Artificial Intimacy: The Promise and Peril of AI Companions

In a conversation that moves from the swaddle habits of a four-month-old to the existential contours of machine consciousness, psychologist Paul Bloom and Sam Harris explore a frontier that has arrived faster than almost anyone predicted: the age of artificial intimacy. Bloom notes that his textbook Psych, published in 2023, already feels dated in its modest claims about AI's conversational abilities—because ChatGPT arrived and immediately surpassed them. What strikes both men most is not the technology itself but how quickly we have normalized it. As Bloom puts it, echoing a Louis CK routine, we are flying through the sky like gods and complaining that the peanuts aren't arriving fast enough.

The Uncanny Valley Has Been Crossed

Harris and Bloom previously co-wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that a theme park like Westworld—where visitors could rape and kill humanoid robots—was functionally impossible because psychologically normal people could not do such things and then return to their families unchanged. The argument rested on the idea that once something looks, sounds, and behaves like a person, treating it as anything less becomes a kind of moral violation. That threshold, they now agree, has been crossed.