The List #67: What are Friends For?
No, really.
It’s funny how new tech makes all the old questions urgent again. AI chatbots have rendered a lot of modern teaching methods basically useless, so many teachers are returning to the ancient and medieval practices of memorization, handwritten essays, and in-person viva voce exams. The prospect of outsourcing menial labor to chatbots has raised the issue of what to do with all our newfound leisure, which is basically the age-old issue of which things are good to do for their own sake—the starting point of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For a while these seemed like faculty lounge preoccupations. Now they seem like existential necessities.
Friendship is one of them. People—men especially—are lonely. This was true before the smartphone, as the sociologist Robert Putnam documented at the turn of the millennium in his chronicle of modern alienation, Bowling Alone. Our English word “friend” covers a bewildering array of relationships, from profound intimacy to superficial acquaintance. But social media turbo-charged the problem by confusing “friendship” with a shallow transaction involving clicks and likes. Now Mark Zuckerberg, the man who deserves a lot of the blame for this mess, proposes to fix it by replacing real-life friends with AI simulations.
I wrote this week in The Washington Examiner about what’s so wrong with that idea. But if texting with a Large Language Model is the wrong way to do friendship, what’s the right way? Another ancient question. There’s one short, lovely book that lays out some big, beautiful answers. It demonstrates the best thing about ancient philosophy, which is that it contains practical guidance about things that actually matter.
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