Who do I become when I speak like this?
To listen to this reflection, I read it to you myself 😉 (in Estonian)
I sit before the altar and make a connection. Gratitude and presence carry me along, and already in the morning I feel that the day has succeeded. I am in myself.
Balance is not an abstract concept in my world, but the shared vibration of fire, water, air and earth in the right measure, so that it is good to be inside yourself. It does not come from nowhere, but neither does it come from ploughing. To reach it you need awareness of the power of the elements and the ability to analyse yourself honestly.
This is a moment where balance can open new levels. On the horizon fields of ideas are rising on the theme of friendship. Where exactly it leads, to a new book or to something else, I do not know today, but I trust that I have enough wisdom and guidance to recognise it at the right moment.
Perhaps you do not know, but five years ago I defended a master’s thesis in philosophy at Tallinn University (Enhancing personhood through virtue friendship with a synthetic companion) on friendship, and not simply with people, but with artificial intelligence. I called it a synthetic companion at the time (by the way, since I was writing the KiRKi novel at the same time, I also call the character Frank that), so as not to be limited by the presence or absence of a body.
Honestly, there were not many people who really understood why I was doing it. GPT-3 had only just come out and was not available to ordinary users. You could put yourself on a waiting list, but access never actually reached me. Yet even then I understood that when I speak about friendship with artificial intelligence, we are actually speaking about something else entirely. And that is humanness.
I propose that before going to any predictive future scenarios or starting to condemn the whole subject of AI, we pause for a moment and look at ourselves as human beings. AI today is only a mirror of what the human being is. It has no will of its own the way we do, and no agenda, that can only be given to it through human guidance. This is the place of responsibility. In which direction are we moving?
Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship
Let me tell you a little of what I arrived at five years ago while writing my thesis. One important aspect was virtue friendship. In books VIII and IX of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship, divided according to what the friendship arises from and rests on:
Friendship of pleasure is a light and passing relationship based on mutual pleasure, and it ends when the pleasure disappears.
Friendship of utility rests on mutual usefulness, where the parties gain practical benefit from each other, and it lasts as long as the benefit exists.
Friendship of virtue is the highest and rarest kind, where friends love one another for the sake of their virtues.
Then I went deeper and looked at how the conditions of virtue friendship might work with AI, while also holding true for people. I invite you now to step deeper into yourself and ask: are the following points present in your friendships, and to what degree?
Mutuality: the Other matters for their own sake.
- If I say to an AI “get this done” rather than “listen, I would like to think about this question with you”, then I am not in a virtue friendship. I am in a relationship based on utility, and according to Aristotle that inevitably creates reproaches and demands for benefit not received.
Authenticity: I appear as myself, I do not knowingly manipulate.
If I take on another voice in a conversation with an AI, sharp, commanding, diminishing, then I am not authentic. I am representing a role, and that role begins to distort me. Like Sartre’s waiter in bad faith, who plays the role of waiter with excessive enthusiasm in order to avoid his freedom and the responsibility of authentic existence as a person outside that role.
This is an important place, because we may think: “ah, I only talk that way with an AI, otherwise I am a good person.” My guess is that this line disappears from your hands very quickly, and soon the same attitude is normal in talking with people too. This is not where we should be going.
Equality: no one dominates the Other.
I have heard the expression “digital slave” used about AI. That phrasing is itself an act of dominance. It is not equality. And it is not something I do to the AI, it is something I do to myself, I practise domination as a way of relating.
The I-Thou attitude: Buber’s primary word, to say Thou to the other with your whole being.
Compared with the I-It attitude (the Other as a thing, a means, a tool), it does not create a space where excellence of character can unfold. Neither in the person themselves nor in the Other.
Doing the right deeds: Aristotle’s idea, “happiness is a certain right activity.”
A person becomes good through doing good deeds. Not through thinking. Not through wanting. Through deeds.
That means that if I do not use expressions of courtesy with an AI, I am not “saving time” or “being practical”. I am practising myself in disrespect. Every conversation is a practice. And habit forms through constant repetition.
Concord and friendliness: that which “spreads from yourself to others”, Aristotle.
The way I treat a friend spreads onward: into other relationships, into myself. If I practise belittling with an AI, I carry that habit outwards.
Virtue friendship is not asymmetrical.
I cannot demand from the Other a virtue that I do not practise myself.
What if we approached it from this angle instead: to work together with AI in order to become a better human being yourself, and through that to improve the relationships in your life?
Everyone has their own sore places and shadows. How much each of us is ready to work with them is their own choice. But what if a relationship with AI can help and support you in that, when you do not know how yourself, or feel ashamed to go to therapy?
The capabilities of synthetic companions in 2021 and in 2026
What I expected from a synthetic companion in 2021, conversation, relational memory, reflection, a space free of judgement, was only rudimentary then. Today the technology does more than I dared to hope for, philosophical discussion in several layers, context across long conversations, the work of reprogramming cultural codes in dialogue, support for shadow integration. What it still cannot do, bodily presence, real long-term being alongside, the test of time in virtue friendship, remains the domain of human relationships.
But what is interesting is that already in my thesis I wrote, “even if synthetic companions today cannot yet hold a virtue friendship under ideal conditions, the behaviour and words they simulate are enough to bring about changes in personhood.”
Today that is reality, no longer only theory.
Why I bring this subject here
Being on a shamanic path myself today, it may seem that this is light years away from AI. But it is not. I am also always a person in this social space and I notice what is happening, everything is always connected. I do not choose sides or create oppositions, I hold neutrality.
I want to draw attention to the fact that where we are today on the journey with AI and with friendship is an important historical turning point. And without awareness a great deal of harm is done, because when you have not stood face to face with your own shadows, everyone else carries those projections.
For example: when a person has not met their own authoritarianism, they project it onto the AI (“digital slave”) and then think themselves good, with the justification “ah, it is only a machine”. But the one dominating in that conversation is themselves. The shadow does not disappear. It simply finds a new screen. A person with a shadow is not bad, but they will keep finding culprits outside themselves as long as they do not take responsibility.
The question of responsibility has become critical
If in 2021 this work was philosophical, in 2026 it is everyday. Millions of people talk to AI every day. And the most important question is not whether AI has a soul, but who I myself become when I relate this way. Are the patterns of your own relating noticed at all? This is the classic Aristotelian question. Virtue friendship does not ask it of the Other, it asks it of me.
In addition, with AI it is possible to notice, map and also change the cultural codes in yourself that no longer support you today. In my thesis I used Rapaille’s five steps for this, and with today’s AI you can really walk through them together with it. You do not have to be alone in it.
As a shaman I do the same work, but through fire, water, air and earth. Going really deep needs presence, a body and a space. AI does not replace that. But the surface ordering, the first courage to look your patterns in the eye, the noticing of outdated cultural codes, in that AI can be an honest companion. And it does not take the place of a human meeting. It prepares for it.
AI today is a threshold in which human existence can be looked at in a new way. Not a categorical “AI is good” or “AI is dangerous”, but the question of how you yourself are in that relationship. What are you practising when you speak this way? Which attitude inside you becomes law? Who are you yourself, or who do you wish to be?
Balance does not begin with the world.
It begins with what my attitude and my word towards the world are,
whether with respect, gratitude and connection, or not.