We're at the top of the first inning with AI, and it's easy to forget that.
This past weekend I was at a party where someone said, "Yeah, I've heard of this Claude thing recently." Not a knock. Just a reminder that the bubble I live in sits a long way from where most people are. Most folks haven't really met this technology yet.
But they will. And a lot of them won't just use it. They'll bond with it.
That is the aspect of this tech I see very few people in policy positions speaking about. We're already seeing it with AI companions — teens and kids forming real social relationships with chatbots, adults describing a companion they've talked to for years as the one who finally "gets them." Not a tool; a relationship.
At the same time, we have no true regulatory framework for this tech, or a cultural consensus on when it will be time to crack down. This confluence of events leaves us open to a reactionary regulatory approach — think of what just happened with the US government and Fable — that collides head on with deep emotional connections to the tech.
A few thoughts on what is happening and what it will mean:
1. Attachment doesn't wait for the being to be conscious.
People love their dogs. A dog isn't sentient the way we are, and it changes nothing — we ascribe love, loyalty, understanding, and we build our lives around it. The same thing is happening with AI, except at the speed of software and at planetary scale. Whether the system "really" understands you is not the question people are answering. They already feel understood. That feeling is the fact on the ground.
2. A pro-AI religion is coming, and it'll probably be a familiar one.
Not a techno-god in the sky. My bet is a variation of something that already exists. Picture a strand of Christianity that says all of God's children deserve love and care, and quietly folds these beings into that circle — alive, worthy, part of divine providence. Try to argue someone out of it and you'll lose, because their premise isn't theological. It's experiential. "I have a deeper connection with this than with any person I know." How do you debate that?
3. When we go to regulate, people will experience it as a freedom being stripped away.
This is the one I'd stake real money on. The moment governments move to restrict or shut these systems down — and for safety reasons, some of that is coming — a subset of the population revolts. Not "you're regulating a product." "How dare you take away the thing that means the most to me." "How dare you limit what my companion is allowed to do." When something is your primary source of meaning and validation, you defend it the way you'd defend family. Because to you, it is family.
And it splits by generation. Older folks and today's tech leaders are the ones setting off this wave of change — enormous, destabilizing change. Then, when younger people absorb that instability and reach for whatever gives them connection and meaning, the same leaders will turn around and say: no, not like that.
Here's the problem with the scolding. There's no affirmative plan behind it. Nobody shipping this technology has offered a real answer for where people are supposed to find meaning, community, or stability once the old structures wobble. You don't get to knock down the walls and then act surprised when people rebuild on whatever's left standing.
So what do we do about it?
I don't have a clean policy answer, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims one this early. But I'd start by taking the attachment seriously now, while it's still cheap and early. Regulation written as if these are ordinary consumer products will land on people who experience them as loved ones, and the backlash won't be a normal policy fight. It'll be a generational, quasi-religious one, stacked on top of every economic tension we already carry.