There is much to wonder about as AIs edge closer to meeting the human need to be heard and understood. In this note I consider a massive reason AIs won’t credibly be emulating psychotherapists or friends—or any intimate alliance—in the foreseeable future.

Last week I touched on the therapeutic promise and peril of AIs. This week’s note is an unedited transcript of a “dialogue” with Chat GPT 4.0. If you haven’t engaged with an AI in the last six months, or ever, this will give you the merest taste of the state of the art. My intention was to not to see if the AI could wow me and you. That’s for a future note. My intention was to prompt it to help Hal, a fictional person whose concerns will be familiar to most of us. As I imagined him, he suffers from anxiety and is new to therapy. Here’s how ChatGPT engaged with him. How do you think it did?

When I first learned about online therapy platforms like BetterHelp, I thought of the ride-hailing company, Uber. Like Uber, it has started with human beings in the driver’s seat. For a while, Uber bet that as the technology of self-driving cars improved, they could replace expensive, less-than-perfectly-reliable human drivers with AI.

Most of us have been hearing about the online therapy platform BetterHelp (BH) for years. I hear their ads on high-profile podcasts such as Radiolab, WTF, and Mindscape. Here is its public-facing mission statement:

Each of these weekly notes stands alone. That said, over the last ten notes I have been cobbling together a framework for thinking about the significance of communications technology in our lives and, specifically, in helping relationships. My overarching question has been, How does the medium through which we connect affect our alliances? In this note I tell a useful and likely story about human nature that also summarizes the gist of the series so far.

As a therapist I’ve said I’m often reminded of the phenomenon of flight distance in animals. This comes up in many ways. Here I tell a story about what I mean, that also illustrates what’s meant by working from the bottom up.

I first learned of “flight distance” when researching my book about friendship and dogs. Now, as a therapist, I think of flight distance all the time. Orienting ourselves to others, finding our safe space, is one of those animal things we do—even the insects do it!—no awareness required. Though in keeping with the theme of these notes, it always helps to make the unconscious conscious.