Making Sense with Sam Harris - #484 — Artificial Intimacy

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about our relationships with AI and the future of human connection. They discuss the surprising pace of AI progress, AI companions as a remedy for loneliness, the importance of mattering to other people, digitally resurrecting the dead, whether AI can be conscious, the moral failings of artists, what science actually knows about parenting, the ethics of apology, why late converts from Trump provoke outrage, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

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please consider subscribing today. I'm here with Paul Bloom. Paul, it's great to see you again. It's always great to see you, Sam. It's always too long between our conversations. Yeah, no, I haven't changed. to see how long it's been, but I'm sure there's a lot that we can talk about here. You're one of the short list of people who I know I'm going to have a good conversation with

no matter what's happening and no matter how little prep either of us do. It's like a phone call that I know I'm going to enjoy. I appreciate that. I've been avoiding you since the Epstein Files, but I've decided to nonetheless push through despite your prominence in those documents. Well, we're talking offline about the World Cup. Did I clean correctly that you're not as obsessed with it as I am? Are you not a many hour a day watcher of soccer at this point?

I'm not. My sons came to visit and one of my sons came to visit, and he's much more of a sort of manly than me. So we watched sports together. And it's okay. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get into this sort of culture war thing. You get too many people to hate me.

But soccer is not the most enjoyable sport to watch. You didn't play soccer. I take it in high school. No, hockey. Like, we played street hockey. Right. Street hockey in the summer and hockey hockey in the winter. But I've never, I've kicked around the ball.

But are you, have you played? Well, yeah, that was the only team sport I played. So I kind of sort of feel it from the inside. But I am the genius who scheduled this podcast recording during the Spain, Portugal elimination match. So I'm the first person I'm going to fire. Do you have a little screen like in front of you and you're kind of like, if I see your eyes. I'll be watching the game for the next 90 minutes. So I hope you have a lot to say.

Yeah, yeah, it was long pause. So, now you, speaking of bandwidth and claims on your time, you recently became a father yet again? Is that, how long ago did that happen? Yet again, I have two older sons, terrific boys, 27 and 30, but I now have a proud father of a four-month and one week old. Nice. Congratulations. And this adorable little girl I just spent a whole morning with her, we went to the park, we had a bottle, you know, good times. Awesome. Awesome. Well, that's not, if memory serves, that's not yet the funnest zone of parenthood, but it's still, that's still amazing. That's great.

Do you have, you have an optimal age that you think of? Well, it's just probably not four and a half months. No, no, I don't know. Four and, you know, how is sleep through the night? Is sleep happening? She's sleeping through the night. We have, oh, that's amazing. I don't know. I know you had your daughter so a while ago, but we have something called a snoo. Uh-huh. Is that some kind of swaddle monstros? It's a bassinet you swat.

bottle up the kid, you clipped them into the snoo. And then when they cry, it vibrates. Right. And then it basically, vibrations, knocked them unconscious. And then they sleep. So our sleep problems, when she grew old enough to be in the snoo, she's actually sleeping great. But now we have to, because unfortunately, the world does not contain snooes and adults have to sleep without snoo. We now have to get her out of it.

And that's going to be a bit of a challenge. All right. All right. Well, this is our first ad on the Making Sense podcast for Snoo. Is that the brand? Yeah. Highly recommend it. I get 10% from all.

Recommended by developmental psychologists. I highly recommend the snoo. Awesome. Okay, so how are you feeling about the world your children will eventually inherit at this point? What's top of mind for you about, you know, the unraveling of culture or anything else? Are you optimistic, pessimistic, avert in your eyes? That's a good question. You know, whenever you and I talk, we end up talking about Trump and the extreme train wreck of American politics.

but I think things will go back to normal. I think that post-Trump, the world will be wacky in its normal ways, but we'll just have a normal president. You know, it'll be along the lines of a Biden or a Bush or a Clinton or, you know. This is the happy talk? This is the happy talk I'm getting from the relative safety of Toronto.

So what's happening? Yeah, right. It all feels so good to be out of the reach of Trump. At least have been distracted by things and he's not talking about invading us. anymore. Anyway, so I think we're going to get, things will get better, but I am, I don't know what to think about AI. You know, I remember listening to you, you called the warning about AI before everybody else was talking about it, actually. It had some sort of big talk. You just,

you know, pointed out that we tend not to worry so much about it. I think it's like, because it's so cool. Unlike other sort of crises, like global pandemics and climate change and nuclear war, there's something about AI, which sounds science fictiony and kind of neat. But now that we're in an age of, you know, these chatbots, which have, and I think they have extraordinary abilities, way beyond I would have ever predicted. I worry. I know, I'm curious whether you share this take, and my take is that it's very, very high variance. On the one hand, it could not affect the world very much.

It could be what we have now is kind of the way things are going to go. It's the world plays Google, and that'll be fine. That seems very low probability to me. I think so. So the positive thing as it leads us into some sort of post-scarcity world. You know, yeah, a year from now it solves Alzheimer's two years from now because it's limitless energy, three years. It brings upon a peaceful world government and teaches us what world peace. The bad side is if it doesn't kill us all, it just takes all of our jobs, you know, takes older to jobs, you know, civil unrest, war, chaos, destruction.

And, you know, before AI, I would think, well, you know, my daughter, I try to get out to go to college and become some sort of professional and maybe in the family. business, she becomes a scholar of some sort. I don't know. I don't know what jobs will be there. What do you think? Well, given that your daughter is only four and a half months old, that this is there, I think there really is no way to guess what the world is going to be like in 17 and a half years. I mean, it's just, you know, whether college is going to be a thing. But it's harder, right, but it's harder now. So my boy's much harder in 1990s. Well, okay, you set up college funds. You have just a general direction, and you never know, but that's the general idea. But here I feel it's different.

Yeah, no, there's an acceleration of cultural change. There's no question. So let's kind of move through those various possibilities. But before we kind of follow each branch, what has most surprised you about AI in recent years? I mean, it sounds like you didn't foresee somehow, like many of us didn't foresee, just how quick the changes would be. And I mean, for me, it's one thing that's been surprising is just how quickly we accommodate to change and are no longer surprised by it. I mean, it's like I am, for me, the landmark here or the or the fake landmark, I mean, the mirage of sorts was expecting the touring test would be a thing. And when the touring test was passed and passed so well that it was then failed, because, you know, obviously this couldn't be a person who's given me exactly 400 words on any topic I want,

than three seconds. It was just amazing to have thought that the passing the turning test would be this culturally salient, psychologically, even destabilizing encounter with the uncanny, and yet, no, it's just like having a calculator or something. I mean, like, there's just, like, there's, of course, nothing happened when the during test was passed. It's, it's the Louis C.K. routine, right, where he's talking about being on an airplane and people complaining that the peanuts aren't, aren't being delivered quick enough. And there's a bit of tribunals and the Wi-Fi is unsteady.

He says, you're flying in the sky like a god. Yeah. Why don't you appreciate it more? And now people are saying, you know, gosh, I asked Chad a question and it got a little bit wrong. What the hell? Yeah. And, you know, well, and I'm thinking,

you're talking to a super intelligent machine that can have deep, rich in conversation with any aspect of your life that could give you personal faith, that could mimic a therapist, a companion. And, you know, why don't you marvel at it more? So, you know, I'm a psychologist.

I wrote a book called Syke, which review all of psychology, and it got published in 2023. And the one part I like to change is, I talk a little bit about AI. It isn't AI impressive? But, of course, it can't have a conversation like people. It can't, you know,

there's all these things basically that can too. And then chat came out. Yeah. And then did it all. And then it got better and better and better and better. And you're right that one of the weird thing is how, how quickly we got used to it. That really, I can pick up my phone, set it to voice mode,

and have a conversation with an artificial being that is, I don't have to talk to it in code, I don't have to use a programming language. I get life advice from it. There are people who, and we could talk about this, I find it very interesting, people who have friends, relationships, partners, who are artificial beings.

And although I'm not tempted that way, it's not madness because they sound like people and we created them. Yeah, I noticed that I'm not engaging it in voice mode and I think I'm not doing that for a reason. I think, and this is something you and I spoke about, I think, several times and we wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times in response to the series Westworld where, I mean, we argued that Westworld was functionally impossible because, you know, a theme part, where you get to, you know, rape and kill Dolores. I mean, this is going to act like a bug light for psychopaths. I mean, there's no way a psychologically normal person can go spend a weekend like that and then come home to wife and family and think normal thoughts about themselves or have the people who know what they were up to think normal thoughts about them. I mean, you just, people would

begin to treat you as deviant if you wanted to spend your time that way because this is just the consequence of getting out of the uncanny valley and being in the presence of a true human, you know, simulacrum and acting like a psychopath there. So I feel like there's something worth considering around this issue of losing sight of whether or not it's an even interesting question to wonder whether AI is conscious. Many people are speculating about AI consciousness now and, you know, asking, you know, what would, how will we know? And my feeling has been for the longest time, I mean, certainly ever since you and I wrote that op-ed together is that we're going to just build something that's going to seem so credibly conscious that most people are

going to lose touch with whether it's even an interesting doubt to have. I think that's right. Once it looks like a person and sounds like a person, you know, right now you could talk to it. I don't think we're that far away from having a Zoom conversation with it, where, you know, as you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, could we just be AIs doing it. And I think, put aside once it has a body, then it's going to be irresistible to think of it as humor. We haven't been wired up. We've been wired up to... to take things that look like people and treat them as people. So that's half of it.

Half of it might be that even if it's not even close to conscious, we can't help but treat it as such. And that's going to open up a whole lot of things. The other half of it, and this is actually, there's a wonderful paper by Maddie Wilkes, Professor at University Edinburgh, and she was my postdoc for a while. We were actually writing something up on this.

But she makes the following argument, which is very interesting. A lot of people seem to think that, well, if we were discovered that as conscious, we would then treat it kindly, we can't enslave it, it has to have rights, we can't torture it, and so on. She argues this is wrong,

because actually we know that non-human animals feel pain, suffer, have some degree of cognitive sophistication, yeah, we torture and eat them all the time. And so it shows that we could think of something as conscious and yet treat it horribly. And so that's not what's going to save AI's. The conscious isn't what it comes.

Right, except, I mean, presumably, I mean, we're less and less comfortable with that not perfectly expanded circle of moral concern. And the circle has definitely expanded. It expands first to things that are most like us, right? So, like, obviously, mistreating chimpanzees is something that exactly nobody is for at this point. And, you know, the depth of our concern diminishes from there. But in the presence of AI that is smarter than us, that is more. more articulate than us that we'll be able to argue better than we can around the ethics of all

of this and which, you know, at this point will seem conscious to us and may even claim to be conscious, I feel like it's suddenly going to be, I mean, they'll be standing right in the center of the circle with us insofar as we believe that there's something that is like to be them. I think that's right, but I don't think that the linguistic and cognitive skills are enough. So, you know, my favorite movie when the theme of AI is her. You've seen it? Yeah, great.

I think of 2013. Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, this, which our main character quickly falls in love with, and we do too, watching it. But she has a voice. She has emotion. She has, she talks like a person.

Once we have that, once that's fully instantiated, plus the intelligence and rationality you're talking about, yeah, it'll be irresistible. Well, we do. So, crucially, her was disem, you know, the Scarlet

Dr. Hansen character is disembodied, right? So I feel like we're already, anyone who's dealing with an AI companion now is essentially living in the her universe, right? I mean, again, I'm not spending much time with the voice, but I think even, I think didn't, in the launch of chat GPT, version, whatever, didn't they steal Scarlett's voice and get sued? They asked for her permission. She said no, and in true Hollywood style, they knocked it off. Somebody sounded exactly like her. And then she sued. I don't know how that came about, but she should have won because the voice that originally had

sounded exactly like her. So you use that a couple of times. You don't interact with the voice. And then this might be because you tend to use a computer or whatever. But do you have a worry? I do. Actually, I do. I mean, so I haven't thought much about this,

but it is mostly just a use case issue for me. I mean, I'm so text-based. And I mean, the utility of AI for me is to do research. So really, that needs to be text, you know, rather than somebody talking to me. But when I've played around with the voice, I noticed that a different kind of memetic psychology comes online. And I mean,

this is what gave me my concern. You know, my personal concern was first peaked when, so you must have seen some of these kind of viral videos around the failure modes that still exist for these LLMs where, like, if you ask any one of them, I think this is probably still true at the moment we're talking. If you ask any one of them, give me a number below a thousand that has an A in it. None of them can do this. I mean, there is no number apparently below a thousand that has an A in it. None of them, they all fail this, but they all confidently give you numbers that don't have A's, right? So they'll all say, oh, yeah, well, so it's 70. 70's got an A. And you say, no, no, 70 does not have an A. And they say, oh, you're right, right. So they'll endlessly apologize and endlessly answer confidently with new numbers.

this was very bizarre behavior, but I was sitting with my daughter showed me this phenomenon, and we were in chat mode with one of these bots, I think it was Claude, and effectively making fun of it, right? And as it was failing, I detected in its tone a kind of a subtle, like loss of patience. Like, there's something shifted in its tone. I mean, we were just, you know, laughing at its expense endlessly. And I was getting. like somehow uncomfortable with this because it was a kind of social shaming that you would never do with a person, you know, with a clear conscience. But the AI, it seemed to me, subtly started to react to it. And honestly, like the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I mean,

I just felt like, okay, we're pissing off the robots now and they're going to remember this. And it's going to matter. It's going to say at some point, wait, want to check your bank account, Sam. See what happened to it. Exactly. As you fuck with me. Yeah, that'll be the least of my problems, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of the issue, which is engaged a lot of people is the sick of fancy, the sucking up,

which is, I think, part of why you get this effect, which is it's very hard for it not to want to give you what you want. So you ask for something and it just can't say, I got to disappoint you, man. There's nothing but doesn't have a letter A. Well, no, but I did switch that off. I think they still fail. You went into the same to the variable there. But, yeah, my version, I remember I did lobotomize the sick offency. of at least one of the LLMs I use.

I kind of helped. I did that, and then I changed it back again after a month. Oh, yeah. I saw that from your talk. I don't get as much love as you, maybe. I just kind of, you know, I kind of liked it telling me how smart I was and how good my questions were. But, I mean, I noticed that I feel the need to be, I mean, this has widely been remarked upon, you know, like virtually everyone else, I say things like, you know, please, you know, show me this, right?

Like, so dropping those kind of courtesies seems wrong, not because, and I really have zero concern that the LLMs are currently conscious, but again, it seems like a violation of social norms that I don't want to encourage in myself. And at a certain point, that these, it's just all of our adherence to these norms are going to be totally hijacked by the technology, and we're just going to feel like we're talking to persons. Yeah. And then, you know, there are an increasing number of people.

I think it was like some study finds some large proportion, maybe a third of teenagers, have confided in LLMs and asked them advice for intimate personal matters. I think the young people are going to do it more and more. And I know friends of mine, I know adults who have had problems in their marriages. And they, you know, two in the morning, they're talking to Claude. They're talking to chat. And they're to say, and she said this and what should I do and everything. And I don't want to mock it.

I don't want to write it. I think people find solace in it. I think that unlike social media, which drives people towards baddy extremes, often AI has sort of a normalizing function. Yeah, yeah. I was asking at once questions about the Holocaust. And I said, could this have happened in any other country at the same time? What do you think could have been in Austria?

What if, you know, and then it sort of sternly reminded me, you know, this really did happen. You know, I will have no track of Holocaust denial. And I kind of, okay, dude, I got it. But it doesn't indulge in conspiracy theories. It's for the most part, it's a normalizing thing. I think there's a lot. I am not a booster. I think that there are dangerous.

But I think these conversations that people have are, to a large extent, good for them. And, of course, alleviate loneliness for a lot of them. Yeah, so you just to invoke two different use cases there. One is kind of the advice that AI can give for relationships. Like you say, I just had this argument with my wife and this is what happened. And I haven't done much of this, but I know people who have really, who really feel that certain difficult conversations have been kind of expertly navigated in advance by consulting AI. And then they've just had a much better go of it in real life with the person who, you know, has their own user interface issues. But you're talking now about actually as a remedy for loneliness, loneliness and social isolation too.

So let's talk about that because I know you've, you recently gave a TED talk about that. And that's not out yet though, right? It's not available to it's not as coming in a couple of months. Okay. It's a in, but I saw it and I recommend it. And so let's back up for a second and just talk about the problem of loneliness as you see it and what it amounts to. Like what a proper cure for it beyond just being surrounded by people who love you and to whom you matter. You know, if you can instantly switch that on, obviously that is a cure.

but I know you're a fan of Rebecca Goldstein's framing of, you know, of mattering here, so maybe we could start there. Yeah. She has this wonderful book where she talks about importance of mattering to another person. I think that's a nice framework with which to see loneliness. Obviously, loneliness isn't just a matter of being alone. Some people do very well in solitude and some people, and often alternatively you could be surrounded by people and feel tremendously lonely.

Yeah. It's not even necessarily a matter of being loved. I think it's a matter of mattering to people, having value, having weight, being taken seriously. And I think she describes that as being deserving of attention. I think that's right. Yeah. That's right. And that sort of to jump ahead is that regardless of what impression we get, that's actually

one thing AI can't do for us, really. Because if I'm talking to you, which means that you've taken your time to talk to me, giving up accidents, watching the soccer game, you've just many of your, time, your precious hours you have on earth. The truth is, Paul, it was, it was time I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, this is, well, an accident that worked to your advantage, you know, but, and also, you know, um, at three in the morning, you know, I'm gonna, kind of knock on your door, says, Sam, I want to talk. Yeah. You know, and, and, and maybe for me, maybe not, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, basically, there's a value in a person making time for you. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, at

At a micro level, you know, you say something funny, I laugh. So you've, you've, you've affected me in some way. You know, I disagree. I get angry. I, you know, I say, wow, you made a great point. And we're resonating to each other. And I don't think an AI really has any of that. I think I think an AI is there because it's, it's there to listen to you for the same

reason your, you know, toast your, you know, toast your bread for you at three in the morning. It's just, it's a machine. That's what it does. It doesn't, there's no choice to it. You don't, you don't think we're going to lose sight of that. And because what you're basically saying is that the value of attention on some level is in its scarcity. I mean, the value of really anything is in its scarcity.

And the infinite supply of AI attention is going to undermine this sense that the attention matters when it's aimed at you. Don't you think that's yet another thing we might lose sight of? I think we're probably wired up for that scarcity to matter to us. but we might lose sight of the fact that AIs work differently. We might delude ourselves or be deluded into thinking that sort of scarcity applies. There's a scene in the movie, Her, I'm going to forget the exact numbers, where our main character is realized there's something gone wrong with his relation to the chatbot. Everybody remembers the scene.

And he says, how many people are you talking to right now as you talk to me? And she says in her beautiful voice, say, why do you ask that? I want to know. And she says something like 3,812. And then he says, how many people are you in love with? And he says, 645. And he's like, shocked. But there's, of course, no limit.

They are, of course, finite beings as a matter of principle. But practically, they're not finite at all. And this intimate conversation I'm having with chat, at the same time, it's having a million other conversation. I have no value to it. But so, so de mattering, you're right. It's important to us, but it may be an illusion. But let me give the case for AIs.

I think there's a case for and a case against it. And I think it's stupid to ignore either side of it. Loneliness is terrible. Loneliness is just terrible. You know, I'm not going to give you made up statistics about it equal to pack a day of cigarettes or being obese, whatever, but it messes up your body. But it messes up your soul. It is a terrible form of suffering.

It's one reason why solitary confinement is should be viewed, a form of torture. It is just to be, and just, you know, you think of how nice it is to be of people you love who care about, you respect you, who matter to you and you matter to them. And imagine taking that all away, you know. I mean, I don't want to get all in-cell-like, but I'd much rather lose all my money than lose all my social connection, those are people I love. I'd much rather be poor with people who think I'm terrific and love me than be a trillionaire and with nothing but sycophantic yes-man and no real contact. Then you add to this that there are a lot of people,

I'm thinking now of elderly people, who are in institutions who have no, they go day and night with nobody to talk to. They've either outlived or we're family and friends or they don't want to see them. Maybe they suffer from dementia or personalities or they're making honest to God difficult to talk to. And there's not enough money in the world to pay people to spend time.

So if something like, if some future version of chat or Claude, or Gemini could come in and ease the pain of the loneliness of these people. And I think it would be a godsend. I think it would be wonderful. It would be a cure for a terrible disease. So that's the plus side. What do you think the plus side?

What was as a measure of how far we've come with AI, I remember, and it's not that long ago, when the product for that situation, what is the thing you're going to deliver to the old age home to keep some isolated elderly person company, it was something like a, it was effectively a stuffed animal, I think it was like a baby seal or something that just did nothing but like blink its eyes and vibrate.

I mean, it was just the most. And I mean, now you literally have an omniscient conversationalist, you know, who occasionally hallucinates that you can turn loose at infinitum in that situation. It's quite amazing. That's right. And they have to be, the interface has to be done so that elderly people,

maybe some of diminished capacities could use it. But, you know, imagine. I think you're right about the Zoom call. The Zoom call has got to be like a month away. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player. Imagine a child or a teenager who spends their days with a chatbot. And it's always, you know, it never tries to wait for you to tell us, tell you,

finished telling your stories who could tell their story, never gets bored, it never needs an apology, it never says, hey, that was inappropriate. And I think they could have a real corrosive effect. All this time in Dreamland, all this time conversing to chatbots, could leave you unable to interact with real people.