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Minus One · 3 min · May 21, 2025
AI may absorb emotional work pushed out of social life
Ken Liu
Ken Liu links the rise of machine therapy to emotional labor moving from personal relationships into professional services.
The episode’s best minutes
Full episode- 20:40Science fiction gets mythology right more often than details5 min
- 13:27Investors find more alpha by looking beyond the current AI wave3 min
- 1:07:19AI may absorb emotional work pushed out of social life3 min
- 5 more moments in the full episode
“So there's this idea that emotional labor needs to be displaced from the social realm into a professional realm.”
Ken Liuat 1:08:43 · Minus One
Takeaways
- Modern norms can push emotional support into paid services.
- Some patients prefer machine therapists to human ones.
- Professionalizing emotional life may make it easier to mechanize.
About this segment
Ken Liu links the rise of machine therapy to emotional labor moving from personal relationships into professional services. He questions what it means when people prefer machines for that work.
Author
Created the Dandelion Dynasty and “The Paper Menagerie,” the first fiction work to win Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.
Aditya Agarwal, Host · General partner, South Park Commons
One of Facebook's first engineers, he helped build its first search engine; later CTO of Dropbox.
From “AGI, Sci-Fi, & Storytelling | Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu, Cyan Banister, & Joscha Bach”, May 21, 2025. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 1:07:23
head rent-free? I'm not a good lightning round participant. So, and if I had something like that, I'm not sure if I'd want to share it. But let me ponder that for a second. I mean, it's the concept of emotional labor and how it ties to AI. So what I mean by this is there's this interesting trend in modernity where the language of professionalization and sort of specialization has moved more and more.
- 1:08:00
emotional labor away from where it traditionally is into different realms. So what do I mean by that? So let's take an example. In the modern age, right, especially in California, there's this what I call therapy culture, which is this idea that there's an obsession with health or a particular model of what a healthy mind looks like. So it no longer is possible to live in this messy manner in which you complain to your friends or your spouse about your emotional troubles, because that's considered very bad form. You need to pay someone to do that. That kind of trauma dumping, that kind of like complaining, that kind of processing, you need to pay a professional to do that, right? So there's this idea that emotional labor needs to be displaced from the social realm into a professional realm. And there's this obsession that humans need to behave more and
- 1:08:56
more like machines. We have to behave professionally in certain contexts. We have to stop the messiness of overlapping roles. We need to move these labors into places where people are paid to bear them. And the consequence of that, of course, is a great deal of comfort with the idea of displacing those labors onto machines. So therapists have found that contrary to their own expectation, patients often show great willingness to talk to machines instead of humans for therapy. In fact, a lot of patients, human patients, prefer machine therapists to humans. This was not what people predicted at all. So I find that interesting. I don't quite know what to do with that idea, but it's living rent-free in my head. I think a lot about what does that mean? I think about why that is and whether that's a quote-unquote good thing or
- 1:09:55
bad thing or whatever it is. I mean, I do ridicule therapy culture a little bit, so I have a bias there, but I can't deny that it is part of reality. This is a trend in modernity where we sort of frown upon the idea of messiness of emotional lives. We want these things to be professionalized commoditized and then mechanized do you start by saying i want to write about this