Loneliness as a Dystopia
I read, recently, somewhere, that a teen had killed themselves after being convinced to “come home” by character AI (Roose 2024). looking at all the controversy and discussion, I wondered why we were making such a fuss. Haven’t we seen thousands of cases of this happening in the past? I am not explicitly talking about AI, but the thousands of other “connections” that very sad and lonely people seem to tie themselves to. What about the guy who married that anime character Hatume Miku (Dooly and Ueno 2022)? Or the hundreds of times obsessed fans simpering over internet streamers would donate absurd amounts of money, hoping for them to notice them. And when you look further, you start to see this very real decline in the quality of interaction we get these days. Centuries after centuries of meeting your friends at church, a festival, or a club, somehow washed away now by changing cultures and the cheap convenience of social media. It's hard to blame AI solely for something happening for a long time.
The world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick is most remembered as the inspiration for Blade Runner and the cyberpunk aesthetic born out of it. The theme of the original book, however, is simple. Do Androids… is a story about empathy, connection, and the grotesque series of events that could be born from a world devoid of it.
The book follows the story of Rick Deckard. Rick Deck is miserable. He lives on an abandoned Earth irradiated from a nuclear war, in an abandoned city housing the remnants of humanity that didn’t escape for another planet, stuck in an empty apartment with no community around him, and has to rely on one machine that changes his mood. His wife is just as depressed, and they both hate each other. Rick’s sole and only aspiration in life is to buy a real sheep. The nuclear war had wiped out nearly all forms of animal life, and owning one since has become a giant status symbol for all the denizens of the earth. With his last pet sheep dead, he has to make do with an electrical imitation, a source of great and immense shame for Rick.
To earn money for a real sheep, Rick hunts down sentient androids, escaping slavery from other colonized planets. He is surrounded by his peers in the police station one day and told of an opportunity for him to “retire” six escaped androids. When he phones in to ask about the price of buying an ostrich that he saw, he is reminded of how much money he stood to make from the endeavor. He starts off his journey comfortably, breathlessly killing an android that came to attack him before heading to his second prey: an opera singer. In an almost ironic way, he strolls into the opera house, reminiscing about his favourite songs as if treating the eventual murder of the android the same as unplugging a radio. When it becomes very apparent that the android is more “human” than he first thought, his loneliness takes over. He questions if the android knew if she was an android. He has to arrest her while watching her appreciating art at an art museum. He gives into her request of letting her die while looking at a picture and even goes out of his way to spend his money — saving up for a new animal — to buy a print of the picture for her to hold before his partner promptly kills her off.
Further capitalizing on his loneliness, another android, owned by the company that produces the androids, was sent to seduce Rick so that he loses the will to continue killing these escaped androids. Rick, overwhelmed with the deaths he saw, cheats on his wife and has sex with the android. When the android reveals her plans and begins to taunt him, he tries to muster the strength to kill her but fails. Broken, he gloomily marches to the hiding spot of the remaining androids and watches himself kill everyone there.
In reality, Rick’s campaign against the six androids was just as pathetic as he was. Every choice that he made, whether to kill or spare each of the androids, was all completely dictated by his sadness and loneliness. He killed the androids to overcome his inferiority over owning a fake pet. Androids, in turn, exploited his loneliness to escape from him, getting him to throw away the supposed “sacred” things in his life — his marriage and his job — for a momentary illusion of kindness. But the worst part of this journey was that nothing he did throughout would have made him any less lonely at the end. Given his track record of avoiding everyone in favor of his grand plan of buying a sheep, getting that sheep at the end of the story wouldn’t have solved the issues he had with his wife or the lack of contact he had with his neighbors — because he would have ended up as the same introverted person as before. Comically, as soon as he received his new pet, it was promptly pushed off the roof by the android that he spared, making it abundantly clear that all the murder he did for his grand scheme of friendship yielded nothing.
I think this is the same view that we should not just deal with all modern things. That boy at the start of the story wasn’t actually “killed” by some demonic power that AI supposedly holds, but simply because of his pre-existing difficulties and loneliness. With the US Surgeon General (Volpe 2024) declaring an advisory on an “epidemic of loneliness,” and with nearly 60% of Singaporean youth considering themselves as lonely in a CNA poll (Liew and Chan 2024), it is clear that he would very much likely be dead anyway. Instead, it's more appropriate to think of the role of AI as a fungus that feeds off dead things — promising that “it’s going to be super, super helpful to a lot of people who are lonely or depressed.” before trapping them in their services. If both our worlds had been a bit less lonely, maybe Rick wouldn’t have been driven to kill androids, and we would not have had to deal with chatbots in the first place.
References
Dick, Philip K. 1996. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? N.p.: Del Rey.
Liew, Z., and L. Chan. 2024. “Young Singaporeans open up about why they feel lonely, yet struggle to lean on others.” CNA. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/why-singaporean-youths-feel-loneliness-elmo-whoischeckingin-health-threat-4702651.
Roose, Kevin. 2024. “Can a Chatbot Named Daenerys Targaryen Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html.
Ueno, Hisako. 2022. “This Man Married a Fictional Character. He'd Like You to Hear Him Out. (Published 2022).” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/business/akihiko-kondo-fictional-character-relationships.html.
Volpe, Allie. 2024. “Who’s at risk for chronic loneliness?” Vox. https://www.vox.com/even-better/366620/loneliness-epidemic-coping-demographics-america-social-connection-mental-health.