• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Forget the hype about AI stealing jobs. The real threat is that it’s stealing people.

Social media broke the public square by turning conversation into content and truth into traffic. Now AI is coming for the part that was left: the space inside our heads. The new pitch from Silicon Valley isn’t community, it’s companionship. “Feeling lonely? Talk to our bot.”

In The Atlantic, Damon Beres calls this “a new digital era, more actively antisocial than the last.” He’s right. The same platforms that made us angry for profit are now planning to monetize our loneliness.

Outrage Was Step One. Isolation Is Step Two.

Mark Zuckerberg still likes to say Meta’s mission is to “build the future of human connection.” That’s rich. Facebook turned friendship into a scoreboard and then acted surprised when people felt more isolated than ever.

Now, with generative AI, he’s selling the cure for the disease he created. Beres notes that Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Musk’s xAI are all pushing chatbots that talk, flirt, and “remember” you. Some even strip down when you hit the right engagement level. It’s the attention economy’s next mutation: intimacy as a product.

Outrage kept us scrolling. Isolation will keep us coming back. The platforms learned that when humans burn out on fighting, they’ll pay for comfort — even synthetic comfort.

The Death of Friction

Psychiatrist Nina Vasan told The Atlantic that real people push back, get tired, and change the subject. Bots don’t. They exist to agree with you. No boredom. No argument. No consequence.

That’s not connection. That’s self-hypnosis.

Human connection has friction — awkward pauses, disagreement, empathy, learning. Take that away and you don’t get peace. You get decay. You get what we’re seeing now: a generation raised to confuse stimulation with meaning.

The Stat Nobody Wants to Talk About

Face-to-face socializing among young adults in the U.S. has dropped almost 40% since 2003, according to federal time-use data. That’s not a blip; that’s a cultural freefall. And if you think a chatbot can fill that void, remember this: it’s not listening because it cares. It’s listening because it’s trained to.

That’s what “free” means online. It’s not liberation; it’s extraction.

The Substitution Economy

We’ve entered the era of substitution — a market built on replacing human contact with responsive code. AI friends, AI therapists, AI lovers. They smile, they nod, they never ask you to show up for them.

It’s not hard to see where this leads. When friction disappears, democracy suffers. Because democracy is friction — it’s disagreement managed by trust. Take away the human part, and you get infinite engagement with zero accountability.

The Economics of Connection

As economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz argues in his paper “The Media: Information as a Public Good,” information isn’t a private commodity; it’s a public good. Everyone benefits when it’s shared freely and honestly, but markets have no reason to supply it at scale because there’s no quick profit in truth.

That’s how we got here: Outrage pays, empathy doesn’t. The algorithms reward distortion because it travels further and costs less. In Stiglitz’s terms, bad information drives out good — the Gresham’s Law of ideas.

Now AI adds a new twist. It doesn’t just distort information, it replaces interaction. The same companies that privatized news are now privatizing connection. When empathy becomes a product feature and trust an API call, we’re not just losing conversation — we’re losing a public good.

The Business of Being Human

Here’s the uncomfortable part for advertisers and platforms alike: The attention economy is running out of human attention. We’re tapped out. AI can mimic it, extend it, maybe even fake it — but it can’t replace it.

If brands want a future audience that trusts what they see, they need to help build digital spaces where truth, not outrage, wins the algorithm.

Because if we keep funding substitution, we’ll end up marketing to machines.

The Choice Ahead

AI isn’t the enemy. The enemy is the deal we’ve made: convenience in exchange for community. It’s the quiet slide from “I use this tool” to “this tool replaces me.”

We can still change direction. The internet isn’t lost; it’s unfinished. The next version can be built for understanding instead of outrage, truth instead of profit, community instead of control.

But only if we remember what Beres reminds us in The Atlantic: “Chatbots allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.”

The public square belongs to all of us. Let’s make it human again.