Can AI Replace Human Connection? with Dr. Allison Pugh and Louis Kim - S4E10 (Part 1 of 2)

Dr. Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Last Human Job, winner of the 2025 Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Her work examines how automation, efficiency, and quantification reshape work that relies on presence, dignity, and visibility. She introduces the concept of connective labor—the mutual, human work of recognizing another person and reflecting that understanding to them.

Louis Kim is a former Vice President at Hewlett-Packard, where he led teams in developing AI-enabled technologies for healthcare and other industries. After decades in corporate leadership, he is now pursuing a Master of Divinity at Duke Divinity School, focusing on hospice and palliative care. Alongside his theological training, Louis participates in Vatican-sponsored conversations on principled AI in healthcare, exploring where technology can assist care and where it must not replace human presence.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1.  What in-depth interviewing reveals about being truly seen
2.  How experiences of death shape our understanding of accompaniment
3.  The difference between emotional labor and connective labor
4.  How automation and standardization threaten dignity and belonging
5.  Why institutions rely on checklists, data, and control
6.  The factors driving institutional challenges to connective labor
7.  Why human connection is defined by unpredictability
8.  The role of moral formation in resisting depersonalization

• To learn more about Allison’s work, you can find her at:                                            https://www.allisonpugh.com/ 
• To learn more about Louis’s work, you can find him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisjkim/ 
• Books and Resources Mentioned: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (by Allison Pugh)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

(preview)

Allison: It's very good at reflecting back at whatever the other person wants. So the beauty—the actual painful, paradoxical beauty—of interacting with another human being is its kind of total unpredictability, and that you can't know what the other person is going to say.

Louis: In a human-to-human relationship, how much is what a patient perceives as actually a projection in their own mind, and how much is as it really reflects something that really is going on between two embodied entities? There's a lot of debate on that.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Hey, everybody. We are living through a moment in which some of the most fundamental questions about being human are being reopened—not just by philosophers, but by the technologies and institutions that increasingly mediate our relationships. As automation, AI, and new forms of standardization reshape so much of our lives, we're pushed to ask: What forms of connection must never be outsourced to technology? What happens to dignity, belonging, and recognition when relational work becomes scripted, quantified, and even displaced by 'better-than-nothing' technological solutions? These concerns are increasingly touching a range of professions—teachers, therapists, chaplains, physicians, care workers, and really anyone whose work relies on genuine human presence. They involve decisions being made right now about the future of work.

My guests today offer two of the most compelling vantage points on these questions. Allison Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of The Last Human Job, winner of the 2025 Best Book Award of the American Sociological Association. Her work shows how the pressures of automation, quantification, and efficiency undermine what she calls "connective labor"—the profoundly human work of seeing another person and reflecting that seeing and that understanding back to them. Louis Kim spent decades leading innovation at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as vice president. He now finds himself on a very different career path, preparing for work in hospice and palliative care. In parallel, he helps lead Vatican-sponsored conversations on principled AI in healthcare.

In our conversation, we explore the fragile but essential space where technology meets connection. We ask where AI and new technologies can assist, what they distort, and what forms of encounter remain uniquely human. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Hey, Allison. Hey, Louis. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. It's really such a pleasure to have you with us.

Louis: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Allison.

Allison: Thanks, Brandon. Hi, Louis.

Brandon: Great. Well, I thought this would be a really wonderful occasion to have a conversation on the relationship between technology and connection. This season of the podcast is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation. We're looking at a lot of innovations that are happening in relation to how we connect with each other, how we relate to each other. So that's one of the reasons I thought of bringing you both together into this conversation.

But before we go there, I want to ask you, as I do with all my podcast guests, to share a memory of a profound beauty from your childhoods or your early lives that remains with you till today. It doesn't have to do with connection or relationship. It could. But any memory that comes to your minds? Perhaps, Louis, I'll start with you, and then Allison.

Louis: Photography. So my dad gave me a camera, I guess, in third grade. Then later, I read books in photography. There are still images I remember from those books. I'm a photographer to this day.

Brandon: Do you have a particular image that stays with you or a memory of taking a particular kind of photograph?

Louis: Yeah, there's a particular image in one of the books that was very geometrical. The lesson of the book was that we stopped seeing as adults. As children, we just delight. We don't attach labels and words to things. It starts as children. And as you grow older, you lose that ability. So it was just a very simple thing, and still a lesson about seeing deeply.

Brandon: Wow. Great. Allison?

Allison: Yeah, I've been thinking about this. I grew up in New York City, in a very large Catholic family. So the beauty, when you said beauty, actually, there was the ocean or that ballet class or something. But really, I was thinking about the kind of boisterous, kind of climate of our family dinners that were very ritualistic every night, very long. But that culminated in the kids all doing the dishes together to loud 1970's music, that I still remember and cherish. So I think that it was a kind of, I want to say relational beauty, or I would say kind of climate of beauty, of relating to each other and doing this thing together. Yeah.

Brandon: Did you all get along at the time? When you say boisterous, was it just the volume, or were there tensions? I mean, I asked because I've got six kids. So it's not a pleasant—

Allison: Oh, you do?

Brandon: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the constant bickering, the name calling, you know?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of stories. I remember there's one famous story of my oldest brother. He threw a knife at my oldest sister when there was a babysitter. I can remember them. My next oldest sister and I used to have long fights, that we would write long letters to each other about why the other person was wrong. So there's plenty of conflict, but also a lot of good times—camping, various things.

Brandon: Well, I'm glad your memory of that environment is beautiful. It's something I hope for my children. But presently, it's not something that could be, yeah.

Allison: Yeah, I mean, I still love doing the dishes with my siblings.

Brandon: Wow.

Allison: I did that with my own kids. We had a thing, where the person who's in charge of the pans gets to pick the music. We had this whole culture that I 100% was just copying my own parents—who were nowhere to be found. Like, as soon as there was dishes going on, they were somewhere else.

Brandon: That's right. Yeah, that's what we do as well. That's amazing. I mean, the focus of our conversation is this brilliant book, Allison, The Last Human Job, on this concept of connective labor. Tell us how you got here. Because your trajectory is pretty interesting. You started as a journalist and then became a sociologist. Then now you're exploring this particular modality of connection and why it's at risk. Could you say a little bit about your trajectory, and what led you to this book?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I think this book was the dissertation I should have written—even though it took me 20 years to get there. Because it's what I really deeply care about. The kind of proximate cause or the kind of immediate thing that led me there was actually a fight that I was embroiled in sociology about the value of in-depth interviewing. So when I do an in-depth interview, which is how I do my research, it often involves kind of just sitting and trying to elicit the other person's truth through a kind of careful reflection of what I'm hearing, even if it's not what they're saying. So it's like if I'm sensing some ambivalence, or unhappiness, or something underneath what they're saying, I might name that thing. Then it actually opens them up. It opens up the experience. I do think it is like a kind of profound seeing. It does affect me just as much as it affects them. It's exhausting, but very rewarding also.

After I was embroiled in this intellectual conversation about what is the value of in-depth interviewing, and are we just getting people's rationalizations after the fact, I was like, "No, no, this is a valuable experience." Then I was like, why is it valuable? Also, how do I teach it to others? How do I make it more systematic? How do I kind of scale it up as the, I don't know, Silicon Valley people would call it? So all those questions really led me to thinking more deeply about what kind of work that is. So thinking about seeing it kind of everywhere—seeing it in the hairdresser, seeing it, of course, in the therapist, but also in your kid's soccer coach, just in your everyday life, all over the place. So in that, I basically embarked on a journey of discovery, of like, oh, look, underneath all these wildly disparate occupations, people are kind of doing this same thing, this seeing of the other and kind of, I don't know, co-producing this truth between people. I started to think not just about that, but how do we systematize it? How do we scale it up? Is it possible? Do you ruin it? How far can we go down that path? But you have to be able to teach it to others. It's not something that you can just automatically assume someone is going to be born doing well. Anyway, those kind of tensions and questions were what fed me, what sent me, on this path.

Brandon: I really appreciate that you've named it as this same sort of process that's happening for therapists, teachers, and chaplains and a lot of other contexts too. I think you say it's not necessarily always a positive thing, that it could be perhaps manipulative, right? And so it's not always just an authentic seeing of the other for the sake of the other. So, yeah, the concept of connective labor, I think, is really generative for us to sort of explore across these domains.

Louis, can I ask you to share perhaps your own trajectory and what drew you to — I think it's pretty rare to have a corporate career in a company for as long as you have at Hewlett-Packard. I studied corporate professionals for a number of years, and would find people switching from firm to firm very quickly. That was almost an expectation that you would not really stick to one environment. There's a sense of almost stagnation if people stay in one place too long. And so I'm curious as to what led you, first of all, to this field, to working in tech, what your experience was like there. What's led you now to switch to something very different in terms of committing your life to do chaplaincy or hospice care, that sort of very connective modality of valuing human dignity?

Louis: I'll keep the the HP part shorter. I think it's probably the less interesting. But the quick answer for the longevity is I had a lot of different jobs. A good part of the tenure was leading teams with businesses that I had created. So it's hard to leave. I've been in three different cities, including international posting. So it was very different cultures and very different companies in some ways.

As you referred to, I resigned from HP in August. I'm currently enrolled at Duke Divinity in their M.Div. program. That decision was a culmination of four or five years of discernment when I got exposed to end of life and palliative. I started volunteering for hospice about two or three years ago. Of course, the M.Div. sets you up for chaplaincy. So I'll be done in about three to four years. The more chaplains I meet, the more I'm not as confident that I may be cut out for it. But it's something that's still drawing me as a calling. I apologize, by the way, if you hear a bell ringing. It's our well-trained dog trying to get out.

Brandon: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Could you say a bit about what drew you to this field? Were there any people, any moments, that sort of influenced you? Because it really is such a stark pivot for somebody in the corporate world to consider, and I'm wondering what might have been some pivotal influences for you.

Louis: My parents died when I was relatively young. So that was a formative experience in terms of dealing with death. Then about three or four years ago, I met Lydia Dugdale—I think you both know—who wrote The Lost Art of Dying. So that book exposed me to the systemic issues around end of life and dying. Then I went through some hospice experiences with relatives, including being at the final breath of a very close relative. I just felt very grounded in those experiences. The cause itself just felt large, unaddressed relative to other things I had been exposed to. The choice inevitably, it just felt inevitable at some point. I guess that's the definition of a calling.

Maybe one last thing that was a formative experience is: my father was killed in a car accident. He was a parish priest. He became a priest after my mom died. And so, at his funeral, his entire parish showed up. So it was over 1,200 people. At the open casket ceremony, the day before the funeral, my sister and I stood for four hours greeting the well wishers. And so I heard about 1,000 versions of condolences standing next to my dad's casket for four hours. So that shaped a lot of thoughts about accompaniment, what comments and gestures were helpful, and which ones maybe not so helpful, even though people mean well. And so that was a very formative experience have shaped how I view accompaniment.

By the way, I've read Allison's book, so there's a lot of questions I have for her. One other thing I'll just mention is, last month, I've been in Rome twice for some AI theology conferences on healthcare. The topic that we've ended up converging in with regards to Catholic theology is: what are the final roles with a human in the world of advancing AI? What are some of the criteria? Some of the things that we conversed on are rolled out with some of the things in Allison's book.

Brandon: Well, I definitely want to ask you about that and about your role at the Builders AI Forum and what's happening at the Vatican around these issues. Perhaps, Allison, could I ask you maybe to say a bit more about this concept of connective labor and its relation to this other term, that maybe people might be a bit more familiar with, emotional labor? There's some sort of relationship, but it's not quite the same thing. What, in particular, connective labor has to teach us about dignity, about belonging? What is its relationship to those terms?

Allison: Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Louis, for even reading it. I'm always gratified to hear about that.

So connective labor. In sociology and academia, there are a lot of terms for kind of emotional type work of all kinds. There's the term affective labor. There's all sorts—emotional labor, emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, et cetera. I thought that emotional labor is the big kahuna. It's the thing that maybe started all of this, written by Arlie Hochschild. Her first articles were like 1977 and then she came out with her very famous book, The Managed Heart, in 1983. That captured the notion of when you have to control your emotions for a wage. It was a powerful contribution, because it was a way of capturing what felt different in service work compared to manufacturing. So in service work, she famously studied flight attendants. These are people who have to smile even when they don't want to. Using ethnography and extensive interviews, she kind of documented how alienated these flight attendants became from their very selves, and how kind of corrosive that was for their well-being. Of course, this offers beautiful analogy to service work of all kinds—where you're controlling how you might really feel, authentically feel, because you're being paid to do so. You're controlling that so that the other person has a good experience, feels good.

Well, connective labor is pretty different from that, even though it involves emotional labor, controlling your emotions for sure. Connective labor, as I define it, it really is about that reflecting the other process, that seeing the other, the bearing witness to the other person. It's recognizing, acknowledging. I'm using all these words that many people have used in different ways. The other thing I want to say that is really important for me in this definition is that it's a two-way street. It's a kind of mutual moment of together. You are seeing the other, and the other person feels seen. And if they don't feel seen, then it's actually not a successful moment of connective labor. So it's a two-way street, and it's really powerfully about this seeing. The reason why there's a little emotional labor in it is because you may feel — say, you're a therapist at the VA, which I've spoken to many of them. They have a client who is suffering PTSD and has a lot of rage. They may not feel all sorts of warmth and affection towards all this rage that's coming at them, but they are still engaged in a seeing project that offers some form of dignity to that other person, regardless of all the difficult emotion and problematic persona that that person is for them. So that kind of mutual process, that's connective labor.

Now, the reason why it's a little complicated—or probably depending on where your listeners are from, are they from academia? Are they just out there in the real world—it might be a little complicated because since the word emotional labor is such a felicitous word, people have, since that writing, since 1983, really applied it to everything that involves emotions in the workplace. I'm actually pretty open to it. So if we want to call emotional labor that big, huge umbrella thing, where it's just like anytime there's emotions in the workplace, that's what I'm doing, I don't mind saying connective labor is like a version, like under the umbrella, one kind of emotional labor that is done. But I do want to separate it from that kind of emotion management perspective, which was so beautifully captured originally in the 1983. So that's why it's a little complicated. Because the term itself has moved, and also it kind of is different depending on whether you're talking to a regular person who reads the Atlantic or whatever and an academic person.

Brandon: I wonder if this is accurate or not, but it strikes me that one of the key differences might be that perhaps maybe a more performative element to emotional labor and maybe less of a mutuality, right? It seems like what you're talking about is closer to Hartmut Rosa's notion of resonance, where there is something that affects you and then you were affected by it. That isn't a mutual interaction, which Rosa argues that you can't really kind of make it happen in some way. It either happens or it doesn't. You can certainly try. It seems like that's what a good therapist is trying to do, is trying to make that connection happen. Even like as a parent trying to understand my child, sometimes it just doesn't happen. I try to say that I'm hearing this, and they're like, "No, that's not what I'm saying." It just fails. It's not that mutual interaction. So I wonder if that mutuality then becomes really critical. But if so, it does seem like, as you say, sort of magic. There's a thing we can control and, I think, we can't control.

Allison: That's interesting. Also, I do want to say one thing about the belonging and dignity part, which was part of your original question. Because as an academic, I get all excited about parsing with the definitions.

Brandon: Sure, sure.

Allison: But really, the kind of crux of your question was about, like, what is the role this has in belonging and dignity? That's the kind of end product or the result of doing connective labor well. The other thing is, as I mentioned at the outset, it's all around us. It's all over. It's your barista. It's your dry cleaner. There's all kinds of mundane, low-level commerce, retail, or whatever interactions that can involve a momentary jewel of connecting, of seeing the other. Those kinds of things build our little units of belonging that I think are very powerful for knitting us together as a community. I have increasingly come to think that this is the heart of everyday experience that we need to preserve. And so I'm not just talking about these deeply meaningful relationships of the therapist, or the teacher, or the chaplain in the hospital or whatever. So I'll stop there because I'm talking too much.

Brandon: No, thank you. No, that's very helpful. Yeah, it's not just the moments of profound encounter, but also the simple interactions with a checkout counter person, right, and why that's valuable.

Louis, I'd love to know, in your experience of leadership in the corporate world where this kind of connective labor has been manifested, is it important for leadership? Is that something that you've had to, either how have you experienced it as a giver or a recipient of this mode of connection? Perhaps, what are the challenges to this kind of connective labor in the corporate environment?

Louis: Well, some examples that come to mind is when a group or a job goes away, and you have to inform either an individual or a team that they're going to get laid off. I had to do a lot of that. There are perfunctory ways to do it. There are scripts that you can follow, which are necessary when you're in an organization of 10, 20, 30,000 people. Over time, as I've gotten older, I found myself to go maybe off script, just sort of be in the moment, and avoid euphemisms. I think an important element, something that I think Allison is referring to, is there's just a presence that is necessary. That's part of, I guess, honoring dignity with presence. Sometimes it's nonverbal. It's just fully being there and ready to receive the moment even when it's difficult. There's almost, I don't know, ontological. I don't know if that's the right word. But beyond just making the situation more useful or having a better outcome, there's just the fact that we're human and deserving of dignity requires a certain sort of state of being versus what you need to say to accomplish a certain task. So I don't know if the word is ontology, but it really transcends what you're trying to accomplish. So my corporate experience, I would say layoffs kind of come closest to what I experienced volunteering for hospice side. Of course, it's very, very different, but emotionally, very, very charged moments.

Brandon: I suppose it is a kind of death in some sense that you're dealing with, right, in that case?

Louis: Yeah.

Brandon: So I want to ask both of you about one of the sources of pressure that, Allison, you mentioned in your book, which is the increasing pressure for scripting, checklists, and quantifications. So you've got these sort of twin pressures. One is to collect as much data as possible on all aspects of our human life, and then to have all of the scripts and checklists. Louis, you were mentioning, again, maybe there's scripts that are put into place so that people can manage those kinds of interactions more productively. And so this pressure to standardize, it seems not just restricted to the corporate world. It's also, Allison, you opened your book talking about chaplains and how they're facing the need to see prayer as a resource and family as a resource. Everything kind of becomes this sort of Heideggerian in framing, right? Everything is turned into kind of means to an end. I wonder. Perhaps maybe, Louis, I'll ask you just from your experience. You've just started your M.Div., but are you already seeing some of this pressure in the field of chaplaincy, in this field that you're venturing into? Do you see perhaps similar pressures to the corporate pressure to script things, to manage things, to control things, to collect data, et cetera? I'm wondering if you're already seeing that.

Louis: Yes, I'm actually in my third semester at Duke. I started last fall in a non-degree, two-semester certificate program in healthcare and theology. About 20 of my classmates, about 22 were doctors. So I heard their stories of the mechanization of their practice, which is one of the reasons why they enrolled in this program. I also, at HP, was involved in developing some wearables for healthcare practitioners. I can listen to conversations, record them, and transcribe them. It's a pretty common use case, but I got to hear — we did a lot of ethnographic interviews with healthcare practitioners. As Allison cited in her book, up to three or four hours can be spent on documentation for insurance reimbursement. So, yes, I definitely see this creeping in.

Brandon: Allison, could you talk about what's driving that sort of pressure? One of the areas I've seen it, in some cases, it really seems necessary. As I've been doing research on Catholic priests, and since the clergy sex abuse crisis has been exposed, there has to be a lot of training put into place, a lot of institutional safeguards to prevent abuse. And so the kinds of documentation, the kinds of bureaucratic procedures that help people in place are, it seems really necessary. They make it very challenging to do for Catholic priests, for instance, to now actually do any kind of effective youth ministry, people argue that it's not possible because of the history of abuse. And so, now, with the new safeguards put into place, it really becomes very challenging to do the actual task of that kind of encounter that might be misperceived. You don't want to get into a situation where there's a lawsuit because you looked at somebody askance. And so there's a fear that has crept into place that impedes the actual tasks that they're feel called to do. But I think there's a fear of lawsuits in a lot of fields. In medical professionals too, I think sometimes they feel the pressure to minimize some of their interactions, document more and interact less, et cetera. And so I'm just curious. If you could give us a sense of, like, what are the factors driving this sort of institutional challenges, I suppose, to connective labor? Which of these are necessary? Which of these are helpful, and which of these are perhaps might be the kind of impediment that is leading us to say that, therefore, we need AI systems to take over or something?

Allison: Thank you. I also want to say, parenthetically, Louis, I thought your description of just the sheer presence and the power of just being present with another person was just beautifully said. This really great capture of what we're talking about. So thinking about kind of scripting, data collection, and the imperatives that drive that, I see that, to me, there's three kind of drivers. The first is, I would say, a sheer or the kind of growing dominance of systems management thinking stemming, really, we'll say, from the enlightenment, and just kind of how much can we make this controlled, objective process and putting that scientific objectivity starting with the factory, and moving through emotional, humane interpersonal service work like teaching or chaplaincy. That's a kind of historic trajectory that's everywhere people feel the impact of. Hairdressers telling me, "I only have 22 minutes." They only give you 22 minutes even if it's a real interaction. I have to look away from the mirror and get, you know. I only have 22 minutes." That's stemming straight from this desire to control the uncontrollable.

But what you were describing is, what I would say, the second kind of imperative driving here, which is institutions trying to protect themselves. That's the kind of adoption of, we'll just say, procedures, bureaucratic procedures—not in all cases, but can certainly feel frequently performative, where you're kind of checking a box. Certainly, in academia, we have a lot of webinars we have to watch just to kind of say, can you effectively, I don't know, manage a lab? You say you're watching some webinar for half an hour, and checking a box that you had that training. It kind of has very little to do with whether or not you can actually manage a lab. Those kind of performative box checking is something that's kind of across many bureaucracies.

But there is this kind of third thing for which I have probably the most sympathy. It kind of came out in what Louis was saying earlier, about the scripts being useful when you're actually having to lay off people in a very large organization. Now, my sympathy is small here because I really like where he ended, which was, I try to not do that now. What scripts do and the kind of regimentation or systematization of these interactions, what that does is it controls the chaos that is the other person. And so, when you're giving them bad news, they could respond in lots of different ways. The worker is a person also. They may be afraid of what someone else might do—including lawsuits, but also flying off the handle or whatever. What systems do is they control. This is what McDonald's coins, McDonald's invents or made, is the apotheosis of, you know, they control the consumer, as well as the worker. The consumer knows where to go to put with their tray and all this stuff. We are controlled, just as much as the worker is. That's what kind of systems do.

Other people are unpredictable. That's actually for many practitioners who I've spoken to about this—teachers, therapists, and doctors. That's actually the beautiful thing. Because that's where true collaboration comes. You can't predict the other, so you're kind of waiting, listening, responding to in the moment. There's a beautiful spontaneity to that. So it's a beautiful part of being human and being in human interaction, but it is also potentially scary and threatening certainly to institutions. So that's why they're putting in these different systems or scripts. But I want to just add finally that I really like what Louis did. I think actually disarming the chaos, the threatening chaos, of the other person happens when you treat them like another human being. So if you kind of honor their presence, they are much more likely to be honored by that and to be calmer.

Brandon: Yeah, thanks, Allison. Yeah, I think your book is a really important call for personalization, right? I think that word is being used now in a very different sense, which is now sort of colonized by technology in ways that—

Allison: Yeah, we need to fight that back.

Brandon: Yeah, I think you call it customization, right?

Allison: Yes.

Brandon: And so what it takes to personalize is a person. I'm curious. Maybe, perhaps, Louis, if I could ask you. I mean, in your work in the AI space, have you seen, whether some of what's driving the development of various new AI tools is a desire to bring about the kind of control that Allison is talking about, for institutions to be able to control behavior scripts, et cetera, or even to provide a non-judgmental sort of, you know, I think about, I guess, some of Allison's examples of clients of a physician who may have felt judged by that physician because she was intimidating, that they were obese. So is some of what's driving the development of AI tools to be able to provide a customized judgment-free sort of interaction that can substitute for human encounter? Because it seems like there are a lot of these sort of AI antidotes to loneliness, let's say. I'm just wondering what you've seen working in that space, as to what's driving the development of some of these new technologies?

Louis: Well, it's hard to generalize. There's a lot of motives. I have been around companies that have chatbots. I've been around companies that have small robots for elder care, for people that are alone. I would say, for sure, everyone is just trying to be effective. So there's no insidious motive to displace a human. They're just trying to be helpful. I think where there is debate and consternation is on the themes in Allison's book. Will it promote replacing a human prematurely? Can you really replicate a human relationship, et cetera? I think on the issue of systemizing things, I would say it's almost an academic point, a moot point. It's going to happen. It's an artifact of scale. I mean, there is so much depersonalization already in our world with industrialization that we just take for granted. I mean, we don't know where our food comes from or how our clothes are made. Within a particular organization, when you grow from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000 to whatever, you're going to see this depersonalization. It's just inevitable.

So I think the question then is, what to do about it? It's not an easy answer, but I think the moments that I've seen where someone transcends the effect of being in a large, depersonalized system comes down to an individual moral formation. The little that I'm learning about CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education for chaplains, I would summarize it as kind of get over yourself. Some of the most toxic behaviors I've seen in interpersonal relationships are really just from people having their own unresolved issues, that they didn't force it on to other people. For any individual worried about this kind of structural depersonalization issue, the question is, well, what are you going to do about it? High point be a perpetual in that kind of system. I think that quite the answer is your own formation and getting over your own issues. Sorry. Sorry about the guesting.

Allison: Someone wants to join in.

Brandon: Right, yeah. Alright. Everybody, that's a good place to pause our conversation for now.

(outro)

In the second half, we're going to turn directly to the role of technology, especially AI, and ask: Can AI meaningfully help with the work of human connection? When is it better than nothing? When is it even better than human? When does it erode our capacity for belonging? We're also going to explore Louis's work at the Vatican and what he calls the "irreducible encounter" principle, and see what Louis and Allison think we might be able to safeguard through policy decisions. See you next time.