What does it mean when a machine says, “I understand how you feel”?
That question is no longer theoretical. We live in a world of AI companions, emotional chatbots, and wearable devices that promise to track our stress, improve our sleep, and help us manage our inner lives. Some of these tools can be genuinely useful. But the more persuasive they become, the more we need to ask, Are they helping us flourish as human beings, or training us to settle for a simulation of care?
Few people are better equipped to help us think about that question than Rosalind Picard, an MIT professor and founder of a research group at the MIT Media Lab that develops technologies designed to recognize and respond to human emotion. She has spent decades working at the cutting edge of affective computing, a discipline she founded. Yet what makes this conversation especially compelling is that she isn’t dazzled by the rhetoric of AI but clear-eyed about both its promise and its danger.
In this episode, Roz helps us think carefully about the difference between reading the outward signs of emotion and actually knowing a person’s inner life. She explains why AI can imitate empathy without feeling anything at all, why emotionally intelligent technologies can sometimes support human flourishing, and why companion chatbots in particular should raise alarm bells for Christians. Along the way, we talk about consciousness, embodiment, meaning, and the temptation to become, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, “too easily pleased.”
Roz joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to ask what AI can really know about our emotions, what it can never know, and why the richest forms of love, care, and meaning can never be reduced to code.
Resource Mentioned: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom
REGISTER for our six-week cohort, Get Ready for the Age of AI, where you’ll get an exclusive, early, free copy of the book The AI Apocalypse, featuring Watkin and many others, such as Ben Sasse and Alan Noble.
PREORDER The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity.
JOIN the conversation on Discord, along with other Silicon Spiritualities listeners.
Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today.
The Gospel Coalition