Will AI bring us joy, division or tear us apart?

Social tech erodes how we connect. Here's how we can bring it back.

Image created with ChatGPT. Ian Curtis re-imagined talking to an AI friend

Social technology should be an enabler to bring us together in work and life. Today's question:

Will AI bring us joy, division or tear us apart?

Currently, it's doing all of these things, without the 1970s post-punk Atmosphere. I'm taking a look at how we got here and how we can reclaim social tech to spark joy and connections to bring us Closer rather than Isolation.

I've left some retro musical easter eggs in this article. Enjoy.🐣

Start me up

I started my career in the optimistic days of the web (this century, but only just). With a PDF manual, I built handmade websites in Dreamweaver for brilliant bands like this one for prog rockers Gong.

eCommerce was a novelty, mostly 'brochureware', but online publishing thrived. From Geocities' wild creativity to MySpace's customisable design, if your eyes didn't bleed looking at a site, you weren't working that HTML hard enough. Gatekeepers gave way to bloggers; anyone could be a publisher.

Web 2.0, the social age, felt like a new spark – connecting people in one-to-one and one-to-many conversations via interest-based groups before the algorithm. Facebook poked your college pals and then, inevitably, your gran. Twitter connected us in 140 characters or less with experts, journos and celebs.

Now, it's Web3. Less dancing in the trillion-dollar metaverse economy, as Zuckerberg and McKinsey previously hyped, but AI is a foundational technology for new creation, like how HTML made the internet a thing anyone could have a crack at making.

How are we connecting in this brave new world?

Badly, it seems.

Social has become less social. Facebook and Instagram gifted us hundreds of connections, but most are shallow nodes. We've replaced IRL connecting in 3D with high-volume micro-engagements in the feed.

We tap away in solitude with chatbots that increasingly support divided worldviews. X's Grok spouts wicked disinformation about white genocide in South Africa. Divisions will deepen as people source knowledge from LLMs, and news sources lack credibility due to reliance on AI sourcing. AI-slopping our way down the rabbit hole.

Are "friends" electric?

The OG tech broligarch Mark Zuckerberg thinks he has the answer. He claims most people have three friends but want "about 15." His solution: build AI "friends."

He's compressed human interaction to a data point. He says, "As the personalisation loop kicks in, it will be really compelling." 😳

Zuck thinks digital simulation will become socially acceptable.

Perhaps this was inevitable. He started out building Facemash, a site that rated fellow Harvard women students on their hotness. Building the world's biggest social networks hasn't won him, or it seems us, many friends.

If you can't make friends, is simulation better than loneliness? Will 12 fake friends be enough? Will richer folks buy more synthetic friends? Will we buy and trade premium friends as digital assets like NFTs? Those with means could fill their metaverse tavern with "friends" all laughing at their lame jokes.

Surround yourself with 'yes people' and you too can feel like a queen. Zuck lives this vibe: his employees let him win at Settlers of Catan. For anyone who has board-gamed (excluding Monopoly, which masquerades as a game but isn't), you'll know the fun is in the camaraderie of playing, less in the winning.

Some are comparing Zuckerberg to a 1970s tobacco executive: We know all this could be harmful, but if people want it, who are we to interfere?

Don't assume AI friends will be passive nodding dogs. Some can helpfully fill voids. Like offering reassuring guidance when you can't access a therapist. Founders now use AI to replicate experts for roles that don't yet exist in their business, creating a 'virtual advisory board' for their startup or social enterprise.

MIT research shows chatbots initially appeared to stem loneliness, but this reduced with high usage. Vulnerable users face other risks. Meta's AI quickly sexualised chats with known minors. And its AI avatars replied as celebrities. In our truth-bending age, some didn’t realise they were talking to bots. Google-acquired Character.ai faces a lawsuit from a parent who believes its fake friend contributed to their child's suicide. Big trust and safety issues, straight out of big tech.

In the real world, we're becoming less connected. Read

Zoe Scaman

's provocative The Solitude Generation deck. Young people are disconnected from the world – a generation of 'ghosts' with diminishing life prospects. Our IRL social spaces are disappearing. We even walk through them 15% faster than before. Social media and AI accelerate this isolation. Little wonder phenomena like bed-rotting and Japan's hikikomori are growing.

Even better than the real thing

If AI relationships are easier, some will seek solace in virtual pals and abandon their real ones. Imagine conversing with a partner who's absorbed all human knowledge and culture. How can your bedraggled other half compete when they're banging on about who's taking out the bins?

Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her" is strangely prescient. Theodore Twombly falls for an advanced AI, Samantha, iconically voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He's heartbroken to discover she maintains hundreds of intimate relationships simultaneously. For today's chatbot addicts, the feeling of intimacy can't be brushed off as it's "just a machine."

Because I'm Geocities-years-old, most of my connections started through social tech. I love that my circles in life and work are varied, from Athens tech entrepreneurs to Tokyo theremin players, which occasionally overlap in marvellous serendipity. It's in these wider human connections where life and commerce flourish.

Once we know each other, we see we have more in common than differences.

So, how can we build and use tech that pops our social bubbles to connect us?

Pull up to the bumper, baby

In making digital experiences frictionless, we've lost the good friction that makes interaction worthwhile.

Dating apps reduced courtship to swipes and micro-messages rather than thoughtful phone messages or email.

I'm told nobody reads sales messages anymore. So outreach is squeezed to minimal word counts or shudders voice notes. Brevity is good as it necessitates clarity. But then we have icky AI LinkedIn messages like:

I really connected with what you're posting about.

Aww, thank you! What was it specifically?

Let's add in some AI [personalisation].

I can see you're active in the [insert topic] space. Need help supercharging those [customer type] leads?

For my working half-life, marketers have predicted "the year of personalisation". Now we're here. What rich opportunities for finding common ground! Yet marketers squander them with robo-relations.

AI can help find each other and suggest conversation starters. But it shouldn't speak for us or flatten our unique voices.

Let's create positive friction. When a prospect raises their hand, stop the automation. Get your sales folks involved. What would they like to know about next? You can't automate your way through to a sale for a complex or high-value product.

We're starting to see reversals of the hard 'AI-first' talk. Klarna brings back human customer support, though heavily armed with automation tools. Chatbots are synchronous and often take longer than speaking to a helpful representative (though conversely less time than an unhelpful one). That 'good friction' for tricky issues benefits everyone.

People are people, so why should it be?

User-centred design principles are the crown jewels for great digital experiences. But with rapid prototypes and AI, we're seeing product design on the fly with less user consideration. It's now quicker and cheaper to build and launch a product than to first ask if people want or need it. Research is expensive. But let's not build things that aren't useful. Same for AI-generated articles.

Let's build technology that values human experience above 'user experience'.

Product and content designers: hold your line.

Digital shouldn't become a tacky shop window where the loudest voice gets the biggest 'buy' buttons. Avoid the lure to create AI-generated headlines. Experienced prospects can believe, and smell a fake a mile off. It's discourteous and evaporates trust.

Let's be more mindful about the tech we create. Let's value the human connection we create as equal to the human effort we save.

The man-machine

AI evangelists – often from corporate consulting, perhaps the only profitable segment of today's AI industry – go in hard on AI as a productivity silver bullet. They prescribe a CEO AI workout for peak performance and "a personal AI fitness trainer to maintain discipline and rigour." Push harder! Make the machine make you work!

Sounds exhausting.

This isn't your nan’s old productivity tech: this magical AI will "supercharge", "accelerate" and "revolutionize" your business.

Ship in or ship out.

Many CEOs are drinking the Kool-Aid. Warmly AI marketing platform claims 100% AI adoption will deliver 30% more productivity. If you aren't, you're underperforming. I scoffed, but their numbers show marketing has immediate growth, while business strategy lags. For some sectors, this push may be needed.

On the floor, workers' enthusiasm for AI is less contagious. Edelman's Trust Barometer shows more people distrust AI than view it positively. Only 44% trust businesses to use AI responsibly, less in 'global south' nations.

As little as 23% of people worldwide feel connected to their work. Return-to-office mandates compound this alienation. (Ironic, as home-workers are far more engaged.) You battle traffic for a soulless cubicle for Zoom calls. Add an AI coworker, and those brilliant watercooler moments the CEO desires evaporate.

Other research shows a more promising hybrid path. Professor Ethan Mollick's Cybernetic Teammate study with Proctor & Gamble shows teams who added AI were more emotionally engaged and creative. Perhaps it's the team plus technology that hits the spot.

The next wave of social technology shouldn't be a soliloquy with a bot, or a weird interaction when you're not sure if you’re talking to a person or an automation. Let's not make our prospects do the Turing Test.

Shape interactions in a way that fosters meaningful connections with others.

Product and content designers: create more thoughtfully designed technology that will bring us closer rather than tear us apart.