Authors, AI, and Happiness

Happiness comes from human relationships, but information technology has replaced relationships with text and images on screens thereby reducing our happiness. AI will likely further remove us from human relationships by substituting authors with chatbots. When we read an author (a novelist, a playwright, a poet, a columnist) we are connected to them and their personhood at some level. This human connection, however indirect, is still valuable and a source of well-being. Reading AI-generated text only connects us to machines, which doesn’t correlate with happiness. Replacing authors with robots will weaken human relationships and likely cause a deterioration in quality of life.