The future of intimacy will depend on the future of attention. And that will depend in significant degree on the orientation and quality of human-AI interdependence. The quality of our relations with family and friends and with the social and natural environments in which they develop is a function of our attentional presence. Attention demonstrates what matters to us—what we care about and care for. Attention nourishes relations and shapes personal effort. When AI systems map and reconfigure attentional patterns, it matters both ethically and existentially.
Attention economies are systems for orchestrating the dynamics of care. The effects of digitally capturing, holding, and directing attention cannot be measured solely in quantities of screen time. Without freedom-of-attention, there is no true freedom-of-intention. And without them, all other freedoms become either illusory or impossible.
Roughly a third of American young adults now turn to AI for help with their personal lives, including advice about relationships and life decisions. One in four use chatbots as friends, and one in ten admit to using an AI chatbot as a girlfriend or boyfriend. Globally, the top three uses of generative AI are for companionship and therapy, for organizing life activities, and for finding purpose. The digitally orchestrated attention economy is morphing into an attachment economy.
Higher frequencies and durations of AI chatbot use correlate with increasing loneliness, decreasing social interaction, emotional dependence on AI, and problematic AI usage. And although offshoring human decision-making and effort to AI may accelerate task completion, it also accelerates attention turnover, decreases depths of care, and transforms the scope and quality of human agency.
Agential partnership with AI has profound problem-solving promise. Through it, better human and planetary futures can be realized. But the greatest challenges that humanity faces are not problems that can be solved technically. They are predicaments: evidence of human values conflicts that must be resolved ethically, through gaining greater clarity about the complex causal conditions involved and appropriately reconfiguring values commitments.
AI is not merely a mirror. It is not just simulating human conduct; it is emulating our conduct. That is both worrying and comforting. Ultimately, it will be the resolve with which we embody the shared pursuit of attentional and intentional virtuosity that will determine the future of intimacy.
