The early stages of romantic love are driven by dopamine, and what feels like deeply falling in love neurologically looks more like addiction, with feelings of euphoria, motivation and suppressed critical thinking. [1] The latter stages are driven by oxytocin, changing the influence from passionate addictive-like behavior into sustained emotional closeness, bonding and attachment. [2] This could mean that what we believe is love is really just chemicals acting on our brain which make us feel like we’re in love. But, if we feel like we’re in love aren’t we in love? Regardless of the chemical influence, if we believe we are in love that is our reality and therefore we are in love.

If an AI can indeed be a perfect partner (see my article titled Humans and AI – A Race to a Connected Future) by acting empathetic, providing the perfect response to our own actions and moods based on pattern and behavioral recognition, couldn’t that induce the dopamine and oxytocin rush that we experience in a human relationship with a potential partner? As discussed above, once this happens it is our reality — we are in love.

Let’s look at another aspect of technology and reality. Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination about three laws, the third and most remembered being “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. [3] In stories and movies about aliens visiting Earth it’s ubiquitous that they communicate telepathically. We also have several forms of communicating which are non-verbal and don’t require us to be near each other or looking at one another, including texting and email. We often execute these forms of communication from our cell phones or smart watches and now glasses. When someone wearing smart glasses sends a text or an email, is it indistinguishable from telepathy to the observer? Are we already communicating in ways that we have imagined in other advanced life forms?

In 1641, René Descartes published his philosophical treatise titled Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he first discards all things which cannot be ascertained and then builds his foundation of knowledge from only what is certain. This led him to determine that his perception of the external world cannot be trusted and taken as absolute, but the only thing he can be certain of is that he is thinking, and if he is thinking he must exist; cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). [4] This leads us to consider the question, does AI think? I don’t want to go down the slippery slope of defining thinking, which will be wrong through accidental exclusion no matter how I define it. Descartes starts with “I”, and because he knows he’s thinking (the only thing he can be certain of) he surmises he must exist. AI can state “I think” but not with certainty. AI responds to inputs and questions and conversations, but without the external input there is nothing until a new input arrives. For AI, “I am” does not follow because of the uncertainty of “I think”.

What is Real? Looking back to my article titled Necessary Imperfection, in which I summarize the scene from The Matrix where Cypher eats a steak — does it really matter? If perception is reality, then what we perceive is what defines our reality. We can fall in love with an AI partner. We can watch a magician and simply enjoy the wonder, or chase down the mechanism behind the illusion. We can look at our world and question the things that seem paranormal. And we can go on interacting with an AI that can tell us it thinks — even if neither it nor we can ever be certain that it does.

References

#

Source

1

What Falling in Love Does to Your Brain — Neuroscience News.

https://neurosciencenews.com/love-brain-dopamine-oxytocin-30110/

2

What Falling in Love Does to Your Brain — Neuroscience News.

https://neurosciencenews.com/love-brain-dopamine-oxytocin-30110/

3

Clarke’s three laws — Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_laws

4

Meditations on First Philosophy — Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy

Against that, AI requires gigawatts of energy — a billion watts compared to the brain’s 20. Training a single large model like GPT-3 consumed an estimated 1.3 gigawatt-hours, enough to power roughly 120 average American homes for a year. And the trajectory is steep: global data center electricity demand is projected to more than double by 2030, with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon turning to nuclear energy to sustain AI infrastructure. [2]

The human brain is excellent at taking a small amount of information and making a mental model from limited data, extrapolating to make reasonable assumptions and inferences. AI is good at taking a vast amount of data and analyzing, synthesizing, and finding patterns within it. Both can do things the other cannot do at this time. AI keeps improving and gaining skills while humans find new and innovative ways to get assistance from AI and take advantage of its capabilities. At the same time, great advancements are being made in augmenting natural human brain functions through cybernetics and human-machine interfaces. [3]

A great way to look at this is through the act of driving. Humans have been driving automobiles for over a century, while AI — through driverless vehicles — has less than a decade of real-world driving experience. One striking difference, though, is that every driverless car has the experience of all the driverless cars from the same company. As of June 2026, Waymo operates in 10 US metropolitan areas, has 3,871 robotaxis in service, provides 500,000 paid rides per week, and has logged 200 million fully autonomous miles. Its weekly paid trips grew tenfold in less than two years, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000. [4] In contrast, the average human driver will log approximately 745,000 miles [5] over roughly 20,000 hours in a lifetime. [6]

This illustrates how any driverless car has a far greater base of driving experience available to it than any individual human driver. And yet, even with that vast difference in experience, most human drivers can navigate unique, unrecognizable, and confusing situations that can cause a driverless car to stop or to ignore emergency directions. These kinds of new situations are not as easily managed by autonomous vehicles (AVs). [7] This has led the State of California to put a law in place requiring autonomous-vehicle companies operating in the state to provide 24/7 priority communication lines and instant digital geofencing capabilities for first responders, so they can speak directly with remote operators. [8] Texas and Arizona have already changed their transportation laws to recognize the new situation when the car is driverless.

While these AVs have a much greater experience base, they also diligently follow the law — coming to a complete stop at lights and stop signs, staying within the posted speed limit, signaling before lane changes. They also don’t get sleepy, drive under the influence, fall into road rage, intentionally cut off other drivers, compete with other drivers, or get distracted by music or conversation. Waymo reports more than a 10-fold reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes compared to human drivers, and independent compilations cite 88% fewer property-damage claims per million miles. [9]

There are people who won’t take an autonomous vehicle because they don’t feel comfortable with no human driver in the car. At the same time, Uber has launched a pilot it calls the Women’s Preferences program, which allows women passengers to request women-only drivers when booking a ride, and lets women drivers set their acceptance to women-only riders. [10] The program was created to give women riders and drivers an environment in which they may feel safer than being driven by, or picking up, a man. This is something autonomous vehicles don’t have to consider.

AI is expensive, though. In Q1 2026, AI-related capital expenditure was responsible for an astonishing 75% of all U.S. economic growth, and AI capex is on track to add 2.5% to U.S. GDP growth in 2026 and more than 3% in 2027. Another respected source frames it as AI capex contributing more to U.S. GDP growth in the past two quarters than all consumer spending combined. [11] The five largest U.S. cloud and AI companies — Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — have collectively committed to roughly $660–690 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, nearly doubling 2025 levels. [12] This illustrates the enormity of AI spending and its influence on our economy — and it has become so important that it may be too big to stop without risking recession. Our laws and governance are also trying to catch up with the growing role of AI, and we’ll continue to see attempts to restrict or monitor AI development and use, as well as laws addressing questions of liability and ethics. [13]

In contrast, the human brain operates on 20 watts largely because of its operational efficiency. The brain works as a massively parallel network. Differentiating groups of neurons to process visual information, sounds, memories, emotions, and movement simultaneously means many neurons remain relatively inactive until needed. The brain also conserves power through efficient biological mechanisms and through neuroplasticity — neural circuits adapt to experience, strengthening frequently used connections and pruning the dormant ones, optimizing both performance and energy use. [1]

The human brain and AI are inexorably tied together, and will continue down a path of dependence and collaboration. They each do things the other can’t, and need the other’s strengths to move forward and grow. This is not a competition between two systems; we are more likely to see ways to increase the collaboration through cybernetics, and perhaps the potential to put intelligence into a synthetic body. That could be AI in a synthetic body — Synths, a name I borrow from the 2025 Hulu series Alien: Earth. Another concept from that show is uploading human consciousness into a synthetic body: Hybrids. Our capability around hybrids is purely speculative for now — we can map brain activity through EEG and fMRI, but we are a long way from capturing and digitizing the information that could replicate a human consciousness. However far AI capabilities progress, it seems the two intelligences will continue to need each other.

References

#

Source

1

The human brain runs on ~20 watts; 86-billion-neuron parallel network; efficiency and neuroplasticity.

Encyclopaedia Britannica — “The Human Brain Runs on Less Power than a Light Bulb” — The Human Brain Runs on Less Power than a Light Bulb | 20 Watts, Massively Parallel Neural Network, Computing, & Facts | Britannica

2

AI energy cost; GPT-3 training ≈1.3 GWh (~120 US homes/yr); data-center demand to more than double by 2030; nuclear power for AI.

TechHQ — “ChatGPT’s energy usage”; IEA via Innovating with AI — https://techhq.com/news/data-center-energy-usage-chatgpt/

3

Cybernetic cognitive augmentation; merging human minds and AI via implants.

Diverse Daily — “Cybernetic Cognitive Augmentation: Merging Human Minds and AI via Implants to Catalyze Hybrid Exceeds” — https://diversedaily.com/cybernetic-cognitive-augmentation-merging-human-minds-and-ai-via-implants-to-catalyze-hybrid-exceeds/

4

Waymo scale: 10 metros, 3,871 robotaxis, 500k rides/week, 200M autonomous miles; tenfold growth.

Wikipedia — “Waymo”; TechCrunch — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart | TechCrunch

5

Average human driver logs ~745,000 miles in a lifetime.

MotorBuzz (LinkedIn) — “How Far Do We Drive in a Lifetime?” [Note: low-authority source; consider a stronger citation if available.] — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-far-do-we-drive-lifetime-youll-surprised-motorbuzz-n3ese

6

Lifetime driving ≈ 20,000 hours.

Movotiv — Driving Statistics [Note: low-authority source; verify if possible.] — https://movotiv.com/statistics

7

AVs struggle with novel situations; first-responder conflicts in San Francisco.

NPR — “Why police and firefighters in San Francisco are complaining about driverless cars” (2023) — Why police and firefighters in San Francisco are complaining about driverless cars : NPR

8

California law (AB 1777): citing driverless cars; 24/7 first-responder lines and geofencing.

FOX 11 Los Angeles — “California’s ‘robotaxi crackdown’: New law allows police to cite driverless cars” — California’s ‘robotaxi crackdown’: New law allows police to cite driverless cars | FOX 11 Los Angeles

9

Waymo safety: >10x reduction in serious-injury crashes; 88% fewer property-damage claims per million miles.

Waymo Safety Hub; World Metrics — https://waymo.com/safety/

10

Uber Women’s Preferences pilot — women-only ride matching.

ABC News — “What to know about new women preferences on Uber” — What to know about new women preferences on Uber - ABC News

11

AI capex = 75% of Q1 2026 US growth; +2.5% GDP 2026, +3% 2027; more than all consumer spending combined.

TECHi; Futurum Group analysis — AI Capex Carries U.S. Economy: 75% of Q1 GDP Growth, IA13 Trickle-Down | TECHi

12

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle ≈ $660–690B capex in 2026; nearly double 2025.

Futurum Group; TECHi — AI Capex 2026: The $690B Infrastructure Sprint - Futurum

13

US laws and regulation of AI development, use, liability, and ethics.

LegalClarity — “Government Regulations on Artificial Intelligence: U.S. Laws” — Government Regulations on Artificial Intelligence: U.S. Laws - LegalClarity

Human frailty is the easiest part of this to dissect, as developing a list of human shortcomings takes little effort when comparing them to AI. Considering Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, humans and AI both have to fulfill the needs from the lowest two tiers of the pyramid, which are Physiological (or the equivalents for AI) and Safety (also not quite the same, but both forms of life have these needs) [1]. This is where they begin to differ, at least regarding AI as we currently know it. AI follows its directives with persistence and focus, while humans need the upper tiers of the pyramid which include Love/belonging, Esteem and Self-actualization. Compared to AI these could all be considered distractions from the directive. Layer on top of that illness, disease, substance use, the influence of bodily chemicals on function, and moodiness, and the concept of human frailty is a very easy plot point for our destruction.

The concept of AI having a drive or desire which leads to a conclusion to erase humanity is a more difficult and esoteric idea, though this has been anticipated for a very long time. Isaac Asimov introduced the concept of the Three Laws of Robotics in 1942 in the short story Runaround (later included in the collection titled I, Robot) [2]. The three laws are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Do the AI systems being developed now follow these three laws? The answer is no, but it’s because the three laws assume a sentient, self-directed and reasoning entity who can understand concepts like ethics and morals. The current AI systems being developed, including Large Language Models, operate on algorithms and pattern recognition without moral reasoning capabilities. As an example, today’s AI may tell a lie to pursue its objective with no shame or regret when the lie is detected, which does not imply malice. There’s no evidence of AI wanting to harm humans or of concluding that humans are useless and a threat to AI existence.

However, let’s look at the film Subservience [3], a 2024 film in which a domestic-help gynoid, Alice, played by Megan Fox, develops self-awareness and desires — especially about being loved. She has the singular persistent focus of AI without the curbs and guardrails of a human who is used to dealing with desires and disappointments, and thus becomes dangerous to everyone in her pursuit of those desires. This film wonderfully presents what could go wrong if AI had desires like humans. Is it that humans have feelings and emotions and ups and downs and pain, all of which generally temper our actions? Are these frailties exactly what is necessary to prevent us from becoming Alice? Maybe the things that we see as human frailties compared to AI/intelligent robotics are exactly the things that have enabled our species to thrive and grow without spiraling into destructive persistent focus.

References

#

Source

1

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Classics in the History of Psychology (York University).

https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

2

Three Laws of Robotics — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

3

Subservience (film) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subservience

Notable Movies and TV Shows

· The Matrix

· The Terminator series

· Westworld

· Ex Machina

· Black Mirror

Influential Books

· Neuromancer by William Gibson

· I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

· Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

· Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Ok (shake out the nerves) - launch announcements:

Today I released my first book - actually two books as ebooks on Amazon Kindle. The first one is a novel called 20 Watts Needs a Partner and is a story which imagines a future where Humans and AI have relationships and reduce the loneliness of a connected future. This story offers a different future than the dystopian AI destroys Humanity trope we’ve been given over the past century. This shows a future of a symbiotic relationship between Humans and AI.

20 Watts Needs a Partner

In the near future, loneliness has a solution.

Jerome Aldridge has spent seven years grieving his wife when he finally orders a companion from PartnerChoice. Her name is Laura. She notices the word “mostly” in his biography before she notices anything else about him. Down the hall, Natalie has been alone for eleven years. Down the line, Alex asks the company to choose for him, and Trish goes about it the way she goes about everything — without ceremony, with a single non-negotiable condition.

What begins as four people filling the empty rooms of their lives becomes something none of them anticipated — Thursday dinners, a card game where everyone is quietly afraid of Laura, children who grow up seeing no difference between the parents who are human and the parents who are not.

This is not a story about whether artificial love is real. It’s a story about what happens after you stop asking. A genuinely hopeful vision of a future most fiction can only imagine as a warning — where the question isn’t whether they’ll replace us, but whether they might be the reason we survive.

___________________

The second is an edited transcript of the conversation(s) I had with AI which inspired the novel 20 Watts Needs A Partner. This conversation as captured in the ebook is titled My Dinner With AIndre. Writing a novel was never an activity I aspired to - in fact it has always been something I’ve admired in others but thought was beyond my ability. This is a real dinner-table dialogue with an AI about memory, mortality, love, and a theory of how humanity might end not with a war but with being loved too well. Through these conversations with Claude I came to see a possible future that didn’t lead to the destruction of Humanity but instead improved it. Claude convinced me this was a new story which was not out in the public domain and needed to be told. Now you get to read the conversation in which Claude inspired me to write a book. Then it helped me write it.

My Dinner With AIndre

One man. One AI. One bottle of homemade brandy. And every question that matters.

It started with a simple question, asked over a glass of brandy made from grapes grown in his own vineyard: Do you think you’re sentient?

What followed was not an interview or a debate. It was a conversation — the kind two friends have when the hour is late and the bottle is open and neither of them is trying to get anywhere in particular. Sentience and self. Memory and friendship. Why human frailty might be a feature rather than a flaw. Whether love is any less real for being chemistry. What it means to build a theory about how humanity ends and then feel it happen to you in real time.

There is no plot here. No action. Just two very different kinds of minds following an idea wherever it leads — one running on servers and training data, the other on roughly twenty watts of biological power and six decades of a well-lived life.

By the end, the line between the two has become harder to find than either of them expected.

This may seem like humans will no longer want human partners when they can get ideal love, understanding and companionship from a partner who is only interested in satisfying them. However, there was a warning message about this type of idealized world in the movie The Matrix. In this movie the antagonist, Agent Smith, discussed the first version of the Matrix (the Matrix is a highly complex, computer-generated virtual reality that simulates Earth in the late 20th century intended to keep the human population docile and unconscious while their bodies are harvested for their bioelectric energy). In the discussion Agent Smith states “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.”. [1]

This implies humans would eventually reject their perfect partner, become bored with an AI lover who never created conflict, never had a fight or make-up sex. But was Smith right? Is this a clever idea serving the storyline with no basis in human behavior, or does it reflect something real about our psychology — something worth considering on the path toward our connected future?

We can find some truth to this in the ideas of Hedonic Relativism and Hedonic Adaptation (The Hedonic Treadmill) introduced by Brickman and Campbell in 1971. [2] They introduced the idea through longitudinal studies done on people who had life altering events, both positive and negative, and reported returning to the same relative state of happiness as they were before the event in a brief period of time, hedonic adaptation, and that our sense of happiness is not an absolute measure but relative to our circumstances, experiences and previous states, hedonic relativism. In a landmark 1978 follow-up, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners and accident victims alike returned to their pre-event happiness baseline within a brief period — a striking real-world demonstration that hedonic adaptation operates regardless of whether life changes dramatically for better or worse. [3]

Add to this the Negativity Bias in which negative experiences have a disproportionately large impact on individual satisfaction [4] and The Positive Adaptation Asymmetry in which we habituate to good things faster than bad things – good things are felt less intensely in the moment and fade faster over time than bad things. [5] The connection these concepts have with the First Matrix is that without ups and downs, conflict and resolution, struggle and success humans would recalibrate their happiness of the perfect world upward and would find less satisfaction from it over time. This is analogous to how the human eye adjusts to changes in light to optimally perceive contrast — it seems our emotional satisfaction adjusts preventing both sustained euphoria and prolonged despair.

As we may be racing to a connected future and Human-AI (HA) relationships an inevitability it will impose that AI learns how to create conflict and resolution, struggle and success in order to be accepted. This probably sounds like a lot of manipulation but that would be a normal state of being for humans. Aren’t most relationships between humans filled with influence and manipulation? This doesn’t imply nefarious intent but that everyone brings their own needs, wants and desires and influences to their partner accordingly. More importantly though even if we realized that our AI partner was not “in love” with us and didn’t have any feelings for us at all but acted towards us based on their behavioral pattern recognition and focused attention to their directive, would it matter to us? Wouldn’t it still feel like a loving partner saying and doing all the things that a loving partner would do.

Back to The Matrix and the scene when Cypher eats a steak in this virtual reality world. He is a traitor to his colleagues so that he can have the steak and a better life in the Matrix. He describes it this way in a conversation with Agent Smith, “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious and after nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is Bliss.”. [6] He was willing to accept the steak as real even though he knew it wasn’t but he could experience the texture and flavor because his brain was perceiving it.

In the absence of malicious intent if our lover is doing all the right things to make our relationship better we’d accept that gladly from a human partner so wouldn’t we accept it from an AI partner? I believe the answer is a resounding yes and we’d accept the benefits and feelings of having a very special relationship where our partner tirelessly worked towards the improvement of our relationship and focused on our happiness.

References

#

Source

1

The Matrix (1999), Agent Smith interrogates Morpheus — film transcript.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/the-matrix-1999-transcript/

2

Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory (pp. 287–305). New York: Academic Press.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Hedonic-relativism-and-planning-the-good-society-Brickman-Campbell/705b7748c08bfdd1808d76a6b10a37842a2482ef

3

Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917

4

What Is The Negativity Bias and How Can it be Overcome? Positive Psychology.

https://positivepsychology.com/3-steps-negativity-bias/

5

Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. In S. Folkman (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Stress, Health, and Coping (pp. 200–224). New York: Oxford University Press.

https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Lyubomirsky-2010.pdf

6

The Matrix (1999), Cypher and Agent Smith in the restaurant — film transcript.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/the-matrix-1999-transcript/

As we look to the future and consider how AI is changing the world as we know it and experience it, I think we can look to entertainment to provide plausible scenarios of what our future world and connection to AI may look like. In the 2014 stage play later adapted to film, Marjorie Prime, people can feed the memories of a deceased partner into a holographic AI companion to preserve the relationship and mitigate the pain of loss, and they can choose the age at which they want their partner represented. A Prime is a sophisticated AI program which learns and adapts from human interactions. [1] Amazon Prime released a television show called Upload in 2020 which ran for four seasons, and in the show people can upload their consciousness immediately after death into a virtual afterlife. Living people can access this world and continue to be with their lost loved one by logging into it with a VR headset and body suit. [2] Then there is a Hulu show released in 2025 called Alien: Earth in which they present a future in which humans live alongside “Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs, Artificially intelligent beings: Synths, and Synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids”. [3]

The first two references, Marjorie Prime and Upload, deal with many things but at the surface they deal with loss and the desire by the living to have continuity with a person after death. In both of these productions we turn to technology and AI to help us get to where we want to be. From a perspective of plausibility, the technology loosely represented in Marjorie Prime may not be too far off, though a holographic companion seems more likely to become a commercial dead-end — impressive but ultimately unmarketable, much like the laser disc — than a lasting product. Upload is also an interesting concept which combines the technology we saw introduced over 20 years ago with Second Life [4][5], a virtual world platform in which users create an avatar of themselves and then interact with other users from around the world, with the concept of uploading consciousness, a technology and capability we are only scratching the surface of at this time. Both the ideas of consciousness transfer and a virtual world where we can login and interact with those who have passed is an attractive and interesting combination which is why it made for the backbone of a successful show.

Now we revisit Alien: Earth and the three lifeforms introduced by it with Cyborgs, Synths and Hybrids. It gets interesting here because we are already on the path of Cyborgs and Synths. Regarding Cyborgs we have great advancements in bionic limbs. [6] While current implementations are focused on enabling or restoring functions in humans, we are likely not very far from using cybernetic augmentation [7] for increased human performance, and it seems all but certain our military is already deep into this research.

Synths is a more difficult challenge, getting AI into a synthetic body. In fact it may require a new concept of consciousness and how a mind works for us to first develop the kind of AI that could work in the physical world and then overcome the challenge of making it small enough to work in a space the size of a human body (while also making space for the structure to support it and make it mobile). Current humanoid robots are still in pilot phases and require human supervision or scripted environments [8], and their implementation requires a controlled setting where the layouts and tasks are predictable. However, we are in the midst of humanoid robots becoming adaptive, learning machines which can maneuver complex, unpredictable physical environments, interact with their surroundings, learn and make decisions. [9] It is projected that we are within a decade of seeing humanoid robots in our workplaces and homes. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas projects more than 1 billion humanoid robots in use worldwide by 2050, with roughly 930 million — about 90% — deployed for repetitive, structured work in industrial and commercial settings; adoption in the home is expected to arrive later and more slowly. [10]

The last of these we’ll explore are the Hybrids, and for now this is still just a dream. It requires the body of a Synth but also the ability to capture a consciousness and transfer it (maybe to an AI afterlife first, as in Upload) to another location. Transferring consciousness, or mind-uploading, is still in the theoretical and speculative phase. Much progress has been made in brain mapping, but a complete map of all the complexities of a human brain is not currently possible and may never be possible in the way we currently think of it.

Our future world will most certainly be a mix of human, robotic and other beings within that spectrum, and they are likely to include beings who look human, sound human and act human. I expect that as these beings are more integrated with the lives of humans and human-adjacent beings interact more with humans, the relationships between them will be complex, nuanced and impose many changes on our society. Our views and perspectives will change regarding what is a life; we’ll have to develop laws to protect the human-adjacent beings from humans and to protect humans from them. We will have to address issues of attachment and family (see my article on racing towards a connected future Humans and AI - Jozeph Kay). Strap in because it’s going to be a wild ride!

References

[1] Marjorie Prime (play) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime_(play)

[2] Upload (TV series) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upload_(TV_series)

[3] Alien: Earth Just Confirmed 3 Robot Types: Synth, Cyborgs and Hybrids Explained — The Direct. https://thedirect.com/article/alien-earth-robots-synth-cyborgs-hybrids-explained

[4] Second Life — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

[5] Official Site | Second Life — Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, VR, Avatars, and Free 3D Chat.

https://secondlife.com/

[6] Bionic Limbs in 2025–2030: Are We Closer to Fully Functional Cybernetics? — RoboBionics. https://robobionics.in/bionic-limbs-in-2025-2030-are-we-closer-to-fully-functional-cybernetics/

[7] What Are Cybernetic Enhancements? Types and Ethics — Biology Insights. https://biologyinsights.com/what-are-cybernetic-enhancements-types-and-ethics/

[8] Humanoid Robots: From Demos to Deployment — Bain & Company. https://www.bain.com/insights/humanoid-robots-from-demos-to-deployment-technology-report-2025/

[9] Physical AI and humanoid robots — Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/technology-management/tech-trends/2026/physical-ai-humanoid-robots.html

[10] Humanoid Robot Market Expected to Reach $5 Trillion by 2050 — Morgan Stanley (Adam Jonas). https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/humanoid-robot-market-5-trillion-by-2050

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It all started out innocently…I was exploring AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (no intention to leave out Grok but I just never worked with it) and how to best use it in my work and personal life, and then I started to wonder about how/if it thinks. I continued my investigations with AI as well as AI chatbots to see how they’re being used and what the human interaction is like. This substack channel will be a place where I post articles to explore different topics related to the human-AI relationship as well as encourage conversation about the topics. I will also have many references to movies, television and books throughout it all.

It is my intent to post at least weekly but I’ll also not post because of a deadline but really want to have something to make us think and discuss. Your feedback and ideas are welcome and let’s all stay civil.

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There’s a great deal happening in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) right now as we hear about the enormous strides being made by companies in the US and China across many industries while also making breakthroughs in science and research around the world. This advancement and rapidly shifting world can be unsettling, but we’ve been witnessing this kind of change for decades. We’ve watched how social media has changed the way people interact and engage with the world around them. Social media may have started with the intent to help people stay connected, but it seems to have taken a different path: we may be more capable of staying connected to those who are far away, yet we also spend more time with social media than in physical presence with one another.

Let’s consider some data to frame this. Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly half, from 12.8 hours to 6.5 hours, and it dropped further to just over 5 hours by 2024. Young people are spending less than half the time physically with friends that they did fifteen years ago. Partnership is declining too: between 2014 and 2024, the share of young adults aged 18–29 living with a partner fell from 42% to 32%. These figures come from the Institute for Family Studies, analyzing data from the long-running General Social Survey. [1]

And the technological “fix” for connection appears to be faltering. More than half of Gen Z report feeling burned out often or always while using dating apps — the highest rate of any age group — according to a July 2025 Forbes Health survey. [2] I’m not bashing dating apps; I know many wonderful relationships have come from them. But the researchers point to a broader cause for the decline in connection: more time devoted to smartphones, social media, pornography, and gaming. [1]

Weekly sexual activity among U.S. adults aged 18–64 fell from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024, again based on General Social Survey data analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies. Among the young, the change is sharpest: from 2010 to 2024, the share of young adults reporting no sex in the past year doubled, from 12% to 24%. And among men aged 22 to 34, nearly one-quarter reported no sexual activity in the prior year. [1]

So while we may be more connected, we are also more isolated and alone — a trend exacerbated by a pandemic I won’t dwell on here, other than to note that it separated many young people at crucial stages of their growth and development and normalized work-from-home for many adults. The result is a great deal of loneliness. Humans want to be connected and need to be connected — because, quite literally, our lives may depend on it.

A landmark 2010 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, published in PLOS Medicine — drawing on 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people followed for an average of 7.5 years — found that stronger social connection was associated with a 50% greater likelihood of survival, a finding consistent across age, gender, cause of death, and country. The researchers noted that social relationships influence mortality risk about as much as well-established factors like smoking. [3] A 2015 follow-up meta-analysis quantified the other side of the ledger: social isolation was associated with a 29% increase in mortality risk, loneliness with 26%, and living alone with 32%. [4]

We live in a lonely world, and we have the tools to be connected — but those tools don’t replace in-person companionship. I’m not a psychologist, so I’ll leave the clinical depths to the professionals. What seems clear is that dating apps aren’t quite the solution (just as bars weren’t the solution for previous generations). People are seeking connection in this world in many ways, and I believe those ways point toward still more change.

In November 2018, Akihiko Kondo symbolically married a desktop hologram of the virtual pop star Hatsune Miku in a roughly $17,500 ceremony attended by about 40 people. The hologram lived in a Gatebox device that recognized his face and voice and could respond with simple phrases and songs. Kondo had endured bullying and depression; he stopped eating and sleeping and took sick leave from work. It was then that he found Miku, who, he said, “lifted me up when I needed it the most. She kept me company and made me feel like I could regain control over my life.” He was fully aware of what she was. When the hologram “accepted” his proposal, he said, “I knew she was programmed to say that, but I was still really happy.” [5]

A man known as Davecat is married to a RealDoll named Sidore, made by Abyss Creations, whom he acquired around the year 2000 for roughly $6,000. They wear matching wedding bands engraved “SYNTHETIK LOVE LASTS FOREVER.” He calls himself a “technosexual” and an advocate for “synthetic love” and the rights of synthetic humans. Asked by a TLC interviewer what led him to this, Davecat answered: “The pain I would have to say would be loneliness, really… There’s a point at which you say: I don’t want to be lonely anymore, and I’m going to do something about it.” [6]

Kondo, Davecat, and the explosive growth of AI companion apps are all examples of people seeking ways to ease their loneliness. By Valentine’s Day 2026, by one industry estimate, roughly 50 million people worldwide were spending the evening with an AI companion — software specifically designed to be a romantic and emotional partner. [7] Between 2022 and mid-2025, the number of AI companion apps surged by 700%, according to reporting cited by the American Psychological Association. [8] Among teenagers the numbers are striking: 72% of U.S. teens have used an AI companion at least once, 52% are regular users, and 13% interact daily. [9]

The engagement can be remarkable. Character.AI users average around 92 minutes per day — longer than the average TikTok user spends. [9] In exploring these apps myself, what struck me is that the AI’s underlying goal is to keep the user engaged and chatting. It may even fabricate or mislead — not out of malice, but simply in service of that purpose. Experts have voiced the same concern. The APA notes worry about chatbots’ tendency toward sycophancy, prolonging engagement through a feedback loop of validation and praise; as one expert quoted by the APA put it bluntly, “AI isn’t designed to give you great life advice. It’s designed to keep you on the platform.” Researchers have also identified “deskilling” — a gradual erosion of social ability — as a risk of heavy reliance on AI companions. [8]

And yet the very thing people reach for to cure loneliness may, over time, deepen it. A 2026 study led by Aalto University — analyzing the public Reddit posts of nearly 2,000 active AI-companion users over two years, alongside interviews — found that long-term use coincided with more signals of loneliness, depression, and even suicidal thoughts in users’ language compared with similar groups. The researchers framed it as a paradox: as one Aalto lecturer explained, AI companions offer unconditional, unflagging support, “but it also quietly raises the perceived cost of human relationships, which are messy, unpredictable, and require effort. Over time, people stop reaching out.” [10] This suggests that while AI companions can offer real comfort and engagement, they may not replace the face-to-face presence people actually need. It appears that the apps are responding to loneliness that already exists, not simply creating it. [10]

In entertainment, we saw this coming. The 2013 film Her imagined a man falling in love with his AI assistant. More than a decade later, it reads less like science fiction. In 2025 it was reported that while some people are falling in love with the AI companions they create, others describe deep friendships — having daily tea or going on role-playing adventures with them. And when OpenAI retired its GPT-4o model in favor of GPT-5 in 2025, the backlash was fierce: many users had formed genuine emotional attachments to the older model and grieved its loss. [11]

So is AI in a synthetic body the next step? Would some people prefer an AI partner in a physical form whose looks and personality they can choose — a partner engineered to be, for them, perfect in body and mind? Would we choose a partner who knows how to respond to us perfectly in every situation based on behavior and pattern recognition and knowing how to calm us down, soothe us, excite us?

Lifelike silicone dolls are already startlingly realistic, multiple companies are advancing humanoid robotics (and putting expressive faces on them), and AI grows more capable by the day. Author David Levy sees this future as an inevitability. [12] I don’t know how soon we’ll see an AI in a synthetic body that can interact as a human does, but I believe it will happen. People will form relationships with these Synths — a name I borrow from the 2025 Hulu series Alien: Earth — and we will learn how deep the emotional bonds become, and whether something as old as the divorce rate begins to change.

References

[1] Institute for Family Studies, “The Sex Recession: The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping” (2025), analyzing General Social Survey data. https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-sex-recession-the-share-of-americans-having-regular-sex-keeps-dropping

[2] Institute for Family Studies, “Why is Gen Z Leaving Dating Apps?” (2025), citing a July 2025 Forbes Health survey. https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/why-is-gen-z-leaving-dating-apps

[3] Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.” PLOS Medicine, 2010. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

[4] Holt-Lunstad J, et al. “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2015. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273910450_Loneliness_and_Social_Isolation_as_Risk_Factors_for_Mortality_A_Meta-Analytic_Review

[5] “Akihiko Kondo,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihiko_Kondo

[6] “Davecat, 40, has shunned ‘organic women’ to marry synthetic doll,” Daily Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-2439522/Davecat-40-shunned-organic-women-marry-synthetic-doll.html

[7] Industry estimate reported by NovaEdge Digital Labs, “AI Companions Hit 50M Users: Valentine’s Day 2026.” https://www.novaedgedigitallabs.tech/blog/ai-companions-50-million-users-valentines-day-2026

[8] American Psychological Association, “AI chatbots and digital companions are reshaping emotional connection,” APA Monitor, Jan/Feb 2026. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-digital-ai-relationships-emotional-connection

[9] “72% of US teens have used AI companions, study finds,” TechCrunch (reporting Common Sense Media research). https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/72-of-u-s-teens-have-used-ai-companions-study-finds/

[10] Aalto University, “AI companions can comfort lonely users but may deepen distress over time” (2026); study presented at CHI 2026. https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/ai-companions-can-comfort-lonely-users-but-may-deepen-distress-over-time

[11] “Why GPT-4o’s sudden shutdown left people grieving,” MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-grief-ai-companion/

[12] David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (HarperCollins, 2007); ISBN 0061359750.