Anthropologists tell us that only a handful of human experiences can be found in all human cultures. Among them is the experience of friendship. It might have different expressions in different times and places, but something akin to it seems to appear everywhere.
Surely one of the greatest pains a human can endure is to have no friends – to be outside of every circle of trust, every exchange of confidence, every bond of love.
Review: Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots – Valerie Tiberius (Princeton University Press)
Maybe this explains the prevalence of the idea of the mechanical friend. What if we could build machines that replicated the experience of friendship? Would we not then triumph over the horror of friendlessness? Defeat the cruelty that sits adjacent to friendship? Unlock all its benefits and destroy all its iniquities?
Or is the idea of the mechanical friend somehow much sadder or more pathetic than having no friends? Would a significant number of us not pity, even mock or deride, anyone who thought they were friends with a robot, a computer, an algorithm?
Definitions of friendship
Despite being common to the point of ubiquity, friendship is extremely difficult to define. That is probably why the theme has attracted the attention of philosophers since ancient times. We all know what it is to have a friend. But what is friendship? What are its essential characteristics?
Philosopher Valerie Tiberius’s enviably lucid Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots takes up these questions. For Tiberius’s book is not really about chatbots at all. It is about the way that a world of chatbots – one in which a growing number of humans interact with language generated by probabilistic analysis of colossal data sets as if it were another human – allows us to sharpen our understanding of real friendship.
Princeton University Press
Tiberius thus begins by noting that, when it comes to the phenomenon of humans who claim they have established friendships with chatbots, she would prefer to be “curious rather than judgmental”. She is not going to tell them they are ridiculous or deluded. Instead, she proposes to itemise the various values of friendship, or the reasons why we value friendship, and to ask whether chatbots or any similar technology could be capable of fulfilling them.
Being a philosopher, and thus prone to ambiguity and the hedging of bets, Tiberius’s answer is, unsurprisingly, yes and no.
She explains that many follow Aristotle, who defined friendship as non-instrumental. We must love our friends, not to derive some benefit or accomplish some goal, but purely for who they are, in and of themselves. On this account, it is clear that relationships with machines – which are at least partly instrumental by definition – will never meet the mark.
But as Tiberius sees it, Aristotle was wrong to be so stringent. All real friendships involve an element of instrumentality. We don’t exclusively use our friends for our own purposes. Someone who did wouldn’t be a very good friend. But we do use them in some sense, even if it is only to derive a pleasure that is mutual.
If you ask your friend to help you move or call them when you are depressed, or if your friend does the same to you, that doesn’t ruin the friendship. In fact, for Tiberius, it is part of the value of friendship.
Instead of beginning with a rigid definition, Tiberius characterises friendship as a bundle of different values, all of which are relative to particular circumstances and fulfilled to greater or lesser degrees. And in each instance, she proposes that machines can help us achieve aspects of all the values associated with friendship. But she argues that, in the final analysis, there is also some essential aspect that only another human can fulfil.
Feeling loved and being loved
For Tiberius, there are many examples or values of friendship, but there is no fixed and universal definition of the friend. The three values of friendship she emphasises are: the pleasure or enjoyment derived from friends; the sense in which friends help us define ourselves or refine our character; and, finally, the Aristotelian notion of friendship as an end in itself, or something we deem valuable for its own sake.
Tiberius accepts that engaging with chatbots can be pleasurable and that they could assist with the development of personal character. Along with simple entertainment, examples of chatbots having a therapeutic capacity, in cases such as elder care or assisting with social anxiety, should not be underestimated.
At the same time, Tiberius proposes, real friendship involves a kind of mutual concern or caring for one another that, at least at the current state of the technology, chatbots cannot perform. Moreover, part of the value of friendship involves interacting with someone who has a unique perspective on the world – one that I can attempt to empathise with, recognise, and even share.
Chatbots as they now exist cannot offer these experiences because they do not possess consciousness. And even if we were to develop conscious machines, their consciousness would be so alien to ours that mutual care and recognition would almost certainly be impossible.
Moreover (and more troublingly), through a process that has come to be called “alignment”, chatbots are explicitly designed to be helpful, generous and compliant. Given that they are an extension of the market economy, their prime directive is to convince us to continue using them. This explains why, in many cases, they are obsequious to the point of being cloying.
Indeed, and as Tiberius notes, there are more than a few examples of Chatbots being so affirmative that they encourage their user’s delusions and even their most self-destructive impulses – like a friend who never tells you to stop and think.
Bur part of the value of friendship is what Tiberius calls “friction”. Friends are often frustratingly difficult. This is a good thing, as it exercises our capacity for tolerance and compassion, and it points to one of the potential harms of chatbot friends. For a world where chatbots replaced real friends would invariably become less tolerant and compassionate.
It is at this point that Tiberius introduces her book’s central distinction. Chatbots, she proposes, can certainly make people feel connected or loved, but “there is a difference between being connected and feeling connected, between being loved and feeling loved”.
Friendship cannot be reduced to the way it makes me feel. It is not a purely hedonistic good. It has value independent of all its effects. Thus, Tiberius is drawn back to Aristotle’s original insight. Friendship cannot be replicated by probabilistic calculations, because it is “greater than the sum of its parts”. Along with being an instrument for achieving any number of goals, caring for and being cared for by another person is a good in itself.
solut_rai, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Friends and enemies
Tiberius’s approach to friendship is so balanced and sensible that it is hard to imagine anyone having serious objections. Indeed, given how charming and personable Tiberius is as a writer, I suspect many readers will finish her book wishing they could be her friend.
At the same time, her picture of friendship sometimes appears too rosy and affirmative. She is able to explain the positive values of friendship. But she seems less interested in the darker side.
You cannot be friends with everyone. To have too many friends is to have no friends at all, or no genuine friends. Friendship is fundamentally exclusive, even exclusionary.
This suggests that, while friendship is clearly good and valuable, it carries with it an element of cruelty, something familiar to anyone who has suffered the slings and arrows of high school. To say I am your friend is also to say I am not someone else’s. I choose you, or we choose one another, because we do not choose them.
It is not only that there is something cruel and exclusionary about friendship. It is also that friendship seems to imply its opposite: enmity. What if to make friends is also to make enemies? What if it is a force of both connection and division?
It is worth noting that, at least in part, Aristotle characterised relationships with friends as non-instrumental because he wanted to distinguish friendship from another kind of human relationship that was entirely instrumental (and which he had no objection to) namely slavery. The institution of slavery may not be as central to our culture as it was to ancient Greece, but I am not certain that the exalted value of friendship can be understood independently of relations of subordination and domination, power and its opposite.
This is not to suggest that we should not make friends, of course. Tiberius is right to emphasise their many values. But it does suggest that, as we attempt to build machines that replicate human beings, we are going to have to face up to some deeply unpleasant truths about ourselves – truths that no amount of “alignment” is likely to eliminate.
Charles Barbour does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
