Connection

starting to suspect having a good conversation and feeling connected is not primarily eye contact or asking a lot of questions or not talking about yourself or whatever, or even curiosity, but some yet more fundamental thing that drives all of it like ... joie de vivre??

i get the sense the core thing is actually quite simple, and all the indicators... See more

recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.

Compassion, as well as the way it metabolizes pain, is decidedly analog.

If an AI companion becomes someone’s most consistent emotional presence, the right question isn’t “how do we stop this?” It’s “what does that say about the world around them?” Technological relationships are not new. What’s new is how effective they’ve become; and how clearly they mirror the gaps we’ve refused to address.

We’ve tried prohibition... See more

Humans aren’t meant to excavate their inner feelings until they find their “true self.” We become ourselves in relation, not through introspection.

Nowadays everybody is so scared of life and of risk and of anything that comes from it, that we've developed brittle shells around ourselves which make us rather lonely beings.

— Iain McGilchrist