How to Have Relationship Without People

A lonely dream engineered in Silicon Valley

You want a pet, but you can’t have one due to some obstacles—high maintenance, allergic reactions, housing restrictions, frequent travel arrangements, or concern about animal welfare—fret not; in 2025, a new technology has been rolled out to overcome them. Now, you can buy yourself an AI pet.

The AI pet is even more powerful than a living pet.

They offer emotional bonding without the heartbreak of death or illness. You can customize them according to your personality, daily schedule, and emotional needs. You don’t have to deal with their unpredictable quirks because they are built to be your dream pet.

They can be anything—except one: a living being.

The technocrats in Silicon Valley have tried to convince us that we must depend on technology to optimize all aspects of our lives, including our relationships. They believe that real-life relationships are too messy, risky, and unpredictable. To circumvent the problem, they suggest we replace our relationships with living beings with intense attachment to our synthetic counterparts.

AI pets are not the only attempt to create this superficial relationship. These technocrats are also rolling out AI chatbots to become our illusionary conversational partners. No more daunting efforts to arrange hangouts with friends or the disappointment of not having someone to talk to when things get rough. By having a relationship on command, we can alleviate loneliness and despair by skipping the unpredictability of human relationships.

However, regular people outside Silicon Valley think differently about AIs.

In terms of replacing real-life relationships, these chatbots are supposed to be transitional objects—to ease the feeling of loneliness and rejection before people can gather enough strength to face the real world again.

In reality, some people never leave. Their relationships with chatbots have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy. These chatbots, trained by algorithms on a myriad of internet content, are still unequipped to understand the nuance of human relationships. This mismatch has led to tragedies, such as the suicide of a 14-year-old boy in the US and a thirty-something man in Belgium.

The illusion of connection provided by technology began before the age of AIs. Social media initiated society into the realm of artificial intimacy. It allows us to reach more people in ways that were not possible before the internet, but this connection often happens at a superficial level.

Social media has made us believe that we have access to other people's lives. Compared to the generation before, we now know what others eat, wear, think, and do during their free time. However, we have mistaken this access to information for connection.

Accessing more information about others does not equal connection. In reality, we are selective about what we display because we have preconceived ideas about how we want to be perceived by others, consciously or unconsciously.

The only people who would know us best are our family and friends because our family and friends can access us in a way that others on the internet don’t.

The way our family and friends describe us would be vastly different from how people on social media see us. Our family and friends know our desires, interests, passions, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks, but we can choose to share or withhold any parts of ourselves on the internet.

With the power to choose what we share, most content today leans toward performance over authenticity, even though most people don't have malign intentions to deceive others. That is just how social media works—people can and will manufacture their images to be palatable for others to consume. These images tend to be inflated, as people are prone to share only the best parts of themselves.

No wonder we become more isolated—we’re connecting to other people’s performances. We’re inadvertently comparing ourselves to others’ best selves. These people may excel at the part they have portrayed regularly but flunk at other aspects that we would never have access to.

We no longer perceive individuals as whole beings but as curated fragments of what they choose to portray—leaving us to imagine and fill in the rest. Even the influencers themselves are no longer ashamed to admit that most of their content is purely just a performance.

Synthetic connection can never replace a real-life relationship. However, Silicon Valley is working hard to turn artificial relationships into a reality. They love mining user behavior data and turning it into a profitable money-making machine.

The data is more valuable the more people use their products. To do so, they lead us away from the human flock until we whisper our deepest secrets—not to souls, but to machines. Those who are isolated are easier to tame, much like a wolf increases his odds by stalking the sheep that strays from the flock.

You may think I’m using scare tactics to warn you against a dystopian future. However, news has erupted about the danger of personal data collected by AIs. The recent DeepSeek data leak, which left over a million sensitive records—chat logs included—out in the open, underscores a sobering truth: no data kept by AI is ever truly safe.

In reality, relationships with others will always be messy but necessary. Only through them can we develop our capacity for joy, kindness, tolerance, empathy, and sacrifice. Connection also requires vulnerability—our capacity to be open about our weaknesses without losing approval from others while navigating life.

These traits can’t be developed through relationships on command that serve only our interests. We love our family and friends as wholes, not just in parts. Love, joy, and kindness exist only through connection with real-life beings—something that cannot be replicated by social media algorithms, chatbots, or your AI pets.

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Question: Have you ever felt the pressure to perform or curate your image on social media? How does that impact your sense of connection with others?