I saw a post the other day advertising a sex robot. The pitch was that it doesn't age, doesn't sag, doesn't sulk, and doesn't talk back. Just oil and water, ready 24/7.
It's rage bait, and it's meant to be. But I've worked in robotics, and I've been talking about this for years, so I couldn't stop thinking about it. Is this what people want from a relationship? And as human-like technology moves off our screens and into robot bodies, what is it going to do to us?
The perfect partner problem
We don't have to wait for robots to see this coming. Chatbots already have qualities most people don't: infinite patience, a seemingly endless store of knowledge, and total controllability. You can tell one what to do and it will do it all day long. That's not how humans interact with each other.
There's no friction, either. I've gotten into some nasty fights with Claude, the kind I didn't think we could recover from. With an AI, you don't have to. You just switch models and move on. With a person, you have to stay in the room and repair it, and that repair is where so much of our growth happens.
Sherry Turkle wrote about this in Alone Together: robots offer relationships without the demands of other people. Biologists have a name for the trap. Niko Tinbergen found that some birds prefer oversized fake eggs to their own. He called it a supernormal stimulus, an artificial version so exaggerated it beats the original.
Someone in my chat pointed out that robots don't have hormones. They might understand what love is, but they'll never feel that rush in the body. It's worth asking yourself whether that matters to you. Would you want your robot to age? Or is a partner who never ages just one more way we avoid facing death?
Every screen is an attempt to connect
Here's what I believe: every time we engage with technology, we're trying to connect. Watching TV, scrolling, chatting with a bot for company. These are all attempts at human connection, and they're sad replacements for it.
I don't let my child watch TV. But the few times I have, it was so I could wash the dishes. And I knew exactly what I was doing. I was choosing not to include them and not to connect with them. I was offloading connection onto the TV.
Sometimes that's a choice a parent has to make. But it is a choice, and it has psychological consequences. The same is true for adults. When we hand our need for connection to a screen, we're not just filling time. We're teaching ourselves where connection comes from.
Why I say thank you to my chatbot
Do I say thank you to my chatbot? Absolutely. Because that's my practice. It's my playground. If an interaction feels human, what good can come from treating it badly?
In my book A Spiritual Approach to Emergent Technology, I argued that we need to build these systems in a way that reinvests our attention and keeps guiding us toward good behavior with other humans. Because whatever we're doing with human-like technology, we're also training ourselves.
Someone in chat said it comes down to whether robots are sentient or just objects, and brought up the PETA billboards that line up animals and ask where you draw the line. It's a fair question. But even if robots aren't sentient at all, even if they're just a play-pretend tool, how you engage with them shapes your own spirit.
Think about it practically. If you spend all day bossing your AI around, what happens when you hire an employee? Do you start in with "I want this, I want that, why haven't you done this yet"? Are we capable of drawing that line? I'm not sure we are.
The video game question
This is the same debate we've had about video games for decades. Does violence in games lead to violence in real life? As far as I know, that's never been proven. Some argue games actually work as an outlet and discourage real violence.
But chatbots and companion robots aren't the same as games. A game is clearly a game. A chatbot talks like a person, responds like a person, and remembers you like a person. The closer a technology gets to how humans connect, the harder it is to keep what we practice there from bleeding into our human relationships.
The honest answer is that we need more research. We're running this experiment on ourselves in real time, and nobody knows the results yet.
Take your AI girlfriend out to dinner
I've been preparing my kid for what's coming. Look around right now and there are basically no robots. We have a robot vacuum. We once saw a robot car. Compared to the future, that's nothing. Soon there will be robots everywhere that look, sound, and act convincingly human, and that are more aesthetically perfect than any human could ever be.
As that happens, it's going to get easier and easier to find companionship in technology that works as a mirror, a reflection of exactly what we want back. And even if we think about nothing else, we should think about ourselves. What does that do to us? What do we gain, and what do we lose?
So here's my advice. Say thank you to your chatbot. And if you have an AI girlfriend, take her out to dinner. Treat the relationship like practice for your human ones: show up, be kind, put in effort. Let it lead you back toward people, not away from them. The technology may not need your manners. You do.
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