A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. She had no job, no education and no support in times of sickness and distress. Nobody would loan her money or defend her if she got into trouble. There were no policemen, no social workers and no compulsory education. In order to survive, such a person quickly had to find an alternative family or community. Boys and girls who ran away from home could expect, at best, to become servants in some new family. At worst, there was the army or the brothel.
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Today, the role of family and community in providing security, support, education or health has drastically diminished. Instead governments and markets now fulfill many of these needs. Consider education (public schools and private schools), healthcare (hospitals, Insurance markets, pharmaceutical lobbies), security (police and army), financial support (pensions, govt benefits, minority reservations) and almost all other aspects of life you can think of. If you go back a few hundred years, communities and extended family fulfilled all these needs while nations held very little influence over their daily lives. Today you can get all your needs individually without support from a community. This is more true in the western societies than in the eastern societies, and certainly in cities than in villages.
There is one aspect of our lives that a nation or market couldn’t get their hand on yet — Intimacy. The affection from parents or relatives, the feeling of belonging from a community, the intimacy of a partner, all these still stays in the realm of family and communities. Humans fundamentally need these because that is how evolution wired us, to stick together. The nations or markets couldn’t even think of providing these, until now.
Is this about to change? Today, we hear news about youngsters turning to AI for emotional support. While intimacy or emotional support from AI might currently seem like a futuristic fantasy especially for older generations, the trend from younger generations is definitely telling us otherwise. If AI becomes genuinely capable of providing empathy and emotional bonds, I don’t see any reason why youngsters or anyone wouldn’t embrace it. Could this be the final blow to the already weakened concept of community?
Nations and corporations are heavily invested in AI. Whether “controlling AGI” is possible or not is still debatable, but AI is something that is definitely going to be controlled by nations and corporations for the near future. It is evident from the recent events like US withholding chips from China, European union drafting AI regulations and nations and companies pouring billions into AI research.
So when these two conditions are met — nations and markets controlling AI, and AI becoming capable of providing intimacy — what would the role of community be? What fundamental human need will a community or family fulfil that governments and corporations cannot? And more importantly, what will be the consequence of the decline of communities and families?
I can only speculate. Could this cost humanity its freedom, reducing us to mere slaves of nations and corporations? Would it cause a population collapse, where people no more have any incentive for building families and raising kids? One day, we may wake up to find that we no longer need each other — and that would be the loneliest future imaginable. Whether this transformation will be a blessing or a curse remains to be seen.
