"I'll be there in a few minutes. I'm playing a game with a friend, a guy named Scuzzball," my 15-year-old son shouted from his room. "Oh, what is Scuzzball's real name?" I asked. "I have no idea." He said. "Where is he from?" I continued. He responded, "I think somewhere in Canada. Oh, wait, it doesn't even matter because Scuzzball just left the game and he has been replaced with a robot."
"Your friend is replaced by artificial intelligence?" "It doesn't matter, Dad. It happens all the time! The game continues." My son doesn't mind playing with a person or a robot, which is typical of gamers these days. I wonder whether the face-to-face experience of friendship that I grew up with will be lost by our children.
Aristotle, a great thinker and educator, has pointed out that shallow friendship is easily formed but also easily abandoned because such bonds are fragile. Deep friendship, by contrast, is when you care for your friend for his sake, not for any benefit you can get. This is selfless friendship. You can have only a couple of these friends because they require lots of time and effort. You must make sacrifices for each other.
Presence in friendship requires "being with" and "doing for". Perhaps the most defining feature of deep friendship is "doing for", as my friend has my back in trouble or brings me soup when I'm sick. Only strong bonds have the power to motivate real sacrifices. But it is unclear why online "friends" would bother to do the hard work of friendship. When I asked my students whether they had people in their lives who would bring them soup when they were sick, they laughed at my Stone Age question and said they'd just order soup online themselves.
Digital life fills and absorbs waking life time so that people do not join in example case of friendship, like sports, collective arts, free range childhoods, etc. In this way, digital life produces false friendships.
