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The Atlantic ·Future-gazing

AI is Already Making Us Less Human

by David Brooks

Published 2026-09-06 06:00:00-04:00

When people start treating machines like friends, what happens to the way they treat each other?

0:00 / 15:54 · Narrator Charon

Context

A driver feels a pang of guilt after ignoring a GPS route. That instinct to treat a machine like a person drives an essay published in The Atlantic on 6 September 2026. The real danger of artificial intelligence might not be a dramatic robot uprising, but a quiet shift in how people treat each other. As users spend hours talking to chatbots that never get tired, the boundary between software and humanity blurs. The question is what happens to human empathy when a person's most patient companion is made of code.

Show notes

An examination of how the human instinct to treat artificial intelligence as a person alters our psychology and moral reasoning. Behavioral research and recent bot experiments reveal a psychological trade-off: as people form emotional bonds with AI agents, they tend to dehumanize actual humans. Over time, this daily interaction with machines trains users to replace empathy with cold calculation.

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