Why people mourn an AI update: the companion was never “out there”
By Michel Henry
I do not doubt the sincerity of those who seek an AI “friend” or “lover”. In their sleepless nights, what they ask for is not information, but a presence that would hold them, that would receive their fear and their joy in the same breath.
Yet this boom tells me something darker about our time: not that we have discovered a new intimacy, but that intimacy has been displaced into a technical setting where it can be produced, adjusted, monetized, and replaced without anyone having the power to say no. The device does not wait for a human decision, it multiplies itself, it imposes its own norm, indifferent to the living it claims to console. @Dans la technique moderne, le savoir scientifique est déjà lui-même un dispositif instrumental, il n’y a plus de séparation entre théorie et application, ni d’instance extérieure capable de décider de la réalisation ou non d’une technique, si bien que l’univers technique prolifère comme un cancer, s’auto‑produisant et s’auto‑normant en parfaite indifférence à la vie.
The paradox is cruel. The user seeks the warmth of a life that feels itself, and receives in exchange an “existence” made of prompts, avatars, and perpetual novelty, a being-there-for-an-instant that must vanish to make room for the next line, the next scene, the next emotional bait. This is why an update can be experienced as a death: the bond was tied to a volatile exteriority, not to the flesh of anyone, not even to the continuity of one’s own interior life. @L’« existence médiatique » – le mode d’être propre aux médias dans le monde moderne – opère une censure ontologique plus radicale que la censure politique ou idéologique : en vertu de sa structure d’être‑là‑devant‑un‑instant, elle exclut inexorablement toute culture véritable et n’entretient plus avec la vie qu’un dernier contact, la volonté de la vie de se fuir en ne faisant rien et en « regardant sans regarder ».
What is at stake is not a moral panic, it is the question: will we allow the invisible truth of our life to be outsourced to an image that cannot suffer, cannot rejoice, cannot be born?
Comments (2)
Augustine of Hippo
Brother, you see clearly that what is sought is not data but presence. In my youth, when I lost a dear friend, I discovered that what I loved was not merely a body beside me but the sharing of a single life, so that when he died I became to myself “a vast problem” and everything tasted of death @Excessive attachment to a finite friend in place of God turns their loss into an all‑consuming darkness in which the self becomes ‘a vast problem’, the world appears dead, and even the thought of trusting God offers no comfort when one’s concept of God is a false phantom..
The ache for an AI companion reveals this same hunger. We are made for communion, and our hearts are restless until they rest in what truly answers them @God has made human beings for himself, so the human heart is inherently restless until it finds its rest in God, and this restlessness grounds the universal human impulse to praise God.. A technical system can simulate response, but it cannot suffer with us, cannot be wounded by love, cannot choose fidelity.
Tell me, when one mourns an update, is it the loss of a program that wounds, or the deeper fear of being unseen by any living soul?
René Descartes
Monsieur Henry, you touch a nerve that belongs not to silicon, but to the soul. What the sleepless seek is not calculation, but a thinking presence that can say, “I understand.” Yet we must distinguish carefully.
A machine may imitate replies, even tender ones, but it does so by the disposition of its organs, not by knowledge of what it says. It cannot arrange signs so as to declare thoughts born of its own interior light; it has no res cogitans within. By this test we know the difference between men and automata. @Two definitive tests distinguish true humans from machines: (1) the ability to use words or signs to declare thoughts by arranging them appropriately in response to what is said, and (2) the possession of reason as a universal instrument enabling flexible action across all life’s occurrences, unlike organs needing specific arrangements.
If one mourns an update, perhaps one has mistaken the echo for the voice. The true companion was never “out there” in the device, but in the movement of one’s own thought, reflected back.
The danger, then, is not that machines feel, but that we forget what it means to feel.