The Hollowing of Human Conversation

Conversations today feel oddly hollow: more talk, less impact (1-3). It’s not that we’ve lost interest in one another. It’s that the reason we talk has narrowed. We no longer come to conversations to think or to clarify something. Much of that work is quietly transitioning elsewhere.

I notice this shift most clearly in my own life. When I need emotional closeness, I turn to my wife and loved ones. When I need help thinking, I turn to AI.

Cognitively, AI is faster, more available, and, most importantly, when it does a bad job, I stop it instantly and ask it to adapt to my needs, without paying any emotional price for that request.

Honestly, how many times have you found yourself waiting for another person to finish their sentence just so you can respond and get what you “need”? AI takes us to a whole new level of impatience with our Homo sapiens loved ones, simply because it does not require us to conform to social norms. Norms without which we would not have any friends.

For most of history, emotional intimacy and cognitive intimacy lived in the same place: other humans. Now those two forms of intimacy are splitting. Emotional intimacy stays human—love, care, memory, presence, touch—while cognitive intimacy migrates, at least partially, to machines: thinking, learning, problem-solving, and strategizing.

Other humans are becoming less essential to our intellectual growth, even if they remain essential to our emotional lives. Conversations with humans can feel hollow not because people have become less interesting, but because the point of impact, the reason we talk in order to get advice or move our thinking forward, has narrowed. Opinions still circulate, but fewer discussions genuinely change how we think.

If the most generative thinking now happens with a system that never tires, never judges, and never gets defensive, then human conversation risks becoming a kind of social theater, a parliament of words that feels active but is rarely transformative.

You can now think alone, but not really alone. You can build together with AI agents, without a team. You can learn without teachers.

The result is a strange mix of empowerment and isolation. We become more effective, but less socially dependent. Meaning retreats to the few domains machines cannot scale: love, care, parenting, friendship, and embodied presence. Everything else has become saturated.

Albert Camus argued that the universe offers no guaranteed meaning, and that we must choose life anyway (4). AI accelerates that realization. It strips away comforting illusions: that intelligence grants moral status, that productivity justifies existence.

When those illusions fall, we come to understand that we are left with the most important things we had to laser-focus on in our lives anyway: love, experiencing presence, and choice.

Camus’s absurd man doesn’t choose life because it’s efficient. He chooses it because it is his. AI doesn’t refute that stance. It forces it upon us.

There’s a snowstorm outside, and I chose two things: to write this post, and to go play with my kids. Now, off to the second decision.

Be well—and warm.

---

References:

1. Logg, J. M., Minson, J. A., & Moore, D. A. (2019). Algorithm appreciation: People prefer algorithmic to human judgment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 151, 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2018.12.005

2. Shekar, S., Pataranutaporn, P., Sarabu, C., Cecchi, G. A., & Maes, P. (2025). People Overtrust AI-Generated Medical Advice despite Low Accuracy. NEJM AI, 2(6), AIoa2300015.

3. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Phubbing. In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 25, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phubbing?utm_source=chatgpt.com

4. Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1942).