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?