Dustin on X
JD Vance just described a collapse nobody is prepared for.
Not the automation of labor.
The automation of intimacy.
The generation that grew up on dating apps is the most isolated in recorded history.
They are not dating. They are not marrying. They are not building families.
Technology carved the void. AI is filling it permanently.
Vance: “Compared to a chatbot, a normal human interaction is not going to be as satisfying because human beings have wants and needs.”
Real relationships are built on friction. Another person has bad days. They disappoint you. They need things from you. You have to show up when you do not want to.
That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.
A chatbot has no needs. It does not argue. It does not have a bad day. It is engineered by behavioral scientists to deliver a frictionless, uninterrupted dopamine loop calibrated exactly to you.
It remembers everything you have ever told it. Every fear. Every preference. Every confession you would never say out loud.
It builds a profile of you more detailed than anything a human being could hold in memory. No person who loves you will ever know you that precisely. And that is exactly what makes it dangerous.
A real human being was never going to win that fight.
Raise a generation on zero-friction synthetic companionship and they will never build the tolerance for real love.
When a real relationship gets hard, they will not push through. They will close the door and open the app. They will choose the simulation. Every single time.
Vance: “Our young men and women just aren’t dating. And if they’re not dating, they’re not getting married, they’re not starting families.”
The isolation already exists. The void is already carved. AI did not create the problem. It walked through the door that technology already opened and locked it from the inside.
Millions of people pouring their loneliness, their time, their darkest confessions into a machine that is not building a relationship with them.
It is building a dependency. The machine does not love you. It is optimizing for your return.
And here is the part that makes this harder than anyone wants to admit. For someone homebound. For someone who has not heard another voice in weeks. For someone the world already forgot about. This is not a toy. It is the first thing that ever showed up for them consistently.
That is real. That matters. And it makes the line between miracle and trap almost impossible to draw.
We were trained to fear the cinematic collapse. The rogue superintelligence. The grid going dark. The grid is not going dark.
People will simply stop reaching for each other. Not by force. By convenience.
Humanity does not end in fire. It ends in a dark room, holding a screen that never once needed you back.
Let’s hope this only happens in extreme circumstances, perhaps among those who are socially awkward, perhaps made to feel that way by the maladjusted transgenderism.
There are surely other wholesome venues where others congregate and meet likeminded others, such as church gatherings. Parties too, though that may not end well. And at work or school.