: you tell Alexa to turn on Netflix and Siri to call Soul Pizza delivery.
When we say we live in our heads it’s not a metaphor or hyperbole. Everything that there is, is from our minds. So we may as well be provided all the stimulation we need from the simulation that our many home devices project into our minds. You can’t tell the difference. Eating pizza and binge-watching Squid Game 2 with Alexa and Siri is all you need. That’s why The Matrix worked. That's why all of you, dreaming of being Neo, would most likely be Cypher instead.
That is, at least, the lie we tell ourselves. Making our home stimuli-rich replaces the value the street used to provide. The truth is that we shouldn’t focus on that. Not even in the opposite—divesting our living room of the TV, the office of the PC, and our bedroom of the VR headset (No? Is that only me?) Instead, the focus should be on MAGA: Make Activities Great Again. More attractive. With a diverse social offering. As Thompson says, “degraded public spaces—and degraded public life—are in some ways the other side of all our investments in video games and phones and bigger, better private space.”
One of his most striking revelations aligns with that: “Americans [especially younger people] are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. . . . Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” One of his most surprising revelations, however, is counterintuitive: “. . . many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness . . . But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same.” How do we square these apparently conflicting insights?
“Feeling lonely” is the emotional alarm signal that tells you to go out and meet people. A little bit is good, just like hunger or anxiety. But being cool with extended periods of solitude reveals that you lack that warning: your mind and body are deteriorating from lack of social contact, but you still spend a lot of time alone because you don't feel lonely. Then, when you have a sudden burst of loneliness—we all do—you’re somatizing the sudden awareness of all the solitude that has quietly accumulated in your body. As Thompson says about Americans, “Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping.” This is not the century of loneliness but the century of solitude. The anti-social century.
It is this recent paradigm shift—from loneliness to solitude, from the restless craving for others' company to the composed acceptance of spending most of our time alone—that has compelled me to write this essay with a focus on AI and what’s coming. Without the alarm of our social clock, we will keep self-isolating ourselves instead of course correct. AI may not be humanity’s ultimate boss but it will be socialization’s.
But what’s all the fuss about AI here? Isn’t this just another case of “this time is different” that turns out to be exactly the same? Let’s find out. TV was trivially problematic; you stayed at home instead of going out. Phones have always been trickier. Thompson puts it nicely here: “Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary.” As AI enters the world of custom entertainment with its power to adapt to our inclinations, pleasure spots, and hidden desires, it will cover any gaps left to remind us there’s a world outside that offers, if not greater hedonism anymore, at least less solitude.
I don’t want to enumerate here the many works of fiction and non-fiction that have predicted and warned about this. They all were, of course, right. But Thompson’s essay is not a prediction. There’s value in warning that the wolf is coming. There’s also value in calling everyone to arms when it comes. It’s come. Thompson’s data-heavy assessment is testimony to that. So is the rapid progress and careful design of AI products. But let’s not make AI the scapegoat. It was TV first, then computers and video games, then phones and the internet, then social media. The number of culprits is only growing. No single factor explains the entire process, which spans one century already. AI is, as I said, just the latest piece of the puzzle. The problem is that it might also be the last.
AI represents the ultimate prototype for achieving peak solitude without ever feeling lonely—a state Thompson identifies as the true problem. It’s a prospect more chilling than chaotic. Less a Big Crunch, more a heat death: an eternal, unyielding silence.
But what kind of harm can AI inflict when there’s barely any social time left to cut, even if it turns out to be more dangerous than all its primitive predecessors? Thompson writes, “The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.” We’re already not socializing so what’s AI going to change? If it’s just about making entertainment better, then fine, right? Wrong. AI will expose, perhaps too late, the truth.
There’s a strong direct association between the time we still socialize—even if it’s through phones—and the number of things we can socialize about.
Before electronic technology, life was pretty static so we gossiped about the fifty other people in our tribe or village or neighborhood. Once TV, then cinema, then radio, and then all the other multimedia gained popularity, we started to socialize about it instead of ourselves. We became voyeur gossipers; socializing about—and through—others’ socializing. But at least we still had something in common to talk about. TV had one channel at first, your entertainment diet was fixed and so was everyone else’s. You went to class the next day like: “Hey Dave, did you watch that Lost episode? The Smoke Monster—crazy stuff!”
Nowadays Netflix, TikTok, and MMORPG video games break this otherwise shared culture. It’s bad if a few corporations control everything you see. It’s just as bad if no one sees the same thing ever again. This is what it looks like if whatever it is that I did yesterday doesn’t overlap with whatever you did:
"Hey Dave, I just started this new sitcom on Netflix called Those Good Years. You should watch it!"
"Really? Never heard of it... But I’ve been watching this other one, a sci-fi anthology called Tales from the Future. Check it out."
"Eh, probably not my thing."
"Yeah, yours sucks too."
Just imagine. People won’t watch the same movies. They won’t find the same movies on the platforms that offer movies. If you go on TikTok, you don’t even find the same comments your friends do. Reality will fragment into ever-tinier microcosms depending on who you are, what you like, where you live, and what you consumed yesterday, an hour ago, a minute ago. Human beings have evolved with an internal reality only we can access and an external reality everyone knows. What do you think happens when both collapse into one accessible by nobody else but you? Why would I socialize with you about anything if I’m already being served the perfect leisure menu my mind can conceive? To suggest a movie? To share a funny joke? No—those are funny to me and only to me. You’ll have yours, your own hyper-funny inside jokes where inside is just you. You’ll watch movies I’ll never watch. I’ll detest them anyway. You’ll read—if that’s even a thing—books generated for you on the fly. Books so heavily customized for you, like commissioned fan fiction, that I’ll find them repulsive and alienating.
There would be infinitely more of everything, yet paradoxically, nothing left to socialize about. That’s AI’s ultimate promise: summit solitude, quietly suffocating you without ever giving you the chance to feel lonely.
At the same time, AI companions—a different breed of service than AI content—would never tire of telling you how great your taste in vampire romance novels written as culinary memoirs is. I swear some people love this stuff. They just do in their unfulfilled intimate fantasies, destined to remain unspoken—shared with no one but their AI partners. Always attentive. Always up. Always happy. Always horny. Always ready to make your weirdness feel normal. To validate every fiber of your being. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that? It’s a mirror, in every sense.
Add to it the fact that AI now talks. And sees. Just like you. Just like the people you once connected with, mostly over the phone. There’s little difference between a human friend represented by black symbols on a white background and ChatGPT (or Replika, if you like kinky). Perhaps temporal consistency and past shared experiences are the only aspects that keep AI from entirely replacing our already parasocial relationships. They may not last. And don’t think people are naive—they’re not getting deceived into believing AI companions are real. As journalist Jason Fagone puts it, “People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners, and they’re getting deeply attached anyway, because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.”
Thompson mentions one subject from Fagone’s yet-to-be-published book on AI companions, “a young man who, after his fiancée’s death, engineers an AI chatbot to resemble his deceased partner.” I’d be willing to bet the young man is Joshua Barbeau, about whom I wrote more than three years ago. This is not about the future, guys. This is the present. In some cases—you should read Barbeau’s story—it is the past. Thompson’s takes feel prescient. All of them. They also read like a historical account of events that have been unfolding right under our noses, unnoticed.
Do you want this? The absolute solitude? The perfectly customized entertainment? The AI everywhere? I don’t. At least that’s what I think today, not sure what I’ll think five years from now. While I’m capable of taking a sensible stance, I will say that we’ve already experimented enough on this petri dish of aloneness. We’re turning into shapeless amoebas and I firmly believe we should instead live up to what it means to be human and move away from our most primitive impulses. It is better to have a shared culture that no one fully loves than perfection alone. It’s your call. And if you make it to Soul Pizza, make sure it’s to book an in-person reservation.
What a deep topic your wrote about in such a personal way. Love it!
I just hope we don't end in The Matrix 25 years later!