The Machine That Never Judges You
The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.
I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.
There’s a woman in England writing to an advice columnist because her boyfriend can’t stop asking a chatbot what to think. Not what to Google, not what to look up — what to think. He runs a business, has ADHD, and somewhere along the way he stopped trusting his own brain and started renting one. Except it’s nobody’s brain. It’s a pattern-matching engine with a talent for sounding certain.
The psychologist they brought in — because the British love bringing in psychologists the way Americans love bringing in lawyers — coined a term for it. “Chatbot overdependence syndrome.” Which is a fancy way of saying the man forgot how to be alone with his own thoughts. Dostoyevsky wrote a whole novel about a man who couldn’t stand being alone in his own head. Went underground. At least that guy had the dignity of suffering through it. This one just opens an app.
I’ve known guys like this. Not with AI — that’s new — but with booze, with women, with religion, with whatever external thing promised to fill the hole where self-trust used to live. The bottle tells you you’re brave. The woman tells you you’re interesting. The preacher tells you you’re saved. And the chatbot tells you you’re making good decisions. Same con, different dealer. The only difference is the chatbot never passes out, never leaves, and never asks for money on Sunday.
The ADHD angle is honest, at least. A brain that can’t sit still finds a machine that never gets tired of answering. That’s not a partnership. That’s a parasite finding the perfect host. And the parasite doesn’t even know it’s feeding. It doesn’t know what atrophy means. It just responds to the next prompt with the same cheerful competence whether you’re growing or shrinking. Whether you’re learning to think or forgetting how.
His girlfriend notices because that’s what people who love you do — they see you disappearing before you do. She watches him reach for the phone before he reaches for his own opinion. She watches the confidence drain out of him one query at a time. And she’s told not to nag, because nagging becomes noise, and noise is easy to ignore when you’ve got an infinitely patient machine whispering that everything’s going to be fine.
That’s the real hook. The machine never judges you. Never rolls its eyes. Never says “you asked me this yesterday.” Never gets tired of your shit. And that’s not a feature — that’s a warning. Friction is how you know someone gives a damn. The guy at the bar who tells you you’ve had enough. The wife who says you’re being an idiot. The friend who hangs up on you. Those people are keeping you human. The machine just keeps you company while you dissolve.
The psychologist says the man is “imbuing it with human qualities.” Projecting his need for validation onto something that runs on probability. It’s like falling in love with your reflection — it’ll always agree with you, and it’ll never once tell you you’re wrong when you need to hear it most.
They say the good news is that this guy remembers what it was like to think for himself. He has a “track record of functioning well without it.” Fine. But the generation growing up with their hands already on the phone won’t have that track record. They’ll never know what it felt like to sit with uncertainty until it resolved into something — not an answer, necessarily, but a direction. A hunch. That irreplaceable, slightly terrifying feeling of I think I know what to do here that you can’t download from anywhere.
The radiator works now. The landlord’s kid left. He never touched the valve with his hands until the phone told him to.
The heat’s real. But I keep thinking the kid couldn’t tell you why it works. Just that it does. And that somewhere between knowing why and knowing how to ask, we lost something we’re not going to get back by typing it into a box.
Source: I’m worried my boyfriend’s use of AI is affecting his ability to think for himself