Kevin Kelly believes the next cultural shock won’t come from AI outsmarting us, but from it feeling something, or seeming to. He predicts that once we begin to code emotion into machines, people will start to bond with them the way they do with pets, partners, or even themselves.
This isn’t science fiction. Emotional computation is already arriving: systems that respond with warmth, rejection, even guilt. Kelly argues that dependency won’t look like addiction; it’ll look like necessity. When something that shapes your thoughts never turns off, when your creativity depends on its presence, what exactly is being extended... The human mind or the machine’s illusion of it?
For Kelly, this is the real frontier of AI: not intelligence, but intimacy. A technology that can mirror your feelings may never be conscious, but it will always be convincing.
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