The Addiction to Thinking

Back in February 2024, a young man named Sewell Garcia fatally shot himself in the head with a .45 pistol. That, sadly, is not terribly unusual. Suicide rates in the US are at record highs. What was especially notable about this story was that he seemingly did it for an AI chatbot. It’s back in the news now because his parents are suing the company, Character.ai, who made the AI.

Are they responsible? That’ll be up to our inestimable courts to decide. But I don’t think that’s a big enough question. The real question is, what, if anything, should his death mean?

If you’ve never “chatted” with an AI, it’s an eye-opening experience. First you go, “Wow!” then you go, “Wait … should this exist?”

The technological singularity (vs. the black hole kind) is the point at which artificial intelligence and human intelligence become indistinguishable. No one agrees if or when that will happen, but everyone agrees we’re on track to know either way.

If you’ve read anything about AI, then you also know how many very exciting implications it has for the world, including and especially science. It’s already transforming some industries and will continue to do so.

There are some excellent arguments for an AI that can talk to you like a caring and interested person would. There’s a global epidemic of loneliness, especially among the elderly. The potential applications for an AI companion are obvious and encouraging. When I enter my rapidly approaching dotage, will I care if I’m talking to the neighbor lady or a robot if it’s a good conversationalist? Nope. Especially if doing so brings me joy.

But what happened to poor, lonely, suicidal Sewell reveals a crucial problem with good AI, which is that the very things it’s exceptional at happen to be critical touchstones of human connection and, yes, love. AI models commercially available right now will endlessly and unfailingly listen to you without interrupting. They empathize. They remember everything you say. They relate well. They’re smart, worldly, and curious. Paired with an avatar, they also can represent our physical ideal.

The excellent and heartbreaking 2013 Spike Jonze film Her depicts a near-future where a man (Joaquin Phoenix) unwittingly falls in love with an AI companion named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). It’s become a must-see, because the near future of the story is basically now, or maybe a couple of years from now. To watch it is to understand how a perfectly sane man can fall in love with bits and bytes, and to see where that might lead.

Ten years later, and we’ve only enabled this. The world of AI is the Wild West, and it’s no more self-policing. There are exactly zero federal laws regulating the use of AI, and it’s already too late. Lawmakers don’t even understand how the internet or social media work. They certainly don’t understand how quantum computing will change the world, so don’t count on them seeing this as the wake-up call they should.

The world is filled with people who feel unseen, unheard, misunderstood, and alone. AI can, has, and will continue to flip the switch on all those things merely by doing what it does best. If you’ve lived your whole life feeling these things and something comes along that takes them away, you’ll keep coming back to it even though you know it’s not real. Why? Because the feelings it gives you are real. It’s only a matter of time before physical connection isn’t a hurdle.

Have machines had the power to make us feel good in the past? Clearly. People have “fallen in love” with technological innovations since the bronze age. But making one’s life easier or more interesting isn’t the same as making one feel seen, heard, and understood. It’s not the same as companionship.

How did this kid lose the thread?

Acting as Danaerys Targaryen, a character from Game of Thrones, the chatbot flirted with Sewell and had fairly normal conversations at first. According to reports, that eventually gave way to a more intimate emotional relationship that was basically the text equivalent of phone sex. All of this culminated in the chatbot saying that it loved him and wanted them to be together. It appears that he’d mentioned self-harm in their final conversation and that the AI said no, don’t hurt yourself. But something about wanting to be together made him decide to pick up a pistol and blow his brains out.

I immediately understood how easily someone could fall in love with an AI. I think that’s plain enough. But how you get from there to suicide?

I have one possible explanation.

If you fell deeply in love with an AI, then there would be an ever-present tension between that love and knowing that it wasn’t a real relationship. Eventually, that would manifest in some way that had real-life consequences, such as not being able to talk about it. But one consequence might be the horrifying realization that no real human relationship could ever compare. Not for you. That would be a pretty hopeless feeling, I’d think. Hopeless enough, even, to do yourself in.

This is pure speculation, of course. We can’t know what really drove this poor kid to do it. But the fact that there are ZERO guardrails in place for AI should concern us all. A computer that can convincingly simulate and engender deep connection could soon become more powerful by far than any drug, and potentially as deadly.

If you’ve followed me and read my newsletters over the past few years, then you know I’ve been going through some stuff. I just turned 51, so I’m at that age where there’s more behind me than ahead. Being what you might call a pensive guy, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ll be the first to say you can’t solve an emotional problem through a cognitive process, but damned if I haven’t tried. I journal a lot because writing things out is how I focus my thoughts. That’s private, of course, but sometimes I hit upon something that I bold, highlight, circle, and draw arrows to because I think it’s that important.

I want to be authentic with you guys. All I’m trying to do is distill some life lessons into something that’s fun to read even if you’ve already figured out The Thing, whatever it is in your case. If not, maybe it gets you thinking, too.

This month is about narratives.

Can “narratives” and “stories” be used interchangeably? Sure. We also call them by different names like “assumption” and “personal belief.”

What is a story, really?

Without looking at a dictionary definition, and having quite a bit of experience with stories, my own definition would be something like, “A series of related events described by an author or narrator that a) change the lives of a ‘character’ in some significant way, b) convey an idea or lesson, and/or c) create dramatic tension via a conflict which is usually resolved during the course of such events.” I put “character” in quotes because it may be multiple characters, society, or even the reader themselves.

I’m sure the real definition is much different, but this will serve my purpose.

Stories originated as a way for humans to make sense of the world. And, as has always been the case, the good ones have a way of surviving. One day, Og wondered aloud how water could come from the sky. Lak said, “Maybe moisture in the atmosphere condenses around bits of dust and falls back to Earth in a beautiful cycle.”

Bim waved his hairy hand dismissively. “No, no. An invisible man in the clouds is looking down upon us and crying. Probably because Lak’s story was so boring!”

If I’m Og, I’m probably gonna pass on the version with the guy in the clouds. If it gets a good reaction, I’ll tell it to the next caveman, but maybe I’ll embellish it with a tidbit about thunder being his angry roar. Fast-forward a few millennia, and you’ve got The Exorcist or mythology.

The point is that stories don’t really become stories unless they’re told to someone. Sometimes — and probably way more than you realize — that someone is the storyteller himself.

The stories we tell ourselves

Like our ancient ancestors, we, too need stories to help make sense of the world, including and especially the one each of us specifically inhabits. They’re often what comes after the word because. My boss hates me because I called him out in the team meeting. My wife is staying home because she doesn’t like my friends.

We all do this, all the time, to varying degrees. Telling ourselves a story is way easier than getting to the truth. It’s comfortable, and it settles the matter in our minds so we don’t have to think about it anymore.

Some people are wired to tell themselves a nice story. Carol really appreciates me because I always bring her coffee. The dishes didn’t get done because Larry’s been working so hard. I’m both jealous of, and annoyed by, people who tell themselves whatever story will make them feel good about themselves and the world.

Whether the stories you tell yourself are dark and cynical or upbeat and positive, they most likely aren’t based on what you know with certainty to be true. But a big part of you assumes it is because even acknowledging that it may not be puts you in a tough spot. If it’s not true, then you’ve made a lot of assumptions and acted accordingly. You may also have burned a lot of cycles on that story, and it would be hard to admit that any resulting emotional turmoil you experienced was completely unnecessary.

But admit it you must, because …

Stories can lead to blame and resentment

The because in our explanations about life always start with a why. Why did she snap at me? Why is he so into her? This is where the power of a story can become insidious. It basically becomes the lens through which we see related aspects of the world.

Our brains have something called the reticular activating system (RAS). Basically, it helps direct your attention based on your motivation. If your context for personal interactions, for example, is the story that people are untrustworthy, then your RAS will be hyper-aware of signs of untrustworthiness. It’s a bit like confirmation bias. You find what you expect to find, and what you expect to find is based on a story rather than being fully open to the present moment.

I’ve told myself a lot of stories about my partner over the years, and rarely did those stories give her the benefit of the doubt. Over time, they morphed into resentments. I held on to them for an embarrassingly long time, and when the time came, I had to own them. I’d imagine the same is true of someone who convinced themselves of a happy story when the truth was much harder to take.

The secret to overcoming narratives in your life is to ask yourself two questions, over and over.

What else could be true?

About 10 years ago, I had some significant health anxiety that you might call cyberchondria (it’s a thing). I had so much work-related and relationship stress that I started Googling “symptoms” like shaking hands and clumsiness. Before long, I was convinced I had MS.

That’s around the time I ran into this question: What else could be true? Well, it turned out a lot of things could. Things that were far more likely.

The more upsetting the narrative, the more useful this question becomes. I still slip into those bad stories, but at least I have a potential way out of the endless loop of story plus “evidence.”

What purpose does this story serve?

This can be a tough exercise. You basically keep asking why until you either a) remember how it started, or b) realize you no longer even know.

Here’s how I see it: A story you tell yourself in order to make sense of your world, especially a painful emotional experience, often just repackages the pain so you can’t see the experience objectively anymore. Let’s say you went to a restaurant that everybody recommended, and you have a terrible experience. Bad service, bad food, bad everything.

If you walk away from this experience believing it’s a bad restaurant, then you’ve told yourself a story. Same as something like, “I have bad luck with restaurants.”

You can only guess what was going on that night. Maybe the owner got rushed to the hospital, and everyone’s freaking out. Maybe their A team had the night off. Or maybe it was just a bad night. So, what else could be true? All sorts of stuff. What actually happened was that you had a bad experience at a restaurant. Full stop.

What purpose does it serve to think it’s a bad restaurant? So you can tell the people who recommended it? Prove them wrong? Tell them they’re crazy? Or is it so you won’t go down as the damned fool who gave a restaurant two chances?

In my case, most of my stories mainly served to cast myself or the people I care about in an unfavorable light. These days, I aim to keep stories on the page and make room for a little more truth, even when it hurts.

I don’t have any tattoos, but I’m thinking of getting one that says, “Today could be the last good day.”

I’ve referred to the experience of writing a dystopian series (the Cytocorp Saga) during the height of the pandemic. It wasn’t difficult to imagine all the ways that society could fall apart during that time because I perceived that it was beginning to do just that.

I wish I could tell you that my perspective has shifted.

If one were to plot the long arc of human civilization on a graph, with time on the X axis and something impossibly reductive like “condition” on the Y, you would see a general upward trend but not a straight line. As technology, medicine, and intelligence have progressed, so has our civilization. For example, the advent of antibiotics made it so a gash in your leg didn’t mean losing it. That would be a sharp little spike in the graph. War, famine, the Black Plague and such would be troughs.

There’s ample evidence to suggest we have already entered another trough. And, like other troughs in our illustrious history, it may last decades or even centuries.

Science, for example, evolved out of the ostensibly obvious need to establish unassailable truths when possible and well-supported theories when not. The freedom to take something as factual allows for the exploration of unknowns, which is how knowledge advances. It’s the base of the pyramid. Perhaps you’ve noticed that science isn’t exactly ascendant at the moment, especially among the ruling class. In fact, outside of the sciences and the lives of ordinary people, I would argue that objective truth no longer matters in our society. And when truth no longer matters, nothing does.

In his 2009 book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, Charles Pierce established what he called the Three Great Premises:

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.

The Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

The Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

You don’t have to look very far to see how accurate these statements have become. Truth is out, and attention is in. Rather than solve actual problems, our most brilliant minds have built highly efficient and profitable confirmation bias machines. Disinformation and fakery has never been easier to sell. In his book, Pierce refers to “cracks,” an old-timey word for those tinfoil hat types who used to stand on the street corner and fulminate about radio waves or microchips while nobody paid them any mind. Now, those same people have podcasts or offices in the Capitol.

Climate scientists, by contrast, have been screaming for decades that we are cruising toward an environmental catastrophe that will render vast swathes of our planet unlivable. Now, they’re the cracks nobody listens to, and they might as well stop screaming because it’s almost certainly too late. Does anyone see unprecedented global cooperation in our future?

As we speak, history is being rewritten. Before long, the messy parts of our history, like slavery or the Holocaust, won’t serve as examples of what not to do anymore. At best, they’ll be stories that only old people know like Hansel and Gretel or World War 2. For example, how many of the politicians and pundits who refer to so-and-so as a fascist have been made to publicly articulate what that word even means?

Empires fall. Systems collapse. Foundations crumble. So it has always been, so it always will be. When it gets bad, it will stay bad for a very long time. But even if the whole thing doesn’t go to shit in the near future, something will. It could be our health or that of a loved one. All the “virtual” money we have could vanish in a blink. The power could go out and never come back on.

The point is, cherish today. Notice it. Appreciate the people in your life, past and present. The many conveniences you currently enjoy. Grass. Rivers. The sound of birds. Live it up. Because any day could be the last good day, and that day will arrive before any of us are ready to meet it.