Pakistan, Oct. 23 -- There's a crisis going on in our pockets and it's not the takeover of the machines that a certain genre of science-fiction cinema would have us believe. It's that we are becoming desensitized to the flaws and twist of the flesh-and-blood people around us because we're constantly relying on an algorithm to give us the emotional validation we crave

We live in the golden era of the AI companion where we have chat bots that listen to us vent without interrupting us, without getting tired headaches, delivering judgment-free validation. This recent wave of research suggests that this is actually a healthy avenue for lonely people to redirect some of their energy. However, as a student and a user of this technology myself, ...