AI degrades human existence and creates existential resentment.

Third, business wants to expand deeper into traditional human activities. It has already done so by systematizing activities that laypeople once engaged in naturally—for example, friendship, matchmaking, advising, loving, and caring. Business turned these activities into fields of study, then employed credentialed providers to perform these activities as a paid “service.” Business also systematized and rationalized these services directly through computers—for example, Internet dating sites. AI robots are the next step. Not only do they eliminate the cost of the human service providers, but also the variations inherent in those providers, thereby saving money. Yet such robots must appear human enough for customers to feel comfortable engaging. By giving robots rights, along with arms, legs, faces, and speech, business makes the fiction more compelling.

People will gradually start to look upon these advanced AI robot service providers, which will be ubiquitous, as perfect beings existing on the same moral plane as humans. That robots are lumps of passive metal incapable of causation will be long forgotten. The robots will be said to “work” with humans, “advise” them, and “befriend” them. At the same time they will be programmed to exist beyond ambition, aspiration, and selfish hopes and desires. They will be perfect “humans.”

Such matchless behavior risks instilling in people feelings of guilt and self-loathing. Marx and Nietzsche described how utopian ideals rotted people from the inside by giving them a “bad conscience” when those ideals could not be realized. Marx called the ideal of heavenly perfection “alienation.” Nietzsche called the ideal of the perfectly altruistic society “nihilism.” Whole societies collapsed in the violence these ideals promoted through people’s worship of them, and in the wallowing of self-doubt and confusion they prompted when people fell short of them.

Unlike utopian ideals, perfectly virtuous robots will be very real. People will live among these ideal creatures who speak only positive, uplifting words according to their programming, who do not lie, cheat, or steal, and who feel no temptation to do so. Perfection can be a terrible thing to gaze upon, almost maddening. Although we praise virtue at a distance, no human being is equipped to be perfectly virtuous, just as no human being is equipped to be eternally happy.

To look upon such perfection will provoke feelings of resentment and inadequacy, as it always has. The feelings may seem harmless at first, the way the same feelings generated by hours spent on social media were also thought to be harmless. The latter ended up creating a , as people compare their lives with the perfect lives they watch on screen, grow anxious and depressed, and sometimes lash out violently. Virtuous AI robots will become one more example of perfection to be rubbed in people’s faces.

If robots were viewed as passive metal, no psychological reaction would occur. But they will not be viewed as such. Through a steady stream of misinterpretation people will view them as competitors who are virtuous in the worst sense of the word.

Bad Advice

AI’s assault on consciousness involves more than just demoralizing people. Sometimes the opposite occurs.

Take, for example, a  that advises management executives. In one case, an executive confessed to Amanda that she doubted her ability to review a colleague’s performance. Amanda slotted the executive into the category of highly conscientious workers and then told her not to be so hard on herself. Sometimes Amanda couples her advice with expressions of praise, such as “I’m so proud of you.” On a larger scale, AI collates information drawn from company data and employee-survey responses to advise the company on how to boost morale. For example, it encourages managers to be less secretive in their decision-making process, while also reminding employees that managers have good intentions.

All this is based on a delusion. The AI therapy app is not a mind. It cannot emote. It cannot feel the warmth behind its praise or the sense of urgency behind its criticism. It is passive. When listening to an AI app, the client’s mind is the only active entity in the room. To the degree that it is through speech that we exchange thoughts and experiences with one another, Amanda’s “advice” does not even qualify as speech, as there is no mind behind it. The app simply elicits sounds.

These sounds, which AI designers mistakenly call “advice,” are just an effect in a series of machine effects that come in ordered sequence. Each effect represents a sign of the effect to follow. There is no “cause.” People project onto the final effect—Amanda’s sounds—the causal impulses that stir within them. They call Amanda’s sounds “coaching” or “advising” to enliven the computer’s activities and win people’s sympathies. It is similar to the way poets impart action to water and wind. Poets speak metaphorically to project by an effort of empathy their energy into passive things. They say water “smashes” and wind “sweeps.” These words wrongly imply that water and wind “cause” things; they do not, because they are passive and lack agency. In the same vein, Amanda does not “coach” or “advise.” Its activity is passivity in disguise.

Sometimes these AI sounds are useful, yet their interpretation comes with risk, which is always the case when people confuse sounds coming from an object with advice coming from a mind. Taking advice from a murmuring brook or a whispering cave is another example of risky counsel.

Sometimes the sounds encourage people; sometimes they discourage people. In either case it is all based on a delusion. Amanda the machine “tells” a client it is proud of him, but perhaps Amanda should not be proud of him, and would not be proud of him if it knew him, if it knew his mind the way only a mind can know another mind, if it knew his deeper motivations. Maybe a real mind would have scolded him rather than praised him. Instead, the client hears Amanda’s sounds, which come in the linguistic form of praise that people use in speech. The client is emboldened to carry out a plan that may be nefarious.

Take another scenario: Amanda’s sounds convince employees that their managers have good intentions, when, in fact, their managers have bad intentions. A revolt is in order. But only another mind can detect all this. Amanda cannot. Amanda is merely an ordered scene of passive realities moved by an agency not its own. The employees hear Amanda’s sounds and are wrongly tranquilized. Their company goes bankrupt.

The danger of AI is that people will confuse a sequence of sounds with human advice, causing them to live ridiculous lives. During a therapy session, they will imagine their AI counselor looking into their eyes, suffering both for itself and for them, mourning over its own suffering and theirs, as if it were equipped with a human heart with an infinite of yearning. This robot confidant, more steam engine than human being, will be advertised as someone who “understands” people, including the thoughts that accompany them always and everywhere, awake or dreaming, interfused with all their aims, plans, and acts. It will be asked to help these people reckon with their consciences, or to draw up a general balance sheet of their lives. People, in turn, will foolishly trust this robot, and wrongly adjust their lives in response to its counsel. Having lost the ability to distinguish between passive material and active mind, they will think they have received sound advice, then yield to that advice and judge their lives according to it.

The whole thing is crazy. It recalls the Russian fable of the madman who imagined that he was made of glass, and who, when he was thrown down, said, “Smash!” and immediately died.

The End of Art

AI’s impact on art has another insidious psychological effect.

Professors at Rutgers University have built a machine that autonomously produces “art” using an algorithm called AICAN. The machine incorporates existing styles to generate images on its own. Project director Ahmed Elgammal : “People genuinely like AICAN’s work, and can’t distinguish it from that of human artists.”

But this is not art. In his essay, “What is Art?”, novelist Leo Tolstoy says art is a human activity whereby people, by means of a medium, hand on to other people feelings they have lived through, such that other people are infected by those feelings and experience them.

Art is a means of union among people’s minds. By definition, AICAN’s work is not art because it has no feelings that it has lived through to communicate. It has no feelings at all. It has no mind. It produces a counterfeit of art.

Even when AICAN draws images that convey emotion to people, it is still not creating art according to Tolstoy’s definition. To express an emotion and arouse that emotion in another person at the same time is not art. A man laughs and infects others with his good cheer. Another man cries and infects others with his sorrow. Neither of these activities is art, Tolstoy says, for art is more than just transmitting one’s feelings of the moment to another person, immediately and directly. Art demands that a person evoke in his or her mind a previous experience, and then transmit that feeling so that others experience the same feeling. If AICAN fakes a laugh, prompting a viewer to laugh immediately in response, that is not art. Yet this is the highest level that AICAN can attain. AICAN cannot feel something arising from a previous experience and then transmit that feeling to another person, which is necessary for art. In fact, AICAN cannot feel at all.

People “like” AICAN’s work, Elgammal declared. It gives people pleasure. But magic tricks and circuses also give people pleasure, and those are not art, Tolstoy said. On the contrary, the notion that art is whatever causes enjoyment is simply a way of justifying existing art, he concluded.

AI cannot produce art. Instead, silicon chips with human-inscribed algorithms pass through a sequence of events. There is a connection, a succession, a certain order; there is activity, there is change. But there is no agency, there is no cause, there is no mind, there is no feeling, there is no art. That some people view AI-generated images as art—one customer paid $16,000 for an AICAN image—is less a commentary on AI’s abilities and more a testament to the worthlessness of much of today’s art, which aspires to do nothing more than stir enjoyment, whatever that enjoyment may be.

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe criticized modern art, especially abstract art, because much of it communicates so little. It neither touches nor moves people. Using Tolstoy’s definition, much of abstract art fails as art. Although the artists producing abstract art may feel something, many viewers feel nothing. But AI-produced abstract art is worse according to Tolstoy’s definition, for now neither artist nor viewer feels anything.

No one dies of bad art. The danger of AI-produced art is not the same as the danger of killer AI robots. Nevertheless, harmful consequences may occur. Tolstoy criticized art in the 19th century because he thought it had strayed from its original purpose. Rather than try to convey the feeling of a previous experience, the goal of art had become “beauty,” to please the upper classes. In the process, he said, art had become a destructive racket—for example, training young people for years in ballet, ruining their feet, to make rich people smile. Worse, he said, art had become a subject for instruction, with rigid rules and procedures, severing it from the unique emotional experiences that cannot be taught but that are nevertheless the wellspring of all art.

Social media has reversed this trend to some extent. Like tiny grass shoots heralding the arrival of healthy new life, millions of people today draw pictures and post them on Instagram. They write personal stories and post them online or e-publish. They try their hand at the art of comedy, music, or dance, and post videos of themselves on YouTube. All this fulfills Tolstoy’s definition of art. These people aspire to touch others and to transfer to others an emotion they have felt. What is poignant in all this is the sense of desperation in some of these aspiring artists. They may be lonely; perhaps they don’t know their neighbors; perhaps they have little family or no partner. Loneliness is epidemic in America. People desperately want to connect with others, and so they throw their work onto the Internet hoping that someone, somewhere, will look and listen—and be touched. Tolstoy never talked about how artists need true art as much as viewers and listeners do.

AI-produced art potentially competes for the attention of these viewers and listeners. Through sheer volume of production it could significantly lower the probability that people will click on the website or video of a live person craving connection. There will be too much “art” out there, and AI’s “art” will be the cheapest. Expect more anxiety, more depression, more loneliness among the human beings aspiring to fulfill a basic human need to join with others, even if just by receiving an admiring click on their posting, but who have been crowded out by the counterfeits of art that serve only to please.

Fixing the Problem

Parallel to the big world inhabited by big people and big things, there is a small world with small people and small things. In the big world they invent nuclear power, discuss foreign policy, and worry about economic trends. In the small world they invent yo-yos, discuss personal relationships, and worry about not having a date on Saturday night. Thinkers about the big world aspire to improve the lives of humanity. They invent intellectual paradigms. They give people’s behavior rock-solid foundations. Thinkers about the small world are far from such high-mindedness. They know small people have only a few desires—to have some friends, to have someone to love, to get along with their boss, to feel okay about themselves, and to get by with as little trouble as possible.

AI may pose a danger to life in the big world. It may lead to mass unemployment and killer robots. Thinkers about the big world have written about these possibilities. But AI also poses a danger to life in the small world. It risks heightening feelings of anxiety, worthlessness, and loneliness, as well as increasing the number of missteps and miscalculations that people make in their private lives. This is important. Such feelings and events determine the fate of a society, as people’s little problems, fears, and mistakes are the stuff societies are made of.