THE ETHICIST TAP : CHATBOTS DEPENDENCE [ A ]

THERE are lots of ways in which artificial intelligence, including the kind behind those chatbots, serves us well.

[ Bear in mind that A.I. is under the hood in all sorts of applications and features we don't think of as A.I. : spam filters, route planning, credit card alerts, garden-variety internet search and on and on.]

But it's a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate. Socrates wasn't wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention.

Of course, that wasn't the whole story : Writing brought advantages too. And there are plenty of skills we can lose without much regret. [ shoeing horses, folding road maps ].

But one thing we surely don't want to lose is a basic capacity for critical thinking.

That would be an example of '' constitutive '' de-skilling - the loss of capacity, like judgment or empathy or imagination, that's central to our moral or intellectual being.

You fell for someone who thought for himself ; it's understandable that watching him outsource that mind to a machine could dim his appeal.

In ''On Liberty'' [1859 ], the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, about someone who. has his own '' plan for life '' that ''he must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold his deliberate decision.''

So one risk is downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won't be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.

There's another risk to what you describe. By letting his conversations with the bot supplant, actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people.

It sounds as if he may have lost sight of the fact that a large language model isn't a person. You've reported an episode of what might be called ''botsplaining'' : hearing your own good advice repeated back to you with the authority of a machine.

But it also suggests he values his time with the chatbots more than the time with you. 

It's understandable that you're feeling crowded out. Be direct with him about how you feel. What's clear is that he's brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it's talking too much.

!WOW! thanks Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah who teaches philosophy at N.Y.U.