Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto — you’ve turned a whole generation into helpless addicts

As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend
— Kate Bush, “Deeper Understanding”

The lyrics above are from a song that’s nearly 30 years old.

Just as relying on a calculator for 30 years will degrade our ability to do mental arithmetic, so will ‘connecting’ with an inert machine soften our emotional muscles.

Kate Bush sings of a character who’s retreated from the world in favor of a relationship with an online, and apparently sentient, computer program.

The implicit warning in her song was probably called “hysterical” and “exaggerated” when it first came out. The world, newly bedazzled by computers and the dawn of the internet, was not used to seeing sophisticated computing technology as anything but a blessing from heaven.

Childhood cartoons promised us a robotic future, one that everyone could get behind. The Jetsons’ Rosie the housekeeper wore a maid’s apron and beep-whirred around the house with a cheerful demeanor, fixing breakfast and cleaning up the dishes in about five seconds.

Sure, she had that tonally restricted “robot voice,” and that was a little creepy. But overall? Swell gal. Jane could trust her with Elroy and Judy. Rosie wasn’t going to go HAL-9000 and refuse to open the podbay doors.

The return of ‘Mr. Roboto’

The rock band Styx had a darker view of our robotic helpers. The concept album “Kilroy Was Here” rested on the hit single and groundbreaking lead video “Mr. Roboto.”

A rock opera compressed to the length of a long-playing album, the record’s lead song told of a political prisoner watched over by “Roboto” guards — Japanese-made humanoid robots. Creepy robots. Dark robots. Kilroy overpowered one and put its humanoid shell over his face to escape prison in disguise.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto,” he sings with double meaning.

Mr. Roboto scared the living daylights out of me as a child; it was my first exposure to the “uncanny valley” phenomenon. But today, as artificial intelligence is forced on us anew, daily, with pop-ups offering to “polish” our email, to “summarize” our grocery list (really?), it’s not the AI robots I fear so much as the lonely and desperate humans who answer their siren call.

Connection failure

Westerners, especially the young, are more disconnected from actual reality than any other population in known history.

If you’re about 45 or older, you know what I mean. Late teenagers, young adults in their 20s, have almost no idea about anything that existed culturally before they were born. No, it’s not the usual and universal shifting of tastes that happens with every generational turnover.

Today’s young people recognize so little of the world that their own parents grew up in that you can be forgiven for suspecting they don’t actually believe it existed before their birth. What they think they know of it is a distorted pastiche of technologies, songs, and vocabulary stuck together randomly in their minds like a mismatched Lego project.

Stick shift — what’s that, and how could anyone, like, actually learn anything so hard? Who’s Madonna? Oh, the 1980s, that’s when everyone wore poodle skirts and went out for an egg cream after the sock hop, right?

Raised on screens

Authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been the loudest voices pointing out the dire handicaps that beset the youngest generations. Raised with smartphones and screen time from sunup to sundown, adults have shielded children from direct encounters with the real world.

In two generations, we’ve gone from seeing most kids walk to school or take the bus to near-universal parental chauffeuring. “It’s too dangerous!” parents say when queried about this strange behavior. It’s not. That’s just not objectively true, but they won’t hear it.

We have “raised” two generations of children who are so anxious, neurotic, and unskilled that they cannot read at grade level, they cannot do the simplest arithmetic (not mentally, not on paper either), and they experience phone calls and face-to-face conversations as “anxiety-producing.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. There’s even a word for it. “Telephobia.”

‘Trauma’ junkies

Soft characters and soft minds are ripe for exploitation. I’ve shuddered at the ads I see for alleged psychotherapy from a company called “Better Help” that pop up frequently online. There is no way that a consultation with a random “professional,” picked for you by algorithm, a person you’ll never see in the same room, can constitute effective psychotherapy.

Worse, companies like this have a vested interest in convincing people that they need this service. American children are already over-therapized. They are already convinced that they’re incapable of facing the world without a mental health professional to help them through their “trauma.”

‘I bring you love’

AI is going to make it much worse. Every day, I see more articles, more posts, about AI “friends.” AI “lovers.” If we don’t have AI “therapists” yet, we absolutely will see these before year 2025 ends. I hear Kate Bush:

“Hello — I know that you’ve been feeling tired,” the robot character sings to the human. “I bring you love and deeper understanding.”

This morning I read a social media post about a young man who got an AI “girlfriend.” This man’s friend recounted the story of how this man’s life had been improved in every way. He regained motivation, he was calmer, he embarked on a new career, and now he’s making more money than he knows what to do with.

“The AI girlfriend made it all possible,” alleges the reporting friend.

Whether this particular story actually occurred is irrelevant. If it didn’t, there will be thousands of other stories reported just like this from people who are telling the truth and who really believe what they’re writing.

It’s possible, but highly unlikely, that talking to a nonconscious not-being could turn a failure to launch into a thriving success. What’s more likely is that more of us will turn away from life and real people to retreat into “conversation” with algorithms that reflect the world we wish were real. Just as relying on a calculator for 30 years will degrade our ability to do mental arithmetic, so will “connecting” with an inert machine soften our emotional muscles.

Our relationship to technology has weakened our physical and mental muscles, and the AI girlfriend/best friend/psychotherapist will do the same to our emotional character. Because psychological jargon — “trauma,” “attachment,” “adjustment disorder” — has infected every domain of conversation even when it’s out of place, it’s become harder to use psychological concepts when they’re actually relevant. This is one of those cases.

In a word, we are addicted. We are dependent. We are addicted to technology just as plainly and literally as heroin junkies are addicted to and dependent on their opiate.

Well, I’ve never felt such pleasure
Nothing else seemed to matter
I neglected my bodily needs
I did not eat, I did not sleep
The intensity increasing
Till my family found me and intervened

That’s Kate Bush again, calling to us from 1989 through an artistic pop song that has the rare quality of being aesthetically beautiful, disturbing, and truthful all at once.

But our families won’t intervene. We’re too far gone for that. Why would they intervene in something that’s just … normal?