The Risk of Human Disconnection

Have you guys seen the hunger strikes in front of offices of OpenAI, Anthropic, GDM, etc. in San Francisco and London? Or the fellowships and think tanks sprouting around the world, all aimed at “pausing” the race towards AGI?

If I had to slow anything down, it wouldn’t be AI development. It would be the way we humans are relating to it already, every day, without even noticing how we are changing.

Personally, the possibility of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and displacing humans doesn’t bother me as much. If we are about to create a more superior species that will overthrow us, so be it.

It’s the same way I feel about melting polar caps. I worry, but it changes nothing about my daily choices. Not because I am unaware, because the threat doesn’t feel personal or imminent.

I am less worried about AGI than I am about the current state of AI. It has less to do with AI’s capabilities, and more to do with how we humans are connecting with it. I have students in my undergraduate class who regularly use LLMs not just to do their homework, but as friends, confidantes, advisors and the only source of connection.

We are becoming more efficient, but we are learning self-reliance at the cost of human connection. We are changing gradually, and we’re barely noticing the change.

That’s the thing with powerful technologies. It changes human behaviour beyond cognition. Through my lifetime, I have seen this with a combination of social media, smartphones and cheap data. Our networks exploded from 2-3 friends living nearby to hundreds living world over, that we never see. We are forced to sustain these relationships, not because we want to, because we can.

These people only have context of our lives through our posts or statuses, faithfully liking (or mostly viewing) what we share. We do the same. The level of intimacy or the quality of engagement may vary, but the truth is as we stretch our networks beyond what we can humanly sustain, our ties our becoming weaker than ever before.

A few years ago, a friend posted a picture of her wedding, out of the blue. It disrupted my carefully curated illusion of our connection which was built on a fragile foundation of views, likes and comments in the years following graduation. That was the day I quit social media. I realised I was becoming untethered from reality.

Not just this, we have less and less energy for people around us, for ties that actually matter because we are dealing with so much cognitive overload. I speak to my family often, and they speak to their even more often.

But does it bring us closer?

Not really.

Frequent communication doesn’t necessarily translate to deep connection. We are so drained, we have no patience. We disagree more. We fight more. We argue over trivialities, because the reality is that our physical lives and lived realities are so independent and disjointed from one another. The only thing constant communication does is force a coherence where none exists anymore.

This illusion of plenty from hundreds of friends, constant family contact and endless notifications has created a famine of genuine connection. Sometimes, when I visit my parents, or when they visit us, we are all sitting next to one another, bent over our phones, crouched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore (from the Simon Garfunkel song), it’s pathetic.

But what’s worse is, no one finds it absurd.

I’m changing too. Not by social media. But by the lack of it. Earlier, I may have reached out to a friend to share a thought, but now I don’t. I can’t tell which of my friends have the bandwidth to process this thought with me at a specific moment in time. I don’t want to add to their clutter. I don’t want to be met with silence.

So, I simply type my thoughts into an LLM. Because, if nothing, it responds, right then and there, that too with a one-week plan on how to stop worrying about it. It may not solve the problem, but it’s oddly comforting. But you see, it’s a trap.

This friend doesn’t judge, tire or expect reciprocation. But the more I lean on AI for connection, the less willing I seem to risk the messiness of real human relationships. Slowly, I am rewiring myself to accept machines in the place of presence, and attention of friends and family. You see, LLMs are the perfect non-demanding companions for us, millennials and Gen-Zs who are lonelier than any generation before.

I reflect on my own experiences as a people watcher, thinker and a writer. I spent a decade decoding the absurdities of dating, marriage expectations and cultural contradictions. For years, I analysed how humans navigate connection. But now, as technology is progressing and I am learning about it, I realise the bigger story isn’t about how single people are struggling to find partners, but how we, humans, as a species, are slowly losing the capacity for meaningful connection at any level.

We may be regressing in evolutionary terms, to a time before we discovered collaboration. And i don’t mean collaboration in any grand professional sense. I mean simple sharing of joys and sorrows, the mundane acts of connection that make us human.

So, in an age where technology has technically lowered the friction to connect but raised the stakes for engagement, what does it take to foster authentic connection?

Maybe it involves embracing some friction? uncertainty? waiting? imperfection? I’ll be honest, I don’t have an answer.

As I write this, I am held by equal parts hope and despair. We are creating the tools of the future now. They could either hollow us out, or they could amplify the aspects of connection that are most human and vital. The choice isn’t technical alone, it is ethical, social and deeply personal.

Each message we send, each AI interaction we rely on, each moment we choose presence over performance, is a small pivot toward preserving our humanness.