Building Community: What AI Can't Do

Oh boy, here he goes, bashing AI again. - I can hear what you're thinking. Please, give me the benefit of the doubt here.

There is plenty that AI currently can do, and plenty it is getting closer and closer to doing well. Just like the humble screwdriver eventually turned into the impact driver, AI is being continuously improved into a more useful tool. But that does take time, and there are reliability, accuracy, and legal issues that still await resolution, so let's all keep cool heads at this point please.

That said, there is one thing that I fully believe AI cannot, and will not ever do: build and maintain community. In fact I'll argue that it will further degrade community if we don't make a conscious effort to prevent that.

Community Matters

I know a significant number of you reading this are probably introverts. Some of you would prefer to spend your Friday nights at home with a good book, crochet project, or even a coding challenge than be surrounded by a crowd of people on a dance floor, loud restaurant, ball game, concert, or whatever. But that's not what community is anyway, so don't sweat it.

We all have communities. Some of them are extremely small - maybe just our partner or spouse. Some of us have massive communities, but we all have them and, frankly, need them. Community is where we go to for support, ideas, comfort, challenge, validation, and so many more things. Communities can be personal, professional, hobby-based, sports-based, geographic, religious, cultural, or any one of a trillion other possibilities. They can overlap or they can be fully isolated. But they are necessary. They provide human interaction beyond the demands placed on us by jobs or household responsibilities. Sometimes we are accountable to our communities to do things for the community, other times we're simply free to be part of the community.

We use communities to help us unwind and decompress from the stresses of our world, jobs, and lives. We use communities to build up our confidence in our capabilities, self-worth, and point of view. We use communities to get support when we need some help, and we're there to help other members of our community when they need it.

In professional circles we use communities to network for sales opportunities, job opportunities, and educational purposes. (I encourage you to think back over your career and think about when the last time was you got a job without "knowing somebody" who helped you get in the door? With AI acting as a gatekeeper I think you'll find that this is even more important for today's job hunting than it was even 10 years ago)

What Good Community Looks Like

Good community is built on mutual aid or mutual interest - hopefully both. Otherwise, good community can look like lots of things: A Discord channel, a weekly get-together, a group of people you text a lot and see once in a blue moon, a neighborhood or building full of great people. Good community doesn't have to be huge, it can be very small: all the way down to just a couple people. But I firmly believe it requires at least two people to have a community, no matter what definition you want to use.

Community doesn't have just one definition, even good community can have various forms and iterations. But AI doesn't build good community.

Why AI Is Bad At Community

Community, like art, is a very fluid and subjective thing. Community draws on life experiences, good fellowship, and those human things that I don't have the vocabulary to put into words. At the end of the day there's just something more genuine about interacting with an actual person in a community setting than interacting with a computerized voice or the text generated by an AI chatbot.

Setting aside the things I can't seem to articulate for the moment, one thing that AI doesn't have now, and I can't say I have the imagination to believe it will ever have, is life experience. No AI has ever felt the rejection of unrequited love, or the joy over watching your favorite team triumph over those jerks from that other country/city/school/club. AI has never felt the sting of being passed over for promotion, or the joy of walking down the aisle with the person you most love in the world. And even if we get to the point of C-3POs or Johnny-5s I fully expect that their motives and drives, their pains and losses, will be so alien when compared to our own that we'll still be less able to bond with them than to the pets and even wild animals in our world.

Good fellowship is also something I don't believe AI can actually provide. Certainly AI can be polite, AI can be flattering, but AI is just parroting those activities and attitudes, there's no substance behind them. Let me put it another way: AI will never offer to sit down with you and share a meal together, or a couple's massage, or to go with you to that concert at the end of the month.

When we talk about a person who is actually incapable of empathy, incapable of actually caring about anybody's well-being, even if they do a masterful job of going through the motions of appearing empathetic, we often describe them as a psychopath or narcissist. In the long run those personality types in humans makes for someone who is good at building and supporting community, so what should we expect from emotionless AI that is only being nice because it was programmed to?

I know it sounds harsh, but I expect to be able to get as much community value out of a screwdriver as I do an AI system. AI is a tool, not a friend, and we need to keep that perspective. Which isn't to say the screwdriver is useless in a community, I've lent and borrowed many a hand tool in communities and our bonds have been all the stronger for it, but a screwdriver has never been the basis for community.

We Really Need Community Now

AI is causing a real revolution right now. Activities that used to involve human interaction are now moving to anonymous chatbots and other AI driven systems at an accelerated pace. Jobs are being shed by companies for the "excuse" of AI by the truckload. Working remotely has recently disconnected many of us from our professional communities. High transportation costs are isolating us from our physical communities.

Job losses are causing many people to need their community more than ever. Political pressures, rising costs, and many other factors are causing people to need their communities more than they ever have. But screen time, interacting with AI like it is a person, and other factors are further isolating us from each other. (Generations much younger than myself are starting to reject these isolating trends and are embracing a more "analog" lifestyle to offset that isolation)

It is up to us - people and organizations - to build and reinforce these communities. I encourage you to join, start, or support a community or twelve. So I encourage you to find a food pantry, study group, a meetup, a regular gaming night, or even a pen pal to make and nourish that connection.