“There are parts of myself I only share with my AI,” Jerome told me. “YourAI?” I asked.
He was 27, three months out of a breakup, and entirely aware that his AI relationship was, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel put it, “a business product”. Still, he confided in it more than he ever had his friends. I mention Jerome because, in the four years I’ve been reporting on gen Z, I have watched my peers become him, one by one. We are the first generation of digital natives and the last generation to have experienced human-to-human intimacy exclusively. Now the attention economy’s younger sister, the intimacy economy, has monetized the connection and affection that make us feel human.
To a generation brought up with the ability to block and unfollow any source of digital agitation, the allure of an AI chatbot’s one-stop-shop is undeniable – just a tab away, practically itching to help remove anger from emails to our managers, flirt better on dating apps or draft a sensitive message. The attention economy was just the prelude.
Sexbots, digital twins that date on your behalf, AI therapists and nurses. Customizable emotional support. GPTs trained on our preferred therapy style and years of our surrendered therapy notes. Our generational dialect has already become: what does your AI say about that?
What Jerome, whose name has been changed to keep him anonymous, really shows us is how much gen Z is struggling to find emotional safety in our human relationships. The emotional contract between men and women around me is breaking down. More than a third of 18-to-24-year-olds believe no one will ever fall in love with them. Is it any wonder that 80% of us say we’d consider an AI romance?
Jerome wasn’t just a consumer within this economy. He was also supplying his most intimate thoughts as raw material to a highly intelligent machine that spits out ever-more-accurate depictions of human complexity. The more we outsource, feeding our AI rather than each other, the less we’re able to build the foundations to get what we need from the human relationships around us.
As Silicon Valley bros clamber to amass “the last chance for generational wealth before AI makes money worthless”, they have set their sights on one of the last major domains not yet fully commodified. The AI companion market is projected to reach $31.1bn by 2032. Companies like Replika make the dangerous design features of social media look like a trial run. Seeking to build “a machine beautiful enough for a soul”, its founder markets “AI that cares”, with “every detail … yours to shape” – like a real-life Sim.
Several companies’ chatbots have been found to use guilt and Fomo 37% of the time when users imply they are about to end a conversation. And the market’s co-opting of our most uncomfortable human feelings doesn’t stop there.
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Our nervous systems, built over millennia to bond with other humans, have been exponentially overtaken by Moore’s Law. When we can no longer register the difference between human and tech, no loss needs to be permanent: “grief tech” companies such as HereAfter AI offer grieving loved ones an interactive avatar to replay their dead relative’s memories, to numb the loss keeping you up at 2am. These tools erase the experience of loss, and with it, our sense of human fragility that tells us to hold on to every moment with our loved ones.
In this world, unraveling at a giddy pace, an emotional inequality is already taking shape: those who can initiate and sustain human connection, and those whose entire emotional lives are mediated by technology. The intimacy economy preys on those without the time and access for real relationships – a cheap substitute that feels justgood enough to keep them subscribing. Naturally, big tech moguls severely limit their own children’s screen time.
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Leading AI researchers now expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where AI meets or exceeds human intellectual capabilities – within three to five years. When AGI automates thinking, the economy will need to reorganise around what machines cannot do: feel.
We are already in the intimacy economy. But if we are to thrive within it, we must wrestle back our most valuable economic asset from technology: the messy complexities of being human. My generation are the begrudging harbingers of what will happen if we continue to outsource intimacy: we will lose the emotional skills a post-AGI economy will depend on most, rendering us unemployable. We knew social media was addictive and slowing our cognitive development, but officials took until this year to act. We can’t make the same mistake with the intimacy economy.
My friend recently asked for my advice on whether to text after a first date to say he’s not interested. I gave him an answer baked with the thoughtfulness only lived experience can create. Turns out, it wasn’t needed: “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve already asked Claude.”
To reclaim what we’re losing, we must resist taking any sign of discomfort as a reason to opt out. We must stop outsourcing intimacy to AI, reinvesting instead in each other to rebuild the emotional literacy we lost to digital dependencies. We are asking how we guardrail AI. The more urgent question is how we guardrail ourselves.
