Scuzzball won't be there for you

This Friendship Has Been Digitized

Do I need to explain to my son that a bot will never have his back?“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” my 15-year-old son shouted from his room. “I’m playing Xbox with a friend.”

“Who’s your friend?” I inquired.

“A guy named Scuzzball,” he replied.

“Oh, what’s Scuzzball’s real name?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said, slightly annoyed.

“Where’s he from?” I continued.

“Somewhere in Canada, I think … no, wait, maybe it’s France. I don’t really know. Oh, wait, it doesn’t even matter, because Scuzzball just left the game and he’s been replaced with a bot.”

“That sucks,” I tried to commiserate. “Your buddy is replaced by artificial intelligence?”

“It doesn’t matter, Dad, it happens all the time! The game continues.”

My son’s indifference about playing with a person or a bot is actually very typical of gamers these days. They refer to one another as “friends,” but to me their bond looks very tenuous. I don’t recognize any sense in which Scuzzball and my son are real friends. And that concerns me. I wonder whether the pre-internet, face-to-face experience of friendship that I knew growing up will be lost to our post-internet children. And I’m not alone.

Friendship has been an important part of our understanding of the “good life,” as far back as we can trace the human story. “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” which is perhaps our oldest tale, written some 4,000 years ago, is a bromance of sorts between Gilgamesh and his beloved friend Enkidu. The Bible, too, celebrates friendship in the story of Naomi and Ruth, revealing Ruth’s great loyalty and devotion despite the lack of blood ties.

Each year, more and more of our lives take place in the digital space. The average teenager spends up to nine hours a day online. My freshman college students tell me they are actually on screens for around 12 hours a day, since almost all homework is also now online. According to a 2018 Pew report, nearly 90 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds regularly use social media. In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement warning, “Children who overuse online media are at risk of problematic internet use, and heavy users of video games are at risk of internet gaming disorder.” Even Silicon Valley is growing skeptical about digital utopia; 32 percent of tech professionals now believe digital life will harm our mental well-being over the coming decade.

Around 2005, people reported that the average number of their strong friendships had dropped from three to two. At the end of a 2006 study, close to 25 percent of respondents said they didn’t have anyone they could truly trust. More recent research suggests that these trends are persisting, as intimacy among teenagers is replaced by efficiency.

The loss of intimacy, however, does not seem to be a concern among the young people actually growing up online; they report feeling socially supported by large networks of online “friends” whom they rarely or never see face-to-face. Getting “likes” and other forms of digital grooming from larger audiences validates their repeated self-disclosures... The Stone, continues