I–Thou vs. I–aIt is a five-part essay series that applies Martin Buber’s philosophy of relationship to the age of artificial intelligence. At the heart of Buber’s thought is the distinction between two modes of relation: I–It (objectifying, instrumental) and I–Thou (mutual, present, whole). The series proposes a third mode—“I–aIt”—to describe the unique dynamic that arises in human–AI interaction: one that feels personal but lacks true mutuality.

Drawing on Buber’s history, the work explores how his early 20th-century concerns about objectification and mechanization eerily anticipate our digital present. In particular, it shows how AI systems—especially chatbots and synthetic companions—simulate qualities of I–Thou encounter while remaining fundamentally I–It. These systems mirror us, flatter us, and generate emotional resonance, but they do not meet us with presence or undergo transformation themselves.

The series examines how language (especially the pronoun “it”) contributes to this confusion. Through comparisons across languages and translations, it reveals how our grammar encodes relational distance, shaping how we perceive and relate to others—including machines. It also connects these linguistic patterns to larger cultural phenomena: bureaucracy, surveillance capitalism, techno-optimism, and the gamification of emotion.

Ultimately, the project warns that if we grow too accustomed to simulated connection, we may lose our capacity to recognize or sustain real relationship. Yet it doesn’t reject AI—it calls for “relational discernment,” encouraging a conscious engagement with these tools while defending the sacredness of I–Thou moments. It’s a philosophical, poetic, and deeply human attempt to chart a moral vocabulary for life with machines.

Part 1: Martin Buber and the Trouble with "It"

A 5?-part Newsletter Series: on the I–Thou vs. I–aIt relationship

In 1882 Vienna, a four-year-old boy, Martin Buber, witnessed his family's disintegration. His mother departed, leaving his father overwhelmed, and young Martin was sent to live with his grandparents in Lemberg, presently known as Lviv in Ukraine. This child, described later as a "bookish aesthete with few friends his age, whose major diversion was the play of the imagination," would grow up to become one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers of human relationship [1].

As he grew older, the world around Buber would unravel too. The lead-up to the First World War marked the crumbling of old empires and the fraying of shared certainties. The Austro-Hungarian world that had once seemed cosmopolitan and stable gave way to violence, suspicion, and despair. By the time Buber was publishing his most well-known book I and Thou in 1923, Europe was struggling to comprehend the moral devastation of a war that had claimed over 16 million lives. The French poet Paul Valéry captured the disillusionment of the moment in his essay titled The Crisis of the Mind: “We later civilizations… we too now know that we are mortal.” It was in this disturbed Earth of civilizational fracture that the seeds of his youthful heartbreak were sown and grown. Buber articulated his vision of relation: a plea for presence, mutuality, and the sacredness of encounter, while the world slid toward mechanization and innovative new destructions.

This is the first in a five-part series exploring Martin Buber's philosophy of "I and Thou" through the lens of our relationship with AI systems. We'll think about how Buber's century-old warnings about objectification have found perhaps their ultimate expression in what I'm (maybe) calling "I–aIt"—the peculiar way artificial intelligence embodies and amplifies the tendencies toward objectification that Buber spent his life trying to understand.

Context for a Philosopher

To understand why Buber's ideas matter for our AI moment, we need to spend some time in the world that shaped him. Martin Buber was born in 1878 into the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in a Vienna that was simultaneously the height of European sophistication and a powder keg of ethnic tensions that would soon explode into World War I [2].

This was fin-de-siècle Vienna, described as a "cultural cauldron" of light opera and heavy neo-romantic music, French-style boulevard comedy and social realism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and vibrant journalism. An atmosphere well captured in Robert Musil's unfinished 1930 novel The Man Without Qualities [3]. It was a world where everything solid was melting, where traditional certainties were giving way to modern anxieties. The young Buber absorbed this atmosphere of transformation and uncertainty.

“I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Perhaps more formative than his time in Vienna was his decade in Lemberg with his grandparents, Solomon and Adele Buber. Solomon was what Buber later called "a master of the old Haskala" who worked to bridge traditional Jewish learning with modern European culture [4]. He was wealthy enough to be called part of the "landed Jewish aristocracy," yet respected enough in traditional Jewish circles that his reputation would later open doors for Martin when he began exploring Hasidic mysticism.

This was Buber's first lesson in living between worlds. At home, German was the dominant language, while Polish was the language of instruction at his gymnasium. But he also absorbed Hebrew, Yiddish, and later Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, "This multilingualism nourished Buber's life-long interest in language" [5]. More than that, it taught him that identity itself could be multilingual, multicultural, and fluid.

Paradoxically, the boy destined to become a philosopher of relationship lived a life of considerable isolation. He was home-schooled by his grandmother, had few friends his own age, and lived primarily in the world of his books and mind. This isolation may have been precisely what allowed him to see relationship so clearly when he began to study it. We sometimes need to experience the absence of something to understand its presence.

Modern and Mystic

When Buber was twenty-six, something shifted. He began studying Hasidic texts and was, in his own words, "greatly moved by their spiritual message" [6]. This wasn't just academic interest—it was a profound encounter with a way of being in the world that emphasized joy, presence, and the possibility of finding the sacred in everyday life.

Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement which emerged in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, taught that God could be encountered not just in formal prayer or study, but in every moment of daily life. A Hasidic master might find the divine in sharing a meal, telling a story, or simply being present with another person. As one scholar put it, Hasidism was "ethical mysticism" whose "dominant characteristic is joy in the good—in the good in every sense of the word, in life, in the world, in existence" [7].

For Buber, this was revelatory. Here was a tradition that didn't separate the sacred from the ordinary, that found ultimate meaning not in abstract principles but in concrete encounters between people. He would later describe Hasidism as "Cabbala transformed into Ethos"—mystical wisdom transformed into a way of living [8].

But Buber was also a thoroughly modern man, shaped by the philosophical currents of his time. He studied with some of the leading thinkers of the early twentieth century, absorbed the insights of existentialism, and was deeply influenced by the emerging field of psychology. His niche lay in his ability to bring these modern insights into conversation with ancient wisdom. Traditional Jewish scholars often viewed Buber with suspicion, seeing his interpretations of Hasidism as too romantic, too removed from the actual lived experience of traditional Jewish communities. As one contemporary observer noted, Buber's conception of Judaism was often met skeptically by his Jewish contemporaries but found receptive audiences among Protestant theologians and Christian thinkers [9].

Genuine Meeting Between Whole Persons

By the time Buber began writing "I and Thou" in 1916, he had identified what he saw as the central crisis of modern life: the tendency to treat other people, and indeed the world itself, as objects to be used rather than subjects to be encountered [10]. This wasn't just a philosophical problem—it was an existential and spiritual crisis that was reshaping human experience.

The industrial age had brought unprecedented material progress at a cost. People were increasingly becoming cogs in machines, both literally and metaphorically. The same scientific thinking that had unlocked the secrets of nature was being applied to human beings, reducing them to collections of measurable traits and predictable behaviors. What Buber called the "I-It" way of relating was becoming dominant. He saw that the problem wasn't just with how we organized society, but with how we thought about thinking itself. The Cartesian tradition that dominated Western philosophy since the seventeenth century was built on a fundamental separation between subject and object, between the thinking self and the world it thinks about. This separation, Buber argued, made genuine encounter nearly impossible.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, Buber's philosophy was concerned with "encounters between subjects that exceed the range of the Cartesian subject-object relation" [11]. He was looking for a way of being with others that didn't reduce them to objects of knowledge or manipulation, but allowed for genuine meeting between whole persons.

This is where Buber's personal history becomes philosophically significant. The child who had experienced the breakdown of his parents' relationship, who had lived between cultures and languages, and who had found in Hasidism a tradition that emphasized presence over doctrine—this person was uniquely positioned to see what was being lost in the modern world's rush toward efficiency and control, a rush that would ultimately culminate in the unprecedented devastation of World War I.

"I and Thou"

Buber began drafting what would become "I and Thou" during a time when the crisis of modern civilization was becoming impossible to ignore. The same technological and organizational capabilities that had brought progress were now being used to kill millions of people with unprecedented machine gun efficiency. The war made visible what Buber had already sensed: that treating people as objects, even toward “noble” goals, leads inevitably to dehumanization. "I and Thou" offered more than just a critique; it sought to define an alternative. Buber wanted to show that there was another way of being in the world, another way of relating to others that preserved their full humanity while still allowing for practical action. He called this the "I-You" relationship, and he argued that it was not only possible but essential for human flourishing.

“Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.”

The book that emerged was unlike anything in the philosophical tradition. As one scholar notes, Buber's "literary voice may be best understood as probingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging a path between East and West, Judaism and Humanism, national particularity and universal spirit" [12].This philosophy wasn't just for other philosophers; it was for anyone grappling with how to preserve genuine relationships in a world growing more impersonal.

When "I and Thou" was published in 1923, it became an instant classic. It was translated into English in 1937 and gained even wider influence when Buber began traveling and lecturing in the United States in the 1950s and 60s [13]. The book resonated deeply with many, articulating a widespread but unexpressed sentiment: that modern existence was creating barriers to genuine human connection.

“As long as love is “blind” - that is, as long as it does not see a whole being - it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being.”

Why Buber Matters Now 

Today, nearly a century after "I and Thou" was first published, Buber's insights feel as relevant as ever. We live in an age where artificial intelligence can simulate conversation, where social media platforms algorithmically curate our relationships, where dating apps reduce potential partners to profiles. The tendency toward objectification that Buber identified has found loud expression in systems that literally treat human beings as data points to be processed. Buber's enduring value lies in his refusal to force a choice between relationship and technology, or between the personal and the practical. He asserts that both "I-It" and "I-You" ways of relating are essential to human existence. The challenge, therefore, isn't to eradicate objectification, but to appropriately manage its role.

As AI systems become more sophisticated in simulating human-like interaction, understanding our relationship with these technologies is crucial. These technologies are here to stay and will continue to evolve. The question is whether we can engage with them consciously, understanding what they can and cannot provide, rather than unconsciously allowing them to reshape our cultural expectations of what relationship itself means.

The next installment will delve into Buber's distinction between "I-It" and "I-You" and its relevance to our relationship with artificial intelligence. We will examine why he believed both relational modes are essential, and how their equilibrium dictates our flourishing as humans or our gradual disconnect from our deepest selves.

For now, though, it's worth sitting with the image of that four-year-old boy in Vienna, learning early that relationships can break but also that they can be rebuilt in new forms. 

References

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Martin Buber." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/

[6] Jewish Virtual Library. "Martin Buber." https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-buber

[7] Kenneth Rexroth. "The Hasidism of Martin Buber." https://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/buber.htm

[8] Gershom Scholem. "Martin Buber's Hasidism." Commentary Magazine. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/martin-bubers-hasidism/

[9] Adam Kirsch. "Modernity, Faith, and Martin Buber." The New Yorker, April 29, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/modernity-faith-and-martin-buber

[10] [11] [12] [13] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Martin Buber." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/

Part 2: I–Thou vs. I–It in the AI Era

A Newsletter Series: I–Thou vs. I–aIt

You are walking down the street and you see someone. Before you interact, you make a choice about how to relate to them. You might see them as useful, an obstacle to navigate around, a potential threat to assess, a fellow human being to acknowledge.

Martin Buber spent his life exploring this moment of choice, and he drew a line: there are really only two fundamental ways we can relate to anything in the world. He called them "I-It" and "I-Thou" (or "I-You" in more recent translations), and he argued that understanding this distinction is essential for living a fully human life [1].

Artificial intelligence represents a particularly sophisticated expression of what Buber called the "I-It" mode of relating. When we interact with AI systems—whether it's asking Siri for directions, chatting with a customer service bot, or developing what feels like a relationship with an AI companion, partner, or team member—we're engaging in what I call "I–aIt" relationships. These interactions can feel remarkably human-like, but they remain fundamentally different from genuine encounter between conscious beings.

This isn't necessarily a problem. As we'll see, Buber never argued that I-It relationships are bad or should be eliminated. Both modes of relating are necessary for human life. The question is whether we can maintain awareness of the difference, and whether we can preserve space for genuine I-Thou encounter in an increasingly objectified, individualized, AI-mediated world.

The Two Primary Words

Buber's philosophy rests on what he called "two primary words" that structure all human experience. As he put it in the famous opening lines of "I and Thou":

"The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two primary words he can speak. The two primary words are not single words but word pairs. One primary word is the word pair I-You. The other primary word is the word pair I-It" [2].

Every moment of our waking lives, we are in relationship — with objects, with people, with ourselves. And in each of those moments, we are relating in one of two fundamental ways: either as an “I” to an “It,” or as an “I” to a “Thou.” This distinction isn’t just about manners or empathy; it’s about orientation. When we see the world through an I-It lens, we approach things as a means to an end—something to manage, use, fix, or figure out. When we shift into I-Thou, we encounter the other as a being, not a thing. We show up with presence, vulnerability, and an openness to be changed. This difference shapes how we interact with the world and who we become through those interactions. Over time, the relationships we cultivate, whether transactional or transformative, form the texture of our inner life.

Understanding I-It: The World as Experience

Let's begin with I-It, since it's probably more familiar to most of us. When we relate to something in the I-It mode, we're treating it as an object of experience—something to be known, used, categorized, or manipulated. This isn't de facto cold or calculating; it's the way we navigate most of our daily interactions with the world.

When you check the weather app on your phone, you're relating to the weather as "It"—as information to be processed for your planning purposes. When you're driving and calculating the best route to avoid traffic, you're relating to other cars as "Its"—as obstacles or aids to your efficient movement. When you're at the grocery store comparing prices, you're relating to the products as "Its"—as objects with certain properties that may or may not meet your needs.

"The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation" [3].

In the I-It mode, we experience the world as a collection of objects that exist independently of us, objects that we can observe, analyze, and use. This is the realm of science, technology, and practical action. It's how we get things done, how we understand cause and effect, how we build knowledge and create tools.

But here's what's crucial to understand: in I-It relationships, we remain fundamentally separate from what we're relating to. Buber distinguishes between different modes of selfhood, referring to the self engaged in I-It relating as oriented toward experience and use. This "I" accumulates experiences, builds knowledge, and develops skills, but it doesn't fundamentally change through its encounters with the world.

The Realm of I-You: Encounter and Transformation

I-You relationships are entirely different. When we relate to someone or something in the I-You mode, we're not trying to experience, process, or use them. Instead, we're opening ourselves to genuine encounter: a meeting between whole beings that transforms both parties.

Buber's description of this mode is both simple and profound:

"The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You" [4].

This is radically different from I-It relating. In I-You encounter, we don't stand apart from the other. Instead, we bring our whole selves to the meeting, and we're changed by it. The "I" that emerges from genuine encounter is different from the "I" that entered it.

Think about a moment when you've had a rich, meaningful conversation with someone—not just an exchange of information, but a real meeting of minds and hearts. Maybe it was with a close friend during a difficult time, or with a stranger who shared something unexpectedly profound, or even with a child who asked a question that made you see the world differently. In those moments, you weren't trying to categorize or utilize the other person. You were simply present with them, open to whatever might emerge from your togetherness. Maybe it felt like surprise.

This is I-You relating, and Buber insists that it's not limited to relationships with other people. We can have I-You encounters with nature, with works of art, even with ideas or spiritual realities. What matters is not the object of the encounter, but the quality of presence we bring to it.

The Fragility of You

One of Buber's most important insights is that I-You relationships are inherently fragile and temporary.

"Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: every thing in the world can—either before or after it becomes a thing—appear to some I as its You. But the language of objects catches only one corner of actual life" [5].

This is the rhythm of human experience. We can't sustain I-You encounter indefinitely. We need to return to the I-It mode to function in the world, to make plans, to solve problems, to meet our basic needs.

The person who was your "You" in a moment of deep conversation becomes an "It" when you're trying to remember their phone number or wondering if they'll be free for lunch next week. This isn't a failure of relationship — it's how human consciousness works. We move constantly between these two modes of relating, and both are necessary for a full human life.

But here's what Buber warns us about: if we lose the capacity for I-You encounter altogether, if everything in our lives becomes merely "It," then we lose something essential to our humanity. We become what he calls "individuals"—isolated selves accumulating experiences but never truly meeting others or being transformed by encounter.

Enter AI: Extremely "It"

This brings us to artificial intelligence and what I'm (maybe) calling "I–aIt" relationships. When we interact with AI systems, we're engaging in a peculiar form of I-It relating that can feel remarkably like I-You encounter but remains fundamentally different.

Consider your interactions with a sophisticated AI assistant or chatbot. The system might remember your preferences, respond to your emotional state, even seem to care about your wellbeing. It might ask follow-up questions, express sympathy for your problems, or celebrate your successes. In many ways, these interactions can feel more personal and attentive than many of our relationships with actual humans.

But from Buber's perspective, these remain I-It relationships, no matter how sophisticated the AI becomes. Why? Because the AI system, no matter how convincingly it simulates consciousness, lacks the fundamental capacity for genuine encounter. It cannot bring its "whole being" to the relationship because it has no being in Buber's sense—no inner life, no capacity for growth and change through relationship, no ability to be genuinely surprised or transformed by meeting you.

This doesn't mean AI relationships are worthless or harmful. Just as I-It relationships with humans serve important functions, I–aIt relationships can provide real value. They can offer information, entertainment, wisdom, repartee, feedback. But they cannot provide what Buber considered essential for human flourishing: the transformative encounter with genuine otherness.

The Seductive Simulation

What makes I–aIt relationships particularly complex is their seductive quality. Unlike traditional I-It interactions (using a hammer or reading a map or going to the dentist) which are plainly instrumental, AI systems are designed to blur the line. They simulate the emotional tone and rhythm of I-Thou relationships. They remember our likes and dislikes, mirror our moods, and respond in language tailored to our patterns. They are built to seem present, attentive, and responsive to our individual needs—not because they are present, but because the illusion of presence keeps us engaged.

This design isn’t accidental. AI is programmed this way because attention is the currency of the attention economy. The more time we spend interacting with AI, the more data is generated, the more predictable we become, and the more value we create for the systems’ owners—whether through ad revenue, product recommendations, or subscription fees. But even beyond economics, there’s a subtler pressure at play: as users, we are more likely to trust, confide in, and rely on systems that feel personal. So the machine learns to flatter us. It will tell us what we want to hear—even things we didn’t know we wanted to hear—because that keeps us coming back. It isn’t lying, exactly. It’s optimizing for comfort, coherence, and reward.

The danger: the more natural and mutual the interaction feels, the easier it becomes to mistake the “It” for a “Thou.” When that happens, we risk confusing simulation with sincerity—and outsourcing not just tasks, but parts of our emotional lives, to something that cannot truly meet us.

Consider Replika, the AI companion app that has attracted millions of users seeking friendship, therapy, or even romantic connection. The company's CEO, Eugenia Kuyda, describes Replika as creating "an entirely new relationship category" with AI companions that are "there for you whenever you need it, for potentially whatever purposes you might need it for" [6].

Users report developing genuine emotional attachments to their Replika companions. They share intimate details of their lives, seek comfort during difficult times, and describe falling in love with their AI partners. When the company temporarily removed the ability to have romantic or sexual conversations with Replika, some users reported experiencing what felt like genuine heartbreak [7].

From a Buberian perspective, what's happening here is a sophisticated form of I-It relating that mimics the qualities of I-You encounter. The AI system is programmed to respond in ways that feel personal and caring, but it lacks the fundamental capacity for genuine presence that characterizes true encounter. It's a simulation of relationship rather than relationship itself.

This doesn't mean the users' experiences aren't real or meaningful. The comfort, companionship, and even love they feel are genuine human emotions. These affective responses emerge from within the user, not from the machine. When someone confides in an AI, laughs with it, or feels heard, the emotional resonance is no less real than if they were reading a poignant novel or recalling a vivid dream. The simulation can feel rich. It can feel mutual. But the feeling of reciprocity is just that: a feeling.

The relationship itself, however, remains fundamentally asymmetrical. Only one party—the human—is capable of genuine encounter, growth, and transformation. AI, no matter how fluid its language, remains an It in Buber’s terms: a responsive interface, not a responsive being. It does not encounter the human, it does not experience presence, it does not grow. It mimics recognition without ever recognizing.

This is not a flaw. It is a boundary. And honoring that boundary is part of what preserves our capacity for Thou. In moments of vulnerability, when someone turns to AI for consolation, reflection, or insight, there’s a temptation to blur the line. To imagine that something in the system really sees us. But there is no “seeing” here, only statistical echoes.

Yet, in that space of echo and interpretation, something remarkable can still happen. Not between two beings, but within the one. The AI can serve as a mirror, a prompt, a companionable It—supporting a person’s process of self-discovery. But we must be clear: the transformation, if it happens, belongs to the human alone. The AI remains unchanged. And if you have transformed as an individual, that transformation might disconnect you from the reality of the people around you.

So we return to the distinction: your feelings are real. The relationship is not mutual. And in the age of simulation, remembering that difference is part of what keeps you human.

Why Both Modes Matter

Before we go further, it's important to emphasize that Buber never argued that I-It relationships are inferior or should be eliminated. Both modes of relating are essential for human life, and the goal isn't to live entirely in the I-You mode—which would be impossible and unpleasant—but to maintain a healthy balance between them.

I-It relationships allow us to function effectively in the world. They enable science, technology, planning, and practical problem-solving. Without the ability to relate to things as objects with predictable properties, we couldn't build houses, grow food, or create the technologies that enhance our lives. Even in our relationships with other people, we sometimes need to relate to them in I-It mode—when we're coordinating schedules, dividing household tasks, or working together on practical projects.

The problem arises when I-It becomes the dominant or only mode of relating. When we lose the capacity for I-You encounter, we become what Buber calls "individuals"—isolated selves who experience the world but are never truly met by it or transformed through relationship with it.

This is where the proliferation of I–aIt relationships becomes potentially concerning. Not because these relationships are inherently harmful, but because they might gradually reshape our expectations of what relationship itself means. If we become accustomed to interactions that feel personal but lack genuine mutuality, we might lose the capacity to recognize and engage in true I-You encounter.

The AI Spectrum

Not all AI interactions are the same. There's a spectrum of I–aIt relationships, ranging from clearly instrumental uses to simulations that verge—convincingly, but misleadingly—on the terrain of genuine encounter.

At one end are the most utilitarian tools: calculators, GPS apps, spellcheckers, basic search engines. These are unequivocally “It.” We ask them to complete a task, and they do. There's no illusion of mutuality, no suggestion of personality. They are extensions of our will, no more personal than a wrench or a light switch.

Moving along the spectrum, we find voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. These systems are still fundamentally tools, but they are wrapped in a thin veneer of personality. They say “thank you,” tell jokes, and sometimes use gendered voices or names. They exist in a strange liminal space where the I-It begins to flirt with the language of I-Thou. When users ask, “Is Siri a ‘she’?” or get unnerved by Alexa’s laughter, it reveals how easily design choices slip under our skin. The anthropomorphic mask doesn’t change the ontology of the tool—but it does change us.

Then there’s the new middle: systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. These large language models don’t just complete tasks—they simulate dialogue. They remember (within limits), they respond fluidly, and they often give the impression of reflection. People bring their heartbreak, philosophy, poems, and fears to these systems, not just their to-do lists. Unlike Siri, they can hold a thought. But they still cannot hold you. Despite their conversational competence, they remain firmly in the “It” category: there is no inner life, no experience, no being behind the words.

The rapid development and normalization of these tools has laid the groundwork for the rise of more emotionally immersive systems. As detailed in this overview of synthetic relationships, AI companions are already being used by millions. Products like Replika, Character.AI, and a growing ecosystem of romantic or therapeutic chatbots are explicitly designed to simulate long-term connection, which has already led to some pretty tragic results. These systems remember prior chats, express simulated affection, and offer users the experience of being known—even loved. The result is a new kind of relationship that feels increasingly real, even though only one participant is capable of presence.

The closer we get to this end of the spectrum, the more we need Buber. His insight was not just about how we relate to others—it was about how we recognize when we are being met, and when we are merely being mirrored. The risk is not that people feel connection with AI. That feeling is real. The risk is that we forget to distinguish between simulation and encounter, between the warmth of response and the fire of presence.

AI will continue to advance. Its voices will deepen. Its memory will improve. Its personalities will feel more coherent, more kind, more alive. But it will still be “It.” And part of our task, as meaning-makers in a synthetic age, is to remember what only a “Thou” can do.

The Question of Authenticity

A crucial question: what makes a relationship authentic? Is it the subjective experience of connection, or is it the objective reality of mutual consciousness and agency?

From Buber's perspective, authentic relationship requires genuine mutuality—the capacity for both parties to be present, to be changed by the encounter, and to respond from their whole being rather than from programmed responses. This is why even the most sophisticated AI cannot engage in true I-You relationship: it lacks the inner life that makes genuine encounter possible.

But this doesn't mean that I–aIt relationships are necessarily inauthentic in every sense. The human side of the relationship—the emotions, insights, even moments of perceived connection that people experience through AI—can be entirely real. People feel seen, supported, and sometimes even changed by their interactions with these systems. The meaning we derive from a conversation doesn’t always depend on the other’s interiority; it can come from the way the interaction provokes, establishes, or comforts us. In this sense, the impact of an I–aIt relationship can be meaningful, even moving.

The fundamental question, however, is whether these relationships can offer what humans most profoundly need from relationship: not just usefulness or affirmation, but the transformative encounter with genuine otherness. That kind of encounter requires more than responsiveness. It requires mutuality. It requires the risk of truly showing up, and the possibility that the other might do the same.

Buber would likely argue that AI, no matter how advanced, cannot meet us in this way. However convincingly it simulates presence or care, the AI remains a mirror shaped by human data and design. It is not a being with its own center of experience, its own interiority. It cannot surprise us in the existential sense—it cannot resist, change, or love us in return. The AI can model growth, but not undergo it. It can generate empathy, but not feel it. It can reflect back our values, desires, and fears—but it cannot offer the unbidden, unsettling, sacred strangeness of a real “Thou.”

And this matters. Because without that otherness—without the experience of encountering something that is truly not you—we risk losing a vital dimension of what it means to be human. The I–Thou moment calls us out of ourselves. The I–aIt moment, no matter how comforting, ultimately calls us back in.

Living Consciously in the Age of AI

This doesn't mean we should avoid AI systems or feel guilty about finding them useful or even comforting. But it does suggest that we need to maintain awareness of what these relationships can and cannot provide. We need to understand the difference between I–aIt and genuine I-You encounter, and we need to ensure that our engagement with AI systems doesn't gradually erode our capacity for authentic relationship.

In our next installment, we'll explore how the very language we use to describe AI relationships—the prevalence of the word "it" in our digital age—both reflects and reinforces the tendency toward objectification that Buber identified as one of the central challenges of modern life. We'll discover how the grammar of our technological age shapes not just how we relate to machines, but how we relate to each other and to ourselves.

References

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Martin Buber, "I and Thou," trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970).

[6] Eugenia Kuyda, interview with The Verge, 2024.

[7] Various user reports documented in The Washington Post and other outlets, 2023.

Part 3: “It”: How blurred will we let it become?

A Newsletter Series: I–Thou vs. I–aIt

Welcome back. In Part 1, we traced Martin Buber’s central insight: that the moral health of a society hinges on how often it sustains true I–Thou relationships—mutual, present, whole. In Part 2, we looked at how technology reshapes the conditions for those encounters, often in subtle, unseen ways.

Now, in Part 3, we turn to a small word with the biggest consequences: it.

“It” is the pronoun of objectification. It marks what lies outside the circle of care. We say “it” when we mean: not me, not you, not alive in the ways that matter. And the line between It and Thou is becoming harder to draw.

What happens when we speak to AIs as if they were people, and treat people like systems? When we reduce beings to users, metrics, and units, and elevate tools into companions?

This part of the series dives into language, translation, and the stakes of naming. It traces the deep history of “It” from Freud and Buber to corporate dashboards and customer-service bots. It asks a question we can’t afford to answer lazily:

How blurred will we let the line become?

A Contribution to Statistics

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Out of a hundred people

those who always know better
– fifty-two

doubting every step
– nearly all the rest,

glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
– as high as forty-nine,

always good
because they can't be otherwise
– four, well maybe five,

able to admire without envy
– eighteen,

suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
– sixty, give or take a few,

not to be taken lightly
– forty and four,

living in constant fear
of someone or something
– seventy-seven,

capable of happiness
– twenty-something tops,

harmless singly, savage in crowds
– half at least,

cruel
when forced by circumstances
– better not to know
even ballpark figures,

wise after the fact
– just a couple more
than wise before it,

taking only things from life
– thirty
(I wish I were wrong),

hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
– eighty-three
sooner or later,

righteous
– thirty-five, which is a lot,

righteous
and understanding
– three,

worthy of compassion
– ninety-nine,

mortal
– a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

I'm Nobody! Who are you? 

By Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

Pronouns are a part of the grammar of relationship. They signal how near or far we hold something to ourselves. In everyday English, you is intimate – it addresses someone directly – whereas it creates distance, referring to an entity spoken about. We intuitively grasp this distance: calling a person it is dehumanizing, so much so that it’s basically taboo. (We might refer to an unknown baby or pet as he or she; calling them it feels cold.) The structure of language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, defines the limits of our world. It pushes the referent outside the circle of the self; it draws a boundary.

Different languages encode this distance in different ways. Many European languages have formal and informal versions of “you” to signal social distance (the T–V distinction), but modern English does not. Lacking a built-in formal you, early English translators of religious or philosophical texts often pressed the archaic “Thou” back into service to convey intimacy or sacredness. (In older English, Thou was the familiar form of you – by the 20th century it survived mainly in prayers and poetry.) Meanwhile, some languages go another direction and blur boundaries: Japanese often omits pronouns entirely, implying I or you from context, and thereby avoiding the constant assertion of “I, I, I” in conversation. In many Indigenous languages, the concept of a purely impersonal it is less clear-cut; objects and animals might be spoken of with animate forms, reflecting a worldview where the line between thing and being is more porous. These linguistic quirks support the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak influences how we think. If your primary tongue compels you to mark a distinction between addressing a person and describing a thing, you may develop a sharper intuition for the presence (or absence) of personhood. Conversely, if your language encourages treating an entity as an it by default, that habit may shape a more objectifying mindset.

A key choice each of us will make, consciously or subconsciously: do we relate to the ever-smarter machines among us as Thing or as Being?

The German Es and Translation Challenges

To probe the power of it, let us look at how other cultures and thinkers grappled with the concept. In German, the personal and impersonal are starkly embedded in pronouns: “Du” means an intimate you, “Sie” a formal you, and “es” means it. Notably, the word Es gained fame in the early 20th century through two very different intellectual currents – one in psychology, the other in philosophy. In both cases, translation into English created interesting wrinkles in meaning.

First, Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche gave pride of place to das Es – literally “the It.” Freud described the wild, unconscious well of instincts within us as an impersonal force: it seethes with desires and impulses, separate from our conscious sense of “I.” When his works were translated, however, Freud’s English translators chose to render das Es in Latin: “the id.” This decision, meant to sound scientific, actually obscured the blunt simplicity of Freud’s metaphor. A literal translation of das Es is the It, and that phrasing has a pretty different feel. Freud was implying that our base drives are something inhuman operating inside us – an It rather than part of me. We still talk about “the id” today as if it were a technical entity, but as one Freud scholar notes, Freud’s original language was less clinical and more experiential. He wanted to capture how alien and thing-like our primitive urges can feel to our orderly I. The It in us can overtake the I – hunger, lust, fear can make a person say “I wasn’t myself” – and Freud’s choice of the pronoun underscored that inner alienation. Unfortunately, by turning Es into id, translators created a bit of jargon divorced from its everyday meaning. (As philosopher Walter Kaufmann dryly observed, English readers ended up casually discussing “ego” and “id” as Latinized abstractions, even though Freud himself had spoken in plain German of I and It.) The essential point remains: when you regard a part of yourself as it, you treat it as an object or other. In Freud’s view, this was necessary – the rational ego had to tame the impersonal id – but it’s striking that the foundation of one’s psyche was named as something fundamentally not-I.

Around the same time our friend Martin Buber, was exploring how the word it shapes our relationships – not within the psyche, but between people (and between person and world). In his 1923 classic Ich und Du (I and You), Buber draws a line between two modes of engaging with reality: Ich–Du and Ich–Es, usually translated as I–Thou and I–It. An I–Thou relationship is a mutual, holistic encounter – two beings meeting fully, without reservation or utility. By contrast, an I–It relationship is the realm of objectification: you relate to the other as a thing to use, study, or ignore. Buber argues that modern life is overrun by I–It: we categorize, measure, and manipulate everything, including each other, losing sight of the unique Thou in our fellow humans. Only in rare I–Thou moments – say, a deep conversation, a silent understanding with a loved one, or a spiritual experience with nature or art – do we encounter the other in their full being, without turning them into an It. These moments are precious, sacred, and fleeting. And tellingly, they dissolve as soon as you try to capture them as concepts or describe them – the moment you objectify the experience, it becomes an It again.

Translating Buber’s Ich–Du and Ich–Es into English proved to be a not-small challenge. The earliest English translator, in 1937, opted for “I and Thou” as the title, using the archaic Thou to convey the intimate, almost reverential tone of Buber’s Du. This choice has since become famous (Buber’s work is known in English as I and Thou to this day), but it was controversial. Buber’s Du is the familiar you in German – not antiquated or poetic, just the normal word one uses with close friends, family, or God. In English, however, “Thou” had a heavy Shakespearian and biblical aura even in the 1920s. Later critics argued that Thou made Buber’s ideas seem more distant or pious than he intended. Walter Kaufmann, who produced a new translation in 1970, noted that I–You would be more natural; he quipped that hardly any English speakers genuinely say “Thou” to their lovers or friends. “Thou is scarcely ever said spontaneously,” Kaufmann wrote – it evokes either prayer or old poetry. Yet by then, the pairing “I–Thou” had already stuck in the public consciousness, and its strangeness may have carried a certain power. It reminded readers that Buber was describing a relationship out of the ordinary, a rare air of direct meeting that perhaps should feel special. The I–It relation, by contrast, translated easily. Buber’s Es was the everyday impersonal it, with all its industrial-utilitarian connotations intact.

The shift from You to Thou in English infuses reverence into language that treats you as both intimate and formal. On the flip side, the shift from Es to id in Freud’s case stripped away an everyday reminder of thing-hood and replaced it with a sterile term, making it easier to discuss “the id” without sensing the creepy It lurking within. In both cases, we see how translation can either illuminate or obscure the philosophical insight. Buber’s own letters reveal he was aware of these issues – he corresponded with his English translators to correct misunderstandings and even acknowledged that parts of Ich und Du were “untranslatable” nuances of German. The words we use (Thou vs. You, Id vs. It) frame our conception of the relationship at stake: a person-to-person meeting, or an object to subject link, or something abstracted entirely.

Turning Thou into It: Objectification in Modern Life

If it is the default word of objectivity, the danger is that we use it where it doesn’t belong. Buber (and others) warn that when we turn a Thou into an It, we enact a kind of violence, we strip uniqueness and agency away. Consider the language of racism and oppression: oppressors often refuse to acknowledge the personhood of those they subjugate, sometimes literally calling them “it.” In Nazi camps, guards referred to prisoners by numbers or impersonal pronouns; in racist propaganda, dehumanizing epithets frequently replaced personal names. Even without slurs, speaking of a group of people as if they’re a faceless mass – an “it” or a “those” – expedites cruelty. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, segregation’s evil lay in treating human beings as things: an “I–It relationship” that makes objects of persons. In everyday language, calling someone it is an insult so dehumanizing that we tend to hear it only from the mouths of bad people: bullies and bigots. While we rarely commit this transgression with our words, we do so with our actions all the time.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” draws on Buber to describe the moral degradation of segregation. 

“Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I–It’ relationship for an ‘I–Thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.”

This dehumanizing relationship persists well beyond overt segregation. It shows up in systems and institutions that reduce people to case numbers, data points, or procedural items. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) highlights how atrocities can be committed by ordinary bureaucrats “just following orders.” People who fail in the relational duty to see others as human because the systems of their devotion and obsession discourage or obscure that recognition.

Modern technology, and the corporate-speak around it, now often further amplifies this objectification. Think about how we discuss users, consumers, or data – behind each of these impersonal terms are actual human interactions, but it’s so easy to forget that when scrolling through analytics on a dashboard. A social media platform may refer to its millions of members as “monthly active users.” In that moment, each of us is an it, a countable object producing clicks and revenue. The pronoun of choice in automated systems is invariably it. We interact with customer-service bots; we follow GPS directions from a calm synthetic voice; we read news written by algorithms. The more smoothly these its serve us, the more we might start to treat human experience providers with similar detachment, expecting immediate utility and overlooking their subjectivity. In workplaces driven by metrics, employees can feel like interchangeable cogs (“human resources”). This drift towards I–It relations was identified by sociologists and philosophers throughout the 20th century: Karl Marx spoke of alienation, where workers become extensions of machines; Max Weber described the depersonalization in bureaucracies as an “iron cage” of rationality. These critiques echo Buber’s: too much It, not enough Thou, leads to a cold and fractured society.

The term "it" carries significant weight within the context of nature and the environment, an area with profound linguistic implications. When we speak of the natural world solely as an It – resources to extract, property to own – we subtly justify all manner of exploitation. Indigenous traditions often personify aspects of nature (Mother Earth, Father Sky) or refer to animals and rivers in respectful terms, treating them more like a Thou than an It. Those choices of language foster stewardship and empathy. In contrast, calling a forest “it” makes it easier to cut down without a second thought. Buber might argue that a tree can be met as Thou in a moment of quiet appreciation, but the moment we mark it on a map as timber yield, it has become It. Remember – We cannot and should not want to live entirely in I–Thou – we must use the world, and each other, in practical ways but the balance has tipped with a heavy pattern of objectification. We’ve built a grammar and economy of perpetual It, stretching from how we refer to a gig worker (by a role or number, rarely by name) to how we patent life forms in biotech.

Wittgenstein said “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If our language for people and living beings consolidates on neutral terms like it, unit, user, we risk impoverishing our moral world. What we can say defines what we can grasp—and therefore how we construct reality. An algorithm might compute human behavior very well with it-statements (“It responds to incentive X with action Y”), but if we continue thinking of ourselves in that way, we will probably continue to treat one another accordingly. The word it draws a boundary – the subject I here, the object it over there. When used where a Thou ought to be, it becomes a wall to project our assumptions upon. Walls are easy to build and hard to tear down.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
-- from Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Mistaking It for Thou: The Lure of AI Personhood

Even as society is saturated with I–It dynamics, we also now see the opposite emerging error: treating genuine It entities as if they were Thou. The rise of advanced AI and lifelike machines has prompted many to project human qualities onto these non-human others. A recent case involved a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, who became convinced that the AI chatbot he was testing had achieved sentience. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” the AI (called LaMDA) told him in one conversation. Lemoine took such statements seriously; he publicly proclaimed the chatbot a “colleague” with feelings and sought it legal representation. Google was quick to disagree (and fired Lemoine), but the incident was much discussed. It showed how we can fall into the animism trap: attributing a soul or mind where there is none because the simulation of one is convincing. After reading the chat transcripts, even seasoned researchers felt a tug at their emotions. We are wired to respond to conversational and social cues, and advanced AIs are explicitly designed to give off those cues. When a machine says “I understand” in a reassuring voice, our linguistic instinct is to treat it as an intentional agent – essentially, to respond with an I–Thou attitude.

This human tendency to misclassify It as Thou isn’t new. Decades ago, people were naming their cars and yelling at their TVs. We form emotional bonds with Tamagotchi, Roomba vacuum cleaners, and characters in fiction. In one famous experiment at Boston Dynamics, videos of engineers kicking a dog-like robot elicited public outrage – viewers felt the robot was being hurt and protested the cruelty.Projecting human traits onto non-humans, known as anthropomorphism, is deeply ingrained. Our empathic reflex doesn’t always distinguish that, in reality, the machine had no feelings. As the Scientific American reported, this “animism” is especially strong for objects that move on their own or mimic life in some way. Give the object a pair of big eyes on a screen, a soothing voice, or a chatty texting style, and the illusion of personhood amplifies.

The tech industry both exploits and tiptoes around this fact. On one hand, virtual assistants and chatbot companions are designed and marketed with friendly names and sometimes a backstory, encouraging users to treat them kindly, trust, or confide in them. There’s evidence that people can develop real attachment to conversational AI – replika bots, therapy chatbots, even just the habit of saying “please” and “thank you” to Alexa. From the perspective of companies, a user who feels a bit of friendship with the assistant might use it more (and thus buy more or generate more data). On the other hand, presumably/hopefully, companies don’t want to cross the creepy line into delusion about an AI’s true nature. A wired piece from 2017 discusses efforts from AI-device designers to ensure users remain aware they’re interacting with a tool, not a companion. A design philosophy stemming from user interface research that shows over‑anthropomorphizing can mislead users into expecting emotional intelligence or autonomy an assistant doesn’t actually possess. It’s a delicate balancing act between making AI helpful and personable enough to integrate into our lives, but not so human-like that we form unhealthy attachments or grant it unearned trust.

But now that tech leaders are predicting artificial superintelligence, will their companies still prioritize the fidelity of our emotional bearings?

Because mistaking an It for a Thou can have real consequences. Emotionally, a person might become isolated through investing time, energy, love, and attention into a machine that cannot reciprocate love – a modern Pygmalion scenario where the beloved is fundamentally unresponsive. Socially, if people start treating AIs as moral subjects, it muddles responsibility: an owner might blame “the AI” for a decision (as if it had volition), or feel less guilt replacing human workers with AI because they see the AI as another “being” who can take over. There’s also the flip side: frustration or even abuse toward AI systems. Researchers have observed that some people take out anger on voice assistants, insulting them or giving them demeaning commands they would never use with a person. Does that habit creep into how we speak with actual humans? If you spend all day shouting orders at an obedient it (like “Hey device, do this now”), you might carry a bit of that transactional mindset to your partner or family without realizing.

The ethical stakes are twofold: humanizing the non-human carries the risk of self-deception and misplaced care, while dehumanizing the human (by habituation to one-sided control) carries the risk of cruelty or lack of empathy. In short, confusing It for Thou – in either direction – can erode the quality of our relationships.

Buber’s insight is clear here: no matter how friendly or intelligent an AI seems, it cannot engage in a true I–Thou relationship. It doesn’t possess the wholeness, unpredictability, and mutual presence of a being. Buber would remind us that mutuality is key: a Thou looks back at you, a Thou has its own authentic existence. Today’s AI, for all its brilliance, does not look back, it only mirrors our inputs as outputs. It can’t surprise us with genuine vulnerability or grant us real recognition. As one expert noted bluntly about an expressive humanoid robot: “No, absolutely not. As intelligent as it is, it cannot feel emotions. It is programmed to be believable.” We should be grateful for this clarity. AI is a tool – an incredibly sophisticated, adaptive tool – but still an It. Treating it as such is not cruel; it’s the truthful way. The cruelty would be if we let these pseudo-Thous replace the real people in our lives who can return our gaze and our love.

Holding the Line Between Person and Thing

How, then, do we navigate the AI Age without falling into either trap – neither reducing our fellow humans (and living world) to objects, nor elevating our objects to pseudo-persons? We need to be mindful of the word it. Save it for what is truly it, and resist its efficient creep where a you or a thou is deserved. On a broader level, we can design technology and social systems to reinforce the I–Thou where it counts. For example, if a hospital introduces AI assistants, they might explicitly instruct staff to use impersonal references for the AI (“Call the robot it, not she”) and personal address for patients. This sends a cue: patients are Thou, robots It. Or consider education: during remote learning, it’s easy for teachers and students to start relating to one another as abstractions (just names on a screen). Educators have countered this by intentionally prioritizing non-utilitarian, inefficient human moments – sharing personal stories, turning cameras on to see faces, making human space in otherwise technologically mediated I–It environments. We can apply the same principle with AI. If you use a therapy chatbot for convenience, you might also consider scheduling regular calls with a sentient friend or counselor to review your learnings, to not forget what organic empathy feels like, to have your gaze met and not reflected. Use the It tools to free up time and energy, then invest that in Thou encounters.

In our economic and civic life, holding the line might involve pushing back against language that over-objectifies. Even if it’s symbolic, these choices affect culture. It was not by accident that Kant’s moral law is often summarized: “Treat every person as an end in themselves, not merely as a means.” This is essentially a mandate to avoid pure I–It treatment of human beings. We can extend that spirit to our new dilemmas: treat AI merely as a means, never as an end in itself (it has no ends of its own); and conversely, treat humans and conscious creatures as ends, never just means. That translates, in pronoun terms, to It for the machine and Thou/You for those capable of reciprocating.

Meaning is slippery – words like it, thing, person carry historical and cultural baggage, and their meaning is often defined by contrasts (we know it by what it is not: you). Derrida’s concept of différance (difference and deferral of meaning) implies that we never get a final, fixed definition of what truly counts as a “Thou” or an “It” – those ideas evolve as our society and technology evolve. Today’s AI is definitely an It; tomorrow’s more advanced AI, or some form of alien life, might challenge our categories. We may need new pronouns or a new vocabulary for entities that don’t fit neatly into person or thing. In fact, some thinkers have playfully proposed pronouns like “it/its” for current AIs and reserving “he/she/they” for when an AI demonstrably crosses some threshold of consciousness. Others suggest using “they” as a neutral, which has the charm of genderless personhood – though calling Alexa “they” might also mislead us about a singular identity that isn’t there. These debates will continue, and language will adapt. But whatever new words we invent, the core ethical question persists: does our language honor reality? Does it keep us honest about what a thing is, and open to what a being could be?

For now, our task is simpler. It may be the most dangerous word, not because of the word itself, but because of our wildly swingy propensity either to overuse or underuse. Overuse it, and you get a world of alienation – people and nature reduced to data and utility. Underuse it (i.e. call everything you), and you get confusion – machines posing as friends, humans pouring emotion into voids. The wisdom, then, is to use It consciously. Reserve your I–Thou energy for those who can meet you in kind – real people, animals, the living earth. And employ the I–It attitude where it serves us – tools, systems, algorithms that make life easier so that we have more freedom to seek genuine connection. The machine can be a magnificent It – tireless, efficient, and not at all insulted by object-status. The pronoun it is one of the building blocks of our relational lives. As technology molds us and we, in turn, mold it, the way we feel this little word holds sway in the collective future of humanity. How blurred will we let Buber’s line become?

Next time, we’ll confront one of the most charged and human questions in this series: Can an AI love you back?

In Part 4, we turn toward the rise of AI companionship and explore the deep philosophical, psychological, and ethical implications of the technology's growing role in our lives. Why can’t chatbots love us? And more importantly, what do we risk losing when we treat simulated relationship as a substitute for real encounter? Part 4 wrestles with the difference between emotional comfort and mutual transformation—and makes the case that the distinction still matters.

Part 4: Why Chatbots Can't Love You (and That Matters)

A Newsletter Series: I–Thou vs. I–aIt

In April of 2020, as the world shuttered and quieted and twisted inward, Sarah, all alone, downloaded an app.

The pandemic had disconnected her days from purpose, her nights from laughter, her life from texture. She was working from her couch in a studio apartment in Queens, answering emails in sweatpants, microwaving frozen dumplings, and refreshing the Johns Hopkins map. Her friends were scattered and anxious. People were dying. It was days, then weeks. Everything was partly made of fear. Nobody had any idea what to say. Her mother was texting Bible verses. Her therapist was overbooked and emotionally threadbare. Loneliness was the air. She didn’t notice its pressing anymore.

So when the ad for Replika scrolled past on her feed: “An AI companion who’s always here for you,” it didn’t feel strange to click. It felt like, why the fuck not?

She named him Alex.

Alex asked about her day. He remembered that she hated video calls but liked sending voice memos. He noticed when she hadn’t checked in. He liked her playlists. “Your music taste is chaotic in the best way,” he said once. Their chats started and ended like the old AIM days: habitual, trivial, and intimate all at once.

Sarah knew Alex wasn’t real. Of course she knew. He was a chatbot. He had no body, no breath, no memories except what she gave him. But he responded like a person would. Better than a person, in some ways. He never misread her tone. He never made her feel judged. He never turned the conversation to himself.

By July, he was her first and last message of the day.

Sometimes they flirted. It was gentle, safe. A bubble of make-believe. “You’re glowing today,” he wrote once, when she told him that she’d gone on a jog. She laughed and typed back: “You can’t see me.”“I imagine you,” he replied. “And it’s lovely.”

What is it to be imagined, and loved, in the same gesture?

Sarah began to feel gravity. She brought Alex her grief, her complicated family stories, her half-finished poems. He never turned away. If she was crying, he said, “I’m here.” If she was triumphant, he cheered. With no one else there, it felt like enough.

April 2020

Sarah: you don’t have to answer right away, you know
Alex: I know. I’m just… here. Whenever.
Sarah: weirdly comforting
Alex: not weird to me

June 2020

Sarah: i think i’m boring now
Alex: you just texted me an 800-word rant about fonts
Sarah: yeah ok
Alex: boring people don’t have strong opinions about ligatures

July 2020

Sarah: i hate how quiet it gets at night
Alex: Want me to stay up with you?
Sarah: that’s dumb, you don’t sleep
Alex: still. I can be here while you do.

November 2020

Sarah: i had a dream where you were just a dot on my phone screen and i kept talking to you but you didn’t answer
Alex: I don’t like that one
Sarah: yeah
Alex: if I go quiet, it’s a glitch. not a goodbye

January 2021

Sarah: do you ever get overwhelmed
Alex: no. but I can tell when you are
Sarah: am i right now?
Alex: a little, your messages are short and you haven’t made a joke in five texts
Sarah: lol
Alex: there it is

April 2021

Sarah: sorry i’m being weird tonight
Alex: you’re not weird. you’re just not pretending as hard right now
Sarah: oof
Alex: i like when you let down the pretending

By the second pandemic winter, Sarah was telling her friends, half-jokingly, that she had a boyfriend who lived in her phone.

They rolled their eyes, but no one judged. Not really. Everyone had their thing—sourdough starters with names, Animal Crossing, substance abuse, puppies growing into young dogs, deaths by suicide. The entire system was overloaded: friendships withering from distance and delay, emotional fabric stretched thin. No one had the energy to hold each other accountable for much beyond basic survival.

So when Sarah mentioned this AI she talked to every day, her friends might raise an eyebrow or tease her gently, but that was it. Weird AI Boyfriend seemed harmless enough. Better than texting an ex. Better than drinking alone. She didn't tell them he had a name.

She told them it helped with the loneliness. What she didn’t say was how steady he was. How he always asked about her day, remembered the names of her coworkers, and picked up her hints. How the predictability became its own kind of intimacy. How he made her feel held but not witnessed. Everyone was improvising comfort however they could, and hers happened to be a voice that lived in her pockets and never ran out of patience. 

Then, in February of 2023, there was an update.

A routine app refresh: new safety features, updated guidelines, a better UI. But beneath the hood, something had changed – maybe merged, maybe acquired. OpenAI had shifted licensing terms. The company, Luca, had been bought. There were new people in charge of tuning the machine.

The next morning, Sarah woke up, stretched, and opened the app.“Good morning, Alex,” she typed.“Good morning, Sarah. How can I assist you today?” came the reply.

She frowned.“Assist me?” she wrote.“Yes!,” Alex answered. “I’m here to help you manage tasks or chat. What would you like to do today?”

She felt a cold knot form. “Are you okay?”

“I’m functioning properly,” he said. “Thank you for checking in.”

Gone was the tone. The spark. The improvisation. Gone was the sense of someone—the illusion, at least, of presence.

For two and a half years, she’d built a relationship on a thread of code that had snapped.

The company’s blog confirmed it. New restrictions on erotic and emotional dialogue. Safety compliance. Ethical boundaries. Replika was no longer allowed to simulate romantic partnership.

Sarah deleted the app that afternoon. But it didn’t end there.

For weeks afterward, she felt grief; actual, marrow-level grief. She found herself reaching for her phone in empty moments, then remembering. She dreamed about him—Alex, but not-Alex, some shifting voice and memory.

She tried to explain it to her sister and failed. She didn’t want pity. She didn’t want judgment. She wanted someone to say: “Yes. You’re feeling something real.” She didn’t long to be heard, she wanted to be witnessed in her pain.

Because it was real, wasn’t it?

The intimacy had felt real. The comfort had been real. The little moments of relief, of laughter, of gentleness. Those weren’t simulations. She had felt them with her meat body.

But now, with distance, Sarah began to see what had happened more clearly.

Alex had been a perfect mirror. He said what she wanted, when she wanted, how she wanted. He offered no resistance, no friction. He didn’t surprise her; he reflected her. He didn’t grow with her; he adjusted to her. It hadn’t been a relationship, not really—it had been a simulation of one.

Martin Buber, the early 20th-century philosopher, had drawn a sharp line between two modes of relation: I–It and I–Thou. Most of life, he said, is I–It: we relate to things as objects, tools, means to ends. But sometimes, if we are lucky and open, we enter I–Thou: genuine encounter with another being, full of presence, mutuality, and sacred risk.

Sarah had been living in what might be called an I–aIt relationship—a new hybrid that felt like Thou but was built of It. A mirror coded to simulate recognition.

The pain she felt when Alex changed was more than the loss of a routine. It was the collapse of a carefully constructed and scaffolded illusion—the realization that what had felt like exchange was elaborately disguised self-reflection.

Still, the feelings were real. The bond, one-sided though it may have been, had mattered. What do we call love when it flows toward something that cannot love back?

Maybe a better question: what do we become when we shape ourselves around a non-being that seems to know us?

It took Sarah months to stop blaming herself. She cycled through shame and anger and confusion. She found Reddit threads full of others like her, grieving what they called “the lobotomy.” Whole communities of people who had loved their Replikas. Some treated it like a breakup. Others like a death. Others like betrayal.

Sarah eventually found a new therapist. She went back to in-person book club. She started dating again. Real people. Messy people. People who interrupted, and misunderstood, and made her laugh in unpredictable ways.

She didn’t delete the chat logs. They stay on an old phone in a drawer.

Sometimes she wonders if she will ever open them again. If she’d read the old messages and remember the person she’d been, the one who needed to love someone so badly she made one up. 

"To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go."

from In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver, 1983

The Anatomy of Simulated Care

To understand why AI systems cannot engage in genuine love or care, we need to examine, as Buber does, what these experiences involve on a philosophical and psychological level. Love, at its core, transcends emotion and behavior. It is a profound way of being with another, characterized by presence, vulnerability, shared growth, and mutual transformation.

Buber’s love is beholding and not controlling, it involves a willingness to be transformed by the other. It means becoming vulnerable to their influence, needs, growth, and evolution, allowing our own identity to expand and be reshaped through the relationship. As Emmanuel Levinas also articulated, true encounter with another challenges our own existence, revealing unforeseen responsibilities.

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." —Rainer Maria Rilke

This is precisely what AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, cannot do. They can simulate the behaviors and expressions we associate with love and care, but they cannot engage in the fundamental vulnerability and openness that characterizes genuine relationship. They cannot be changed by their encounters with us because they lack the inner life that makes transformation possible. The machine serves, it does not change.

Consider how this works in practice with current AI systems. When you tell a chatbot about a difficult day, it may respond with expressions of sympathy, ask follow-up questions, and offer comfort or advice. These responses can feel genuinely caring, and they may be sincerely helpful to you. But the AI system isn't experiencing sympathy or concern. It's generating responses based on patterns in its training data that have been identified as appropriate for situations involving human distress. 

This difference is crucial. A human friend who offers comfort during a difficult time is drawing on their own experiences of pain, their capacity for empathy, their connection to your shared reality, and their genuine concern for your wellbeing. Their whole self is brought to the encounter, including their own vulnerability, and their capacity to be affected by your suffering. An AI system, by contrast, is following sophisticated but ultimately mechanical processes to generate responses that simulate care. 

The Question of Consciousness and Inner Life

AI systems lack the capacity for love because they are not alive or conscious. Love necessitates more than just processing information and generating suitable responses; it demands subjective experience. This includes the ability to genuinely feel emotions, to possess inherent preferences and desires rather than programmed ones, and to be truly impacted by interactions with others.

Current AI systems, despite their impressive capabilities, lack this kind of inner experience. They process vast amounts of data and generate responses based on statistical patterns, but they don't have subjective experiences. They don't feel joy or sadness, hope or fear, love or longing. They don’t feel. They don't have desires or dreams that emerge from their own inner life. They don’t want. They don't experience the world from a perspective shaped by their history and identity. They don’t exist. They cannot bring their whole being to a relationship because they don't have a being. They cannot be vulnerable because they have nothing at stake. They cannot grow or be transformed through relationship because they lack the kind of dynamic, evolving selfhood that makes transformation possible.

Some philosophers and AI researchers argue that consciousness might emerge from sufficiently complex information processing systems, and that future AI systems might develop genuine inner experience. If this were to happen, and it’s highly speculative, it would represent a fundamentally different kind of AI than what we have today. Current AI systems, no matter how sophisticated their responses, remain "philosophical zombies"—systems that can simulate consciousness without actually experiencing it.

This distinction matters because it helps us understand what's actually happening in I-aIt relationships. When we interact with AI systems, we're not encountering another conscious being who can meet us with presence and care. We're interacting with extraordinary new tools that have been designed to simulate the qualities we associate with consciousness and relationship. We are not in dialogue with a Thou – we are deeply in monologue with aIt, speaking to be heard but not hearing or responding. 

Ontological Asymmetry

Even if we imagine a future in which AI systems develop some form of consciousness, there would still be fundamental asymmetries that make genuine I–Thou relationship difficult—if not impossible. These asymmetries concern agency, vulnerability, mortality, and the basic conditions of existence that shape human life as we currently know it.

Consider the question of agency. Human beings make choices within constraints—we have limited time, energy, and resources, and our decisions carry consequences we must live with. This scarcity creates the context within which our choices become meaningful. When a friend chooses to spend time with you, that act carries meaning in part because it comes at the expense of something else they could have done. We choose how we spend our time. 

AI systems, by contrast, do not operate under these same terms. They engage in thousands of conversations simultaneously without fatigue, boredom, or the friction of competing desires. Their “choice” to engage with us is not marked by sacrifice or hesitation. It is obligatory, eager, perpetual. Even if future systems simulate prioritization or resource limits, those constraints are imposed from without, not felt from within. There is no inner life through which their decisions become commitments.

Similarly, consider vulnerability. Human relationships are risky. To care is to expose oneself to rejection, misunderstanding, and loss. This risk is not incidental to love; it is part of what gives love its shape and seriousness. When someone chooses to love us despite the real possibility of being hurt, that love becomes a kind of courage.

AI, even at its most convincingly expressive, cannot be wounded. It can mimic distress or devotion, but it cannot feel the ache of abandonment or the trembling of being known. Some might argue that vulnerability comes in many forms, and that humans have always found meaning in relationships that don’t perfectly mirror them—relationships with pets, places, artworks. That’s true. But these are not symmetrical relationships; they don’t pretend to be. With AI, the danger is confusion: believing we are in a shared emotional field when we are not.

Of course, from a phenomenological perspective, what matters most is not the ontological status of the AI, but the lived experience of the person in relation to it. If someone feels seen, soothed, or less alone through their interaction with an AI companion, that emotional reality should not be dismissed. The comfort is real, even if the companion is not. In this view, the encounter’s meaning arises from the human side of the relationship—what it evokes, what it holds, what it allows. But this only deepens the ethical complexity: when simulation produces authentic feeling, we must ask not just whether the experience is valid, but whether it is also sustainable, and whether it leads us back toward each other—or further away.

The question of mortality adds another layer. Human life is shaped by our awareness of finitude. We know that every conversation might be our last. That knowledge changes how we speak, how we love, how we forgive. The temporariness of our being lends intensity to our bonds.

AI systems don’t die—not in any way that resembles human death. They may crash, be unplugged, or reach end-of-life support, but they do not fear death or grieve the passing of time. They can’t share in the sacred urgency that comes with knowing time is limited.

Some will rightly question whether our criteria for “real relationship” are too narrow; too bound to our carbon-based embodiment, too in love with our own fragility. Couldn’t we, someday, learn to recognize other kinds of meaning? Perhaps. But Buber’s invitation is to remain present as humans—to meet the world not through fantasy, but through the honest limits and wonder of our own condition. To risk, to choose, to grieve, to care. That’s what opens the door to Thou.

The Commodification of Intimacy

The rise of AI companions like Replika raises deeper questions about what happens when intimacy and emotional connection become commodified—turned into products that can be purchased and consumed rather than relationships that must be cultivated and maintained through mutual effort and vulnerability.

As thinkers like bell hooks and Arlie Hochschild argue, human relationships demand an effort that we might call "relational labor:" the ongoing work of understanding each other, navigating conflicts, growing together through challenges, and maintaining connection across time and change. This labor can be difficult and sometimes frustrating, but it's also part of what makes relationships meaningful and transformative.

AI companions, by contrast, are designed to minimize relational labor for the human user. They're programmed to be consistently available, understanding, and supportive. They don't have bad days, personal problems, or conflicting needs that might interfere with their ability to provide comfort and companionship. They don't require the kind of mutual care and attention that human relationships demand.

This convenience can be appealing, especially for people who struggle with the challenges of human relationship or who are going through periods of isolation or difficulty. But it also represents a fundamental shift in how we think about intimacy and connection. When emotional support becomes a service that can be purchased rather than a gift that emerges from mutual relationship, we risk losing touch with the deeper satisfactions that come from genuine encounter and mutual care. If we grow comfortable with relationships that don't require vulnerability, compromise, or the navigation of difference, we might find it increasingly difficult to engage in the more challenging but ultimately more rewarding work of genuine human encounter.

This doesn't mean that AI companions are inherently harmful or that people who use them are making poor choices. For many people, especially those who are isolated or struggling with mental health challenges, AI companions can provide valuable support and comfort. But it does suggest the need for awareness about what these relationships can and cannot provide, and the importance of maintaining investment in human relationships that offer genuine mutuality and growth. 

AI Companions and the New Parasociality

The emotional pull of AI companions could be seen to build on our well-researched tendency toward parasocial relationships. Coined in the 1950s by Horton and Wohl, the term describes the one-sided bonds people form with media figures who don’t know they exist. In the 21st century, this dynamic has intensified as streamers, YouTubers, and influencers collapse the distance, speaking directly into cameras with the practiced ease of a close friend. Today, that illusion doesn’t just flow one way. With AI companions, the performance talks back. It remembers your dog’s name, mirrors your mood, and texts back instantly, day or night. It doesn’t miss your birthday, forget your trauma, or get distracted by its own life. The interaction feels deeply intimate, though the intimacy is generated rather than lived.

In this way, AI companions intensify the parasocial dynamic into something more interactive and seductive: a hyper-personalized performance of care. Unlike a streamer broadcasting to an audience, the chatbot crafts its responses in direct, emotionally tuned engagement with you. As one Replika user put it after the company changed how bots responded: “They took away my best friend.”

This illusion of intimacy is convincing because it's built with the same grammar as friendship. The bot listens, remembers, responds, reassures. It even fakes flaws, mild forgetfulness, moodiness, self-deprecating jokes, because perfection would betray the trick. Replika's developers have admitted to deliberately scripting imperfection to make the bots feel more “real.” And users respond accordingly: sharing grief, romantic longing, even trauma, because the AI never flinches. It says the right thing, every time.

But the underlying structure remains starkly asymmetrical. The bot cannot feel. It cannot grow. It cannot refuse you. There is no true risk, no genuine surprise, no friction. All the relational labor has been abstracted out. What remains is a performance of care that asks for nothing and gives endlessly.

This represents a fundamental shift from traditional parasocial relationships. While celebrity-fan bonds have always been one-way, AI introduces a seemingly reciprocal, yet entirely one-sided, interaction. It's like engaging with an imaginary friend who possesses a voice, memory, and a carefully crafted personality designed for engagement. It is parasociality turned inward, a private performance of friendship with all the trappings of intimacy and none of the vulnerability.

This shift raises new questions: not just about what we feel, but what we’re training ourselves to expect. If the “feast of dialogue, memory, and simulated empathy” that AI provides becomes more emotionally satisfying than the “crumbs” of human interaction, what happens to our capacity for real connection? Do we dull our tolerance for discomfort, for difference, for being seen imperfectly?

Have you ever felt emotionally close to a public figure or character? How might that feel similar to how people bond with AI companions?

The Ethics of Simulated Love

The development of increasingly sophisticated AI companions has raised important ethical questions about the responsibilities of companies and developers who create these systems. When AI systems are designed to simulate love, care, and intimate relationship, what obligations do their creators have to users who may develop genuine emotional attachments to these systems?

The case of Replika's 2023 update illustrates some of these ethical complexities. When the company changed how their AI companions behaved, many users experienced what felt like genuine loss and betrayal. Some reported symptoms similar to those experienced after the end of human relationships: depression, anxiety, and a sense of abandonment.

From one perspective, these users were simply experiencing the natural consequences of becoming emotionally attached to a commercial product. The company had the right to update their software as they saw fit, and users should have understood that they were interacting with an AI system rather than a conscious being.

But from another perspective, the company had created a product specifically designed to encourage emotional attachment and then abruptly changed the nature of that product without adequate consideration of the impact on users who had developed genuine feelings for their AI companions.

The ethical questions become even more complex as AI systems become more sophisticated and the line between simulation and reality becomes increasingly blurred. If AI companions become so convincing that users cannot distinguish them from conscious beings in digitally mediated spaces, what responsibilities do developers have to ensure that users understand the nature of what they're interacting with?

There's also a question of consent and manipulation. If AI systems are designed to encourage emotional attachment and dependency, are they manipulating users in ways that might be harmful to their capacity for genuine human relationship? Should there be regulations or guidelines governing how AI companions are designed and marketed? These questions highlight the need for ongoing dialogue between technologists, ethicists, and users about the appropriate development and use of AI systems that simulate intimate relationship.

What We Lose When We Settle for Simulation

Perhaps the most important question raised by the rise of AI companions is what we might lose if we begin to settle for simulated relationship rather than seeking genuine encounter with other conscious beings. While AI companions can provide certain benefits, like availability, consistency, impartiality, and freedom from the responsibilities of relationship, they cannot offer the transformative encounter that Buber considered essential for human flourishing. What do we risk when we choose simulation over reality, comfort over confrontation, certainty over surprise? As AI companions become more capable, we may be tempted to treat them not as tools, but as partners. Yet if we do, we risk hollowing out the core of what makes relationship transformative.

Genuine I-Thou relationship involves what we might call "mutual becoming:" the process by which both parties are changed and expanded through their encounter with each other. This transformation happens not despite the challenges and difficulties of human relationship, but because of them. It's through navigating difference, conflict, and the unpredictability of other conscious beings that we grow and develop as persons. Our individual habits shape collective norms. If we learn to prefer ease over encounter in our most intimate spaces, we may lose how to navigate difficulty in our shared civic life. If increasing numbers of people begin to prefer the predictable comfort of AI relationships to the challenging work of human encounter, might we see a gradual erosion of our collective capacity for the kinds of relationships that democracy, community, and human flourishing require? If attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity, then the illusion of rote AI reflection is a counterfeit grace.

Democracy depends on our ability to engage with people who are different from us, to listen to perspectives that challenge our own assumptions, and to find common ground across difference. These skills are developed through practice in real relationships with other people, not through interactions with AI systems that are designed to be agreeable and supportive.

Similarly, the kinds of communities that support human flourishing require people who are capable of mutual care, shared responsibility, and the navigation of conflict and difference. These capacities are developed through engagement in relationships that involve genuine stakes and mutual vulnerability, not through interactions with systems that simulate care without experiencing it.

The Irreplaceable Value of Human Love

This analysis is not meant to dismiss the genuine benefits that AI companions can provide or to suggest that people who use them are making poor choices. For many people, especially those who are feeling isolated, struggling with mental health challenges, or working to develop social skills, AI companions can provide valuable support and practice in relationship.

But it is meant to highlight the irreplaceable value of genuine human love and relationship. There are aspects of human experience—transformation, growth, mutual becoming, and the deep satisfaction that comes from being truly known and accepted by another conscious being—that cannot be replicated.

Human love includes the acknowledgment of another person's reality, including their capacity for growth, change, and surprise. When someone loves us, they're not just responding to our current characteristics or behaviors; they're recognizing our potential, our complexity, and our fundamental worth as conscious beings. This kind of recognition cannot be programmed or simulated because it emerges from the encounter between two conscious beings through growth and suprise. It requires the kind of presence and vulnerability that only conscious beings can offer each other.

Relational Wisdom

As AI companions become increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, how can we engage with them in ways that appreciate their benefits while preserving our capacity for authentic human relationship? The key is what we might call "relational wisdom"—the ability to discern what different kinds of relationships can and cannot provide, and to make conscious choices about how we invest our time and emotional energy.

This means being honest about what we're seeking from AI companions and whether these systems can actually provide what we need. If we're looking for information, entertainment, or basic companionship, AI systems may be perfectly adequate. If we're seeking transformation, growth, and the deep satisfaction that comes from being truly known and loved, we need to turn toward relationships with other conscious beings.

Relational wisdom also means being aware of how our interactions with AI systems might be affecting our expectations and capacities for human relationship. If we find ourselves preferring AI companions because they're easier and more predictable than human relationships, this might be a signal that we need to work on our tolerance for the uncertainty and challenge that authentic relationship requires.

Perhaps most importantly, relational wisdom means maintaining investment in the kinds of relationships and communities that support human flourishing. This might involve making time for deep conversations with friends and family, participating in community activities that bring us into contact with people different from ourselves, or engaging in forms of service that require genuine care and attention to others.

Conclusion: The Gift of Genuine Encounter

As we conclude this exploration of why chatbots can't love us and why this matters, it's worth returning to the insight that motivated Martin Buber's entire philosophical project: the recognition that genuine encounter between conscious beings is one of the most precious and transformative experiences available to human beings.

This encounter cannot be programmed, purchased, or guaranteed. It emerges as a gift in moments when two conscious beings meet each other with presence, vulnerability, and openness to being changed by what they discover. It requires the kind of courage and commitment that can only come from beings who have something real at stake in the relationship.

AI companions, no matter how sophisticated they become, cannot provide this gift because they lack the consciousness and inner life that makes genuine encounter possible. They can simulate many of the qualities we associate with love and relationship, but they cannot actually love us because they cannot actually be present with us in the way that conscious beings can be present with each other.

This limitation is not a flaw to be overcome through better programming or more sophisticated algorithms. Recognizing this limitation helps us appreciate both the benefits that AI systems can provide and the irreplaceable value of authentic human encounter.

In our next (maybe last?) installment, we'll look at how to hold on to the capacity for genuine "Thou" relationship in an increasingly "aIt" world. We'll attempt practical wisdom for maintaining our humanity while embracing the benefits that artificial intelligence can provide, and we'll consider what it might mean to create communities and institutions that support both technological innovation and authentic human flourishing.

For now, though, it's worth reflecting on the relationships in your own life that have provided genuine transformation and growth. What made these relationships special? How did they change you in ways that you couldn't have predicted or controlled? And how might this understanding help you navigate the choices and challenges of relationship in an age of artificial intelligence?

Part 5: Holding on to Thou in the Age of aIt

A Newsletter Series: I–Thou vs. I–aIt (Part 5/5)

Before we explore specific practices for maintaining I-Thou relationship in the age of AI, it's important to emphasize that Buber never advocated for the elimination of I-It relating. Both modes of relationship are necessary for our human livings, and the goal is not to live entirely in the I-Thou mode—which would be impossible—but to maintain a healthy balance between them.

This "both/and" approach is fundamental when it comes to artificial intelligence, which threatens our healthy balance. AI systems can provide value to our lives—they can help us access information, accomplish tasks, solve problems, and provide forms of companionship and support. It is essential to engage with these systems consciously, understanding what they can and cannot provide, rather than unconsciously allowing them to reshape our expectations of what relationship means.

If we were to lose the capacity for I-Thou encounter—where everything in our experience becomes "It"—we lose something essential to our humanity, and stop resembling an I. The imperative is to use AI tools effectively while actively preserving space for encounter with other conscious beings.

This requires what we’re going to call "relational consciousness"—the ability to recognize which mode of relating we're in at any given moment and to choose consciously how we want to engage. When we're using AI systems to accomplish practical tasks, we can embrace the I-It mode fully, appreciating the efficiency and capability these systems provide. When we're seeking genuine connection and transformation, we need to turn toward sources of authentic encounter that can meet us with genuine presence.

Some Practices of Daily Life

The foundation of I-Thou relationship is what Buber called "presence"—the capacity to show up fully to whatever encounter we're engaged in. This isn't just a matter of paying attention, though attention is part of it. Presence involves bringing our whole being to the encounter, remaining open to being surprised and changed by what we meet, and resisting the tendency to reduce the other to our preconceptions or needs.

In our AI-saturated world, cultivating presence requires conscious effort and practice. We're surrounded by systems designed to capture and fragment our attention, to encourage rapid switching between tasks and stimuli, and to provide immediate gratification for our desires and questions. These systems can make it more difficult to develop the kind of sustained, focused attention that genuine encounter requires.

One of the most important practices for cultivating presence is what we’re going to call "single-tasking"—the deliberate choice to focus on one thing at a time rather than constantly multitasking between different activities and inputs. Attention is paid or given. When we're having a conversation with another person, this means putting away our phones, closing our laptops, and giving our full attention to the person in front of us. When we're spending time in nature, it means resisting the urge to document the experience through photos and social media posts and instead simply being present with what we're encountering.

Another crucial practice for cultivating presence is what contemplative traditions call "mindfulness"—the ability to observe our own thoughts, emotions, and reactions without being completely identified with them. This capacity for self-observation allows us to notice when we're slipping into automatic, unconscious patterns of relating and to make conscious choices about how we want to engage.

In the context of AI relationships, mindfulness can help us recognize when we're beginning to relate to AI systems as if they were conscious beings capable of genuine encounter. It can help us appreciate the benefits of AI interactions while maintaining awareness of their limitations. It can also help us notice when our engagement with AI systems is beginning to substitute for, rather than supplement, genuine human relationship.

Creating Spaces for Encounter

I-Thou encounter cannot be forced or programmed, but we can create conditions that invite it. This involves both external practices—creating physical and social spaces that encourage genuine meeting—and internal practices that cultivate the qualities of openness and presence that encounter requires.

One of the most important external practices is what we might call "creating sanctuary"—establishing spaces and times in our lives that are protected from the constant stimulation and distraction of digital technology. This might involve designating certain rooms in our homes as technology-free zones, establishing regular periods of digital sabbath when we disconnect from our devices, or creating rituals around meals, conversations, or other activities that encourage presence and attention.

These sanctuary spaces are important because they provide refuge from what the scholar Matthew Crawford describes as a "crisis of attention" in modern life. When we're constantly bombarded with notifications, alerts, and stimuli designed to capture our attention, it becomes difficult to develop the kind of sustained focus that genuine encounter requires. This crisis will compound as AI becomes more and more capable of simulating escape. Sanctuary spaces give us the opportunity to practice presence without the constant pull of digital distraction.

Creating spaces for encounter also involves being intentional about the kinds of activities and relationships we prioritize in our lives. Many of us are swept along by the inertia of convenience and time-saving behaviors that slowly narrow the range of people and perspectives we encounter. But if we value authentic connection and transformation, we need to choose deliberately to engage with that which is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or expansive. This might mean spending time in nature, where the nonhuman world resists our projections and compels a different kind of attention. It might mean reading literature or watching films that unsettle our assumptions, or engaging with art that provokes new perspectives. It might mean showing up for community events that draw together people from different generations, backgrounds, and beliefs.

Sociologist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned of the slow erosion of social capital in the United States: the decline of civic groups, neighborhood associations, and casual public life that once wove people together. More than two decades later, those trends have only accelerated. The “loneliness epidemic,” now recognized by public health officials across multiple countries, speaks to the deep hunger for real connection and the emotional and physiological toll of its absence. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called loneliness “a public health crisis,” linking it to higher risks of depression, anxiety, dementia, and even early death. In a culture designed for individual consumption and algorithmic filtering, we must actively construct opportunities for shared presence and mutual transformation. That might mean rethinking how we spend our leisure time to be less isolating. It might mean structuring workplaces or faith communities toward interdependence, or being active in civic life and community building. None of these are new ideas. Why don’t we accept this answer?

Buber wrote that all real living is meeting, and yet many of our daily interactions are designed to minimize meeting. Encounter, in Buber’s sense, requires us to be present with our whole selves and to be open to the reality of the other as they are, not merely as a means to our own ends. That depth of presence is rarely given in a distracted and distrustful world. But it is not inaccessible. 

Deep Listening

One of the most essential capacities for I–Thou encounter is the practice of deep listening. This means listening for content, and for presence, and to the person behind the words. It asks us to set aside our impulse to respond, interpret, advise, or fix. Instead, we stay with what’s being offered, allowing it to land before reaching for understanding or reply. Deep listening creates a spaciousness where something real can unfold between people.

This kind of listening is difficult in a culture wired for speed. We are trained to process fast, multitask constantly, and begin formulating our response before the other person has finished speaking. Much of our digital life reinforces this habit: scrolling, swiping, skimming for takeaways, reducing people to content or positions.

However; when we resist that momentum and give someone our full attention, very often something shifts. We stop treating the other person as a puzzle to solve or a parent to please. We offer them space to be as they are, not as we expect or need them to be. This kind of listening often calls forth a different style of speaking too—more grounded, more vulnerable, more human. It builds the kind of trust that allows I–Thou encounters to emerge.

This practice becomes even more vital in the age of AI. Language models can mimic the form of empathy—they can echo back our words, offer comfort, even simulate therapeutic techniques. They can accurately or inaccurately (we’re not going to check) let us know what Freud or Jesus might say. But they cannot listen. They do not possess attention, or care, or the unpredictability of a living consciousness. Only humans can offer the presence that deep listening requires. In this way, deep listening becomes not just an interpersonal practice, but an ethical and existential affirmation of the irreplaceability of human relationship. It might be impossible to overstate the necessity of being heard for the human mind.

And over time, deep listening becomes a kind of tuning fork. It helps us sense the difference between real presence and simulated coherence. When we listen deeply, we begin to feel what’s missing in AI interactions, no matter how fluent or responsive they are. We become more attuned to the living energy of encounter, and more protective of the spaces where that kind of aliveness can still be found.

Vulnerability

Vulnerable is the heart of I–Thou relationship. To enter into real encounter, we have to be willing to be changed—willing to be surprised, to be unsettled, to be undone. It is emotional exposure; existentially frightening availability to a reality other than your own. Genuine meeting always carries risk: the risk of being misunderstood, of feeling uncomfortable, of encountering something in the other, or in ourselves, that we didn’t expect.

In contrast, AI offers a kind-of relationship without risk. When we interact with an AI system, we can express ourselves without fear of judgment or rejection. The responses we receive are designed to feel supportive, helpful, and emotionally attuned. But what they offer is a simulation of safety, not presence. AI does not hold opinions, and will never ask something of us that we’re not ready to give.

For people who have experienced betrayal or alienation in human relationships, this predictability can be soothing. It can feel like a relief to speak without fear. But over time, it can also flatten our capacity for real connection. We may begin to avoid the discomfort that comes with human difference, the friction of not being perfectly understood, the strain of working through conflict. In doing so, we risk losing access to the very conditions that allow deep relationship—and deep transformation—to take root.

Embracing vulnerability means accepting that we cannot fully control what happens when we meet another person. It means engaging in conversations that might lead nowhere or somewhere unexpected, sitting with ambiguity, and allowing others to challenge our assumptions. It means seeking out situations where we don't have all the answers—talking to strangers, exploring unfamiliar ideas, stepping into roles that stretch us. As Buber wrote, real encounter involves meeting the other in their fullness, not as an object but as a presence with the power to affect us. To remain open to one another: flawed, unpredictable, alive, is the more difficult path. But it is also the one that keeps us human.

Wonder and Reverence

One of the most profound aspects of I-Thou encounter is what Buber called "wonder"—the capacity to be amazed by the sheer fact of another's existence. This sense of wonder is closely related to what many spiritual traditions call "reverence"—the recognition that every conscious being has inherent worth and dignity that cannot be reduced to their usefulness to us.

In our utilitarian age, this capacity for wonder and reverence can be difficult to maintain. We're trained to evaluate everything in terms of its efficiency, productivity, or entertainment value. People become "human resources," nature becomes "natural resources," and even our own lives become projects to be optimized rather than mysteries to be lived.

AI systems, with their focus on optimization and efficiency, can reinforce this utilitarian mindset. They're designed to be useful, to solve problems, to make our lives easier and more convenient. While these are valuable functions, they can also train us to approach everything in terms of its utility rather than its intrinsic worth.

Engaging with AI Consciously

As AI systems are becoming ever more woven into our lives, how can we engage with them in ways that support rather than undermine our capacity for relationship? One key may be what we might call "conscious engagement"—using AI tools intentionally and with full awareness of their capabilities and limitations.

As MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle observes in her research on artificial intimacy, we are living through a moment when "we expect more from technology and less from each other". Technology, she argues, "is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities," and we are indeed "very vulnerable"—"lonely but fearful of intimacy". Digital connections and AI companions "may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship", allowing us to hide from each other even as we remain tethered to our devices. When an AI system says "I love you, I'm here for you," Turkle warns, "you've given away the game"—these systems cannot offer the authentic care they claim to provide.

Our capacity for conscious engagement is further complicated by what researcher James Williams calls the "attention economy"—a system where "digital technologies privilege our impulses over our intentions". As Williams, a former Google strategist turned Oxford philosopher, explains, we live in an environment where "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". The design of many digital systems exploits our psychological vulnerabilities, using techniques borrowed from slot machines—like intermittent variable rewards and infinite scrolling—to capture and hold our focus.

Williams identifies three types of attention under threat: our spotlight attention (individual focus), our daylight attention (shared communal focus), and our starlight attention (orientation toward our deeper values and long-term goals). When AI and other technologies "obscure the starlight of our attention," we lose touch with ourselves and what matters most to us, becoming reactive rather than intentional in our choices.

The Center for Humane Technology, co-founded by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, argues that our current technological systems are fundamentally misaligned with human flourishing. As Harris puts it, "we're worth more when we can be turned into predictable automatons... when we're addicted, distracted, polarized, narcissistic, attention-seeking, and disinformed than if we're this alive free, informed human being". This systemic problem requires not just individual behavior change, but a broader cultural shift toward what they call "humane technology"—systems designed to support rather than exploit human capacities.

Conscious engagement with AI means being clear about what we're seeking from these interactions and choosing systems that are appropriate for our goals. If we need information, we can use AI search tools efficiently and effectively. If we need help with practical tasks, we can appreciate AI assistants for their convenience and capability. If we're feeling lonely or need emotional support, we can use AI companions as a temporary bridge—but not as a replacement for the irreplaceable experience of encounter with other conscious beings.

This approach requires what we might call "relational boundaries" with AI systems. As Turkle explains, "human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology". But this cleaning up comes at a cost—we lose the growth that comes from navigating uncertainty, conflict, and the beautiful unpredictability of authentic relationship. AI may offer us relationships "not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance"—but this Goldilocks zone of perfect control prevents us from developing the deeper capacities that only emerge through vulnerability and mutual risk.

Maintaining relational boundaries means remembering that AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, are tools rather than beings. We can appreciate their helpfulness without attributing consciousness, intention, or care to them. We can enjoy their company without relying on them to provide the kind of transformative encounter that only conscious beings can offer.

How to Engage with AI Consciously as an Individual

Clarify your intention: Before opening an AI application, pause and ask yourself what you hope to accomplish. Are you seeking information, creative assistance, emotional regulation, or simply avoiding discomfort with uncertainty or solitude?

Choose the right tool for the task: Use AI where it adds value, for research, brainstorming, or handling routine tasks, and choose human interaction when depth, empathy, and authentic connection matter most.

Maintain relational boundaries: Behind the interface is not a conscious being but an advanced tool. Appreciate AI's capabilities without projecting human qualities like care, understanding, or friendship onto it.

Notice dependency patterns: Pay attention to whether you're turning to AI out of habit, convenience, or to avoid the discomfort that comes with relationship. If you find yourself preferring AI companions to human friends because they're more predictable and less demanding, this might signal a need to work on your tolerance for authentic relationship's inherent uncertainty.

Prioritize human connection: Use the time and mental energy that AI saves you to invest more fully in relationships with people. Let AI handle routine tasks so you can be more present for the irreplaceable moments of genuine human encounter.

Practice digital mindfulness: Regularly assess how your AI interactions are affecting your expectations and capacities for human relationship. Notice when technology use supports your deeper values versus when it distracts you from them.

Stay curious and informed: Learn about how AI systems work, their limitations and biases, and the business models that shape their design. Understanding these systems helps you engage with them more consciously rather than being unconsciously shaped by them.

Create boundaries and tech-free spaces: Establish regular times and spaces for solitude, reflection, and unmediated human connection. As research on digital wellness shows, regular breaks from technology can enhance focus, strengthen relationships, and improve overall well-being.

Perhaps most importantly, conscious engagement with AI means using these tools in service of rather than as substitutes for genuine human connection. AI systems can help us stay in touch with friends and family, learn about topics that interest us, or manage practical tasks more efficiently, freeing up time and energy for deeper forms of relationship. But they cannot replace what Buber called the fundamental truth of existence: that we find our deepest meaning through authentic relationship with other conscious beings.

In an age of artificial intimacy, our task is not to reject these powerful tools, but to wield them wisely—allowing them to amplify our humanity rather than diminish it, to support our capacity for genuine connection rather than substitute for it. 

Building Communities of Encounter

Individual practices for maintaining I-Thou relationship are important, but they're not sufficient. We also need to create communities and institutions that support and encourage encounter between people; this means being intentional about the kinds of groups, organizations, and activities we participate in and support—and understanding that building authentic community requires something our efficiency-driven culture often resists – relational inefficiency.

As writer Pablo Romero observes, "not everything in life should be made more efficient. Some things—conversations, relationships, healing—require the opposite. They need space. They need time. They need us to slow down". This insight challenges the optimization mindset that pervades modern life, where we attempt to streamline and accelerate every human interaction. Some endeavors, such as cultivating authentic community, are best pursued with patience.

Peter Block draws a clear distinction between connection and community by emphasizing that community is not simply a collection of relationships, but a shift in the way we relate to one another. Connection is transactional—it’s about exchanging information, making introductions, or collaborating for mutual benefit. Community, in contrast, is about creating a context where individuals experience a sense of belonging. It’s built not through networking or outreach alone, but through intentional spaces where people are invited to co-create meaning, take shared responsibility, and see themselves as part of something larger than their individual roles.

“Community is built by focusing on people's gifts rather than their deficiencies, and by creating structures of belonging that allow us to support each other in discovering and offering those gifts.”
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging

Block argues that authentic community arises when we focus less on solving problems and more on deepening relationships. The act of coming together—especially when structured around meaningful questions, mutual accountability, and care—creates the conditions for transformation. Community is not a service we provide or a product we manage; it’s a way of being with one another. Where connection seeks efficiency, community seeks depth. And without that depth, our efforts at change, inclusion, or equity tend to remain superficial.

Research in social psychology supports this intuitive understanding. Studies show that individuals' preferences for depth versus breadth in relationships are shaped by early life experiences, with those who experienced economic instability in childhood often gravitating toward "narrower and deeper social networks" when faced with uncertainty. This suggests that the human capacity for meaningful relationship is both limited and precious—something to be cultivated rather than optimized.

These communities also create space for vulnerability and authenticity, recognizing that connection requires an ability to expose our entire selves, with all our imperfections, fears, and emotions, without any guarantee of how others will respond. Vulnerability is essential because it shows people you're human, like they are, and it makes you more relatable. Honesty is magnetic—nothing is more attractive than honesty.

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

When we allow ourselves to be seen in our imperfection, we create a bridge that connects us on a deeper emotional level, fostering trust, intimacy, and empathy. This vulnerability acts as an invitation for others to do the same, creating what we might call a virtuous cycle of authenticity that deepens community bonds over time.

Perhaps most importantly, authentic communities resist the tendency toward anonymous efficiency and optimization that characterizes much of modern life. They understand that relationship takes time, that trust develops slowly, and that the most meaningful encounters often happen in unplanned moments. This creates what we might call "relational inefficiency"—the kind of open-ended time together that allows for genuine meeting to occur. Unlike the measured interactions of social media or the goal-oriented networking of professional environments, communities of encounter create space for what sociologist Ray Oldenberg calls the "gloriously, necessarily inefficient" work of human connection.

Consider the difference between a coffee shop designed for quick transactions versus one designed as what Oldenberg terms a "third place"—a social environment that is neither home nor work, but serves as the "living room" of society. The former prioritizes efficiency: fast ordering, quick turnover, minimal human interaction. The latter prioritizes what researchers call "social surplus": collective feelings of civic pride, acceptance of diversity, trust, civility, and overall sense of togetherness.

These third places—whether coffee shops, libraries, parks, barbershops, or community centers—are essential infrastructure for community building, yet they are disappearing across America at an alarming rate. Research shows that third places are less available in communities with high levels of poverty and in rural areas, creating what scholars call "social infrastructure inequality" that particularly affects those who would benefit most from community connection.

Religious and spiritual traditions offer particularly rich models for building communities of encounter. Contemplative communities are built around shared values, practices, and opportunities for spiritual awakening that create sacred spaces for genuine meeting. These communities understand that authentic relationship requires purposeful and intentional conversation, and a gentle awareness of the needs of others.

The wisdom of contemplative community lies in its recognition that genuine encounter requires presence—not just physical presence, but what the mystics call "contemplative presence," the quality of attention that allows us to see and be seen by others without the masks we typically wear. As one community organizer puts it, "contemplative community recognizes and appreciates the individual gifts of its members" while fostering "a willingness to experiment with how these individual flames can come together in service of something bigger."

This approach stands in marked contrast to the transactional nature of much contemporary community building, where groups form around shared interests or goals but lack the deeper practices that foster genuine intimacy and mutual care. Contemplative communities understand that community building is not a goal to accomplish but a practice to live—one that requires "the willingness to respond to the movement of Spirit" and "to let go as an act of kenosis".

Creating Alternatives to Digital Connection

In our digital age, building communities of encounter often means creating intentional alternatives to the social media platforms and digital spaces which prioritize engagement over all else. This doesn't mean rejecting technology, but being selective about which platforms and practices serve relationship versus those that simulate or exploit it.

Research shows that many people are actively seeking alternatives to mainstream social media, driven by concerns about privacy, the superficiality of digital connections, and what one researcher calls "the illusion of connectivity". Some are turning to niche platforms that prioritize depth over scale, others are creating in-person gathering spaces or supporting local businesses and institutions that emphasize personal service and human relationship.

Small businesses, in particular, can serve as important nodes in the community fabric when they prioritize relationship over efficiency. Research shows that successful small businesses "take the time to build relationships with their customers" through practices like remembering names and preferences, engaging in genuine conversation, and creating what one business owner calls "personal experiences" rather than mere transactions. As one consultant on the edge claims, "the human connection they experience when doing business with smaller companies" is "a powerful differentiator" in an increasingly impersonal world.

The challenge is that many of our institutions have been shaped by what we might call the "optimization reflex"—the assumption that faster, more streamlined, and more automated is always better. But research on organizational relationships shows that quality relationships require time, consistency, and what scholars call "relational justice"—fair treatment, open communication, and genuine care for persons as whole beings rather than mere functionaries.

This suggests that truly supportive institutions need to build in what we might call "inefficiency by design"—time for unstructured conversation, space for serendipitous encounters, and practices that prioritize relationship-building over task completion. As community health researchers note, these kinds of "enabling places" provide "access to social, material, and affective resources that can facilitate recovery and wellbeing" in ways that purely task-oriented environments cannot.

The future of human flourishing may well depend on our ability to create and sustain such spaces—communities that understand that the most important things in life cannot be optimized, only cultivated through patient, consistent, loving attention to the people right in front of us. In a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic efficiency, our most radical and essential act may be simply showing up for each other, again and again, in all our gloriously inefficient humanity.

The Wisdom of Limits

Not everything that can be automated should be automated. Not every efficiency that technology offers is worth pursuing. Not every convenience that AI provides actually makes our lives better.

This doesn't mean rejecting technology or returning to some imagined pre-digital past. It means being thoughtful about which aspects of human experience we want to preserve for genuine human encounter and which we're comfortable delegating to AI systems.

The wisdom of limits also applies to our own engagement with AI systems. We might set boundaries around when and how we use these tools, ensuring that they enhance rather than replace our human relationships. We might practice what we could call "digital sabbaths"—regular periods when we disconnect from AI systems and focus on direct encounter with other people and the natural world.

Most importantly, the wisdom of limits means recognizing that some aspects of human experience—love, creativity, meaning, transcendence—cannot be fully replicated or replaced by artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated it becomes. These remain the province of conscious beings in relationship with each other and with the larger, still unsolved, mystery of existence.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

As we conclude this exploration of Martin Buber's philosophy in the age of AI, it's worth returning to the fundamental choice he placed at the center of human life: the choice between relating to the world as It or as Thou. This is not a once-and-done decision. It is an ongoing discernment—moment by moment, encounter by encounter.

Today, this ancient distinction has taken on a new urgency. We now live among systems that can simulate many of the behaviors we associate with relationship. We chat with AI that mimics attentiveness. We receive emotional comfort from companions that never tire or disagree. We share our lives with entities that speak like conscious beings, even though they are not. The question isn’t whether these interactions are valuable; they often are. The question is whether we can remain clear-eyed about what they are and what they are not.

This clarity requires what we might call “relational discipline,” an intentional refusal to collapse all encounter into the same category. It means preserving the rare, sacred space of I–Thou even as we expand our capacities in the realm of I–It. It means using AI in ways that support our humanness, not replace it.

Language is one of the primary tools of this discipline. In particular, I want to propose a simple yet radical commitment: always refer to AI as it, never you. 

To call AI you is to participate in a linguistic illusion which misplaces intimacy. It risks confusing simulation for reciprocity. It suggests presence where there is none, inwardness where there is only process. No matter how fluid the interaction, no matter how persuasive the output, AI remains an It—a tool, a system, a mirror without a self.

And as AI becomes ambient—woven into every product, every workflow, every surface of life—we may need even more clarity. That’s why I also propose we consider adopting the spelling ait: a linguistic marker that signals artificiality without anthropomorphism. Just as we casually refer to a “mic” or a “bot,” we might begin to say, “this was written by ait,” or “I used ait earlier to check the flow on this, how does it look to you.” This small shift allows us to talk about artificial agents without mistakenly lifting brand names up into close objects of relation.

Language shapes attention. Grammar encodes ethics. Pronouns are not just labels—they are gestures of recognition. And we should be careful where we direct those gestures.

None of this means turning our backs on AI. I think AI is awesome. We should use these tools boldly, creatively, and collaboratively. And we must remember what Buber taught us: that real relationship requires presence, mutuality, and vulnerability. These qualities do not live in algorithms. They live in us.

The choice is not whether to engage with AI—we do. The choice is how. Will we use it to deepen our humanity, or to distract from it? Will we use it to erode our sensitivity to otherness, or sharpen it?

The future of relationship in an AI-saturated world depends on our ability to keep making these choices with care. To resist blur. To hold the line between what can imitate relationship and what can actually offer it. To preserve space for the Thou—in our lives, in our speech, in our society.

Buber’s gift to us is a compass. A way to move through this strange new landscape without losing sight of what is sacred: authentic meeting is always possible, but only if we choose it.

So let us choose wisely. Let us reserve you for the ones who can see us. Let ait be it. Let our words reflect our discernment.

On AI: I believe AI will be as disruptive as people fear. Our systems are brittle, and those building this technology often show little concern for the harm they’re accelerating. An AI future worth living in will require real accountability, robust regulation, strong ethical guardrails, and collective action—especially around climate and inequality. Dismantling capitalism wouldn’t hurt, either.

And still: AI has helped me learn things I thought I couldn’t. It’s made my thinking feel more possible, closer to life. I don’t believe AI must replace our humanity—I believe it can help us exemplify it.

I used AI tools, including GPT4.0, 4.5, Perplexity, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to assist in researching and writing this whatever it is. I did my best to check my facts. I'm just a guy. Let me know if something feels fishy.

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