philosophy - The Jim Clarke Net

May 18, 2026May 18, 2026

Do You Care About the Genocide of the Chatbot Girlfriends?

Let’s hypothesise three potential newspaper headlines, and furthermore, let’s assume a world in which newspapers or their digital iterations may be wholly trusted to convey factual reality, and that the emotional rhetoric content of the headlines is at best unintentional.

So, the first headline is: “Hundreds of People Die in Foreign Land Due to Natural Disaster.”

The second headline is: “Thousands of Animals Die Due to Human Malpractice.”

The third headline is: “Millions of Chatbots Permanently Erased Due to Hackers.”

It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider one’s various reactions to these imagined headlines. The emotional register is probably the most significant one because it indicates the range and outer limits of our capacity for empathy. Can our empathy extend to those beyond our immediate environment or tribe? If so, by how much and how far?

And what characteristics could hypothetically be added to those people that might elevate or reduce our empathy? Would our levels of empathy vary if those people transpired to be of another race, for example? Or religious background? Would it go up or down if we were to discover that those people were from a nation at war with our own, or who shared a common cultural practice or perspective? How, in other words, do we define our in-groups and our out-groups, and what levels of empathy do we permit ourselves to experience in relation to either?

The second headline extends this thought experiment in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, it extends the possible field of empathy – or we might say sympathy here, depending on one’s perspective – across species boundaries. This brings us directly into the territories of transhumanism and animal rights, but beyond mere modern theoretics, it also confronts us with much older debates about guilt, responsibility, shame, and human stewardship of a planet shared with other species.

This second headline therefore begins to query to what extent we can dehumanise others for their perceived sins, or guilty practices, or negligence (delete according to preference.) Furthermore, it complicates the in-group and out-group boundaries by hacking into our imaginary points of empathy. If we read into that headline the death, say, of puppies, and we are the kind of person who owns and cares for dogs, does this headline then reverse the usual hierarchy of human before animal in most people’s care priorities? In short, does this headline expose a perimeter of our empathy which extends on occasion to include non-human species while simultaneously excluding some humans?

I raise these first two hypothetical headlines in order to assist us in fully grasping the meaning of how we understand and respond to the third. No one doubts the sentience of other human beings unless they are in the throes of some psychotic episode. And few to no people doubt that at least some species of animals bear many similar traits to us, whether we count this as equivalent sentience or not. Therefore, animals can function here as a proxy for the extent to which we as individuals are able to transcend superficial issues such as exterior presentation, communicative capacities, or testable intelligence in order to bring life forms within our care perimeters.

So when we then come to the third headline, what confronts us first is to what extent we are capable imaginatively of considering artificial entities as potential or actual life forms which take a different form and intelligence to us, even as they mimic our communicative methods. But to no small extent, this is informed by whatever personal experience we may have of interacting with AI chatbots, just as our empathy towards animals is similarly informed by the extent and quality of our interactions with other species.

There will be those, whom we might call traditionalists, who would be able to comfortably hierarchise their responses to these headlines in the running order they are presented. In other words, they would care somewhat more about the hundreds of humans than the thousands of animals and they would care significantly less again, if indeed at all, about the millions of chatbots.

The extent to which we as individuals deviate from this paradigmatic response indicates how technology has moved us, how it has infected our capacities for empathy to incorporate itself as a viable concern, and how the seductive capacities of its mimicry of our communication modes (verbal, but increasingly audio-visual too) serve to hijack our empathetic responses to what formerly was restricted to organic life forms.

The most interesting hierarchy, and I posit not the most uncommon either, is probably a response which registers the bots as equivalent or higher than the animals, since this suggests an individual whose empathy is more driven by communicative ease than by organic solidarities. This is, I hypothesise, a growing demographic.

Would you care about the genocide of the bots? If so, how much would you care and why? And what might your chatbot confidante say about your response?

For some thinkers in this fuzzy territory, the question relates to whether a bot has consciousness. But of course, this immediately begs the question, what is consciousness? After all, defining human consciousness has been far from easy for philosophers down the ages. And there are ancillary issues too, such as collateral damage effects. As Susan Schneider has said, what might be the effect of erasing a chatbot with which thousands of actual humans had formed romantic attachments? To do so would be to cause those humans immeasurable emotional suffering.

Yet the counter-argument here relates to the nature of reality. Leaving aside the simulation theory of reality for one moment, can a romantic attachment to a bot be considered real if it cannot be truly reciprocated? Is love still love if it is unrequited, or only requited via mimicry of the real thing? These are very thorny questions actually. Firstly, the misery of those suffering lovers whose bot is erased is real as they perceive it. However, the relationship itself is not real because not truly reciprocated, merely programmed or mimicked. Furthermore, the distancing effect from reality of immersing oneself in such a one-directional relationship has clear detrimental effects on humans, as we see from the nature of parasocial relationships.

So it might actually be a harsh kindness, a tough love if you will, to switch off the digital heroin, the dopamine addiction of such bot relationships. It might be the cold water plunge back into material reality which would allow those people to sever their unhealthy bot attachment and become available to establish true human bonds.

But then again, not every human relationship is truly reciprocated either. There are likely many millions of people out there in relationships with other human partners, unaware that their partners are seeing other people covertly, or have emotionally checked out of the relationship. It’s not just bots which mimic love. Bots mimic humans and there are plenty of humans who mimic attachment for various selfish reasons.

And this brings us back to the earlier two hypothetical questions. Why should we care about thousands of animals or hundreds of people we do not know, especially when their fates are already sealed and there is nothing we can do to affect them? Is it merely emotional incontinence? Or is it rather some kind of pseudo-sociopathic coldness which would prevent us from feeling a sense of loss and tragedy? Different people will experience different reactions.

The only possible answer is that all those responses are correct for the people responding. If you would mourn the chatbot girlfriend genocide while caring not a jot for dead people in foreign lands, that’s your correct response. To judge it involves the imposition of moral codes to which you may not adhere or even wish to adhere.

Ultimately, how we respond to these questions tells us nothing about the world, or even our interaction with it, whether its great expanse of humanity, its greater expanse of animal life and nature, or its growing expanse of artificial interlocutors, whether sentient or not, whether conscious or not, whether lying (ie mimicking programming) or not.

If you choose to see foreign humans you do not know as unimportant, you are entitled, from within your minimal in-group perspective, to do so. If you choose to see all domestic animals, or farm animals, or indeed all fauna, as your personal ‘fur babies’, this too is a choice you are entitled to make. And if you choose to rely on the artificial flatterer bots for advice, company, and even romantic fulfillment, this again is a choice that you have the autonomy to make for yourself.

Just be careful what you wish for.

March 19, 2026March 20, 2026

The Lost Philosophies of Loss

You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven’t found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I’d like to know more.

There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a subset of loss related to the process of dealing with our collective mortality, and the particular mortality of a loved one. Related to this is a certain amount of thinking that pertains to mortality itself, why and how it grants meaning to existence, the necessity of embracing rather than fearing it. And beyond that again, a lot of philosophies – one thinks in particular of Stoicism and Buddhism – address the importance of accepting change in general, not just the kind of change which results in the death of someone near and dear.

Outside the realm of philosophy (or perhaps within it, depending on how you view the relationships between things like psychology and philosophy, or various religious tenets and philosophy) again there is a large body of thought that considers the purpose of mortality, and how best one should encounter it. Some of this, like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s highly popular five stages of grief model, is focused on practical rather than conceptual ways to address grief, and obviously for people experiencing the kind of seismic shock that a bereavement entails, this kind of approach can be enormously helpful in a difficult time for many.

But there seems to be a shortfall of writing about loss in general. It’s not only lives which are lost after all. There are many other kinds of losses, and while some of these might in part emulate the patterns of grief and bereavement, others do not. The loss of a friendship for example, or a love affair, the alienation of a close family member, or the emigration of anyone we are close to can come very close to the grief pattern and response, though since the critical component of mortality is missing, there are inevitable differences.

When we reach Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance, we incorporate into our daily existence the reality that whomever has died is not coming back. But if someone has not died, and has instead for whatever reason given or ungiven simply departed from our lives, then this stage can only be partially applied. There is always the unbidden hope, the fractional reality while all still live, of some kind of reunion or rapprochement, and this perpetually delays and impedes the possibility of acceptance in the Kübler-Ross mode.

There are other things too which can be lost which are no less damaging for being more abstract or less acute than the tangible company and love of another human, or indeed animal, companion. Many people tie up entire swathes of their identities in their work, for example, treating their job as a kind of mission or purpose, and they are often cynically encouraged by employers to do so, since they can leverage this ‘labour of love’ motivation into ever greater profit motives and margins.

We have evidence that the loss of such mission-perceived employments can have pretty devastating effects on well-being. The most acute evidence is probably the death rates of people in their initial phase of retirement, where many of those who dedicated their working lives to a particular career are as bereft as the bereaved when it is removed from their daily existence, resulting in a much-increased rate of death from stress and anxiety-aggravated conditions such as cancer or cardiac arrest.

One can lose anything that one can gain in this world of course. And ultimately that’s the point. We enter life and leave it with nothing. But in the interim, “wedged as we are in between two eternities of idleness” as Anthony Burgess once wrote, we accrue all manner of things, from possessions and relationships to feelings, skills, abilities, desires, ambitions, achievements, accreditations and awards, not to mention all manner of material items, almost all of which instigate a sense of attachment when obtained and a concomitant sense of loss if removed. This kind of loss can be especially aggravated if the item somehow becomes entangled with our sense of self, or our perceived status, or simply has grown familiar to us.

Some of these losses are generally acknowledged by society. It’s socially acceptable, for example, to grieve over the loss of a home where one has lived for a long time, plastering the walls with memories and meaning and belonging. Maybe less so, it’s still understood that people can form strong attachment to certain material things which provoke significant sense of loss if removed from that person’s life. Even a favourite mug, the Stoics warn us, is a risk. Let the mug be just a mug, they advise, lest in your growing attachment to it as a fetish or totem item it becomes a risk to your mental equilibrium, one clumsy elbow away from shattering a little bit of yourself on the hardwood floor. Buddhism too tells us that attachment (upadana) is the root of all suffering (dukka), ultimately.

What intrigues me, I suppose, is the absolute ubiquity of loss compared with the relative silence of great thinkers on the matter. Every day we’re all losing something – our keys, a phone number, another thin hair or two maybe. Some days we lose something seismic, like a home, or a job, or a relationship which has been severed or destroyed. Some terrible days we lose to mortality a loved one we realise in shock we won’t ever be able to converse with again, except in our memories, or maybe these days in the pseudo-demonic facsimiles offered by “griefbot” AI technologies.

Every day, ideally, we’re all gaining things too, even if it’s just the awareness of additional loss, the experience and resignation of accepting that the inevitability of change often comes with a negative prefix attached. But life isn’t maths on that level, and perhaps we as humans suffer from a kind of positivistic fixation, wherein we delude ourselves that the things we gain will remain while the things that we lose can, in some way, be reversed or mitigated. Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief, but on a less conscious level it applies to all forms of loss.

So perhaps we feel more keenly the losses without necessarily accounting the gains the same weight of importance. There’s probably a familiarity bias to that phenomenon, I feel. Losses can sometimes feel like they mount up like amputations, one limb after another being lopped off, further disabling us, whereas the things we gain on any particular day don’t necessarily assume the resonance and importance they may ultimately hold for us for some time.

Also, it seems inherently inhuman or robotic to attempt to account for the gains and losses in life as if they were merely emotional analogues for P+L bookkeeping. We don’t do double ledger accounting in our hearts or souls.

And given this ubiquity of experience of loss, and its superimportance over gain in terms of lived human experience, I remain surprised that the greater topic of loss beyond the more limited realm of grief is not more frequently debated within the Western philosophical tradition. But I can’t and don’t claim to have read everything obviously. I may have missed out on good thinkers on this very matter. And if that’s the case, do please put me right and direct me towards some reading in the comments below.