From “How AI Changes Your Customers: The Marketing Guide to Humanity’s Next Chapter” by Mark Schaefer
David Porush, professor and author, put it chillingly: “AI will invent new ways to do good and new ways to do evil…and give us moral cover to believe they are the same thing.”
We’re not just outsourcing empathy. We’re outsourcing conscience. This is the real risk: not that AI becomes evil, but that we forget how to be good.
Simulated empathy works. It soothes. It converts. It scales. And it never forgets your gluten allergy. But what happens when empathy becomes just another button in the interface? At what point do we stop noticing – or caring – whether anyone in this world really means it.
The danger isn’t that AI will trick us. It’s that we’ll want to be tricked. That we’ll become addicted to the illusion because it’s easier, cleaner, and less disappointing than the real thing.