Anthropologists tell us that only a handful of human experiences can be found in all human cultures. Among them is the experience of friendship. It might have different expressions in different times and places, but something akin to it seems to appear everywhere.

Surely one of the greatest pains a human can endure is to have no friends – to be outside of every circle of trust, every exchange of confidence, every bond of love.

Review: Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots – Valerie Tiberius (Princeton University Press)

Maybe this explains the prevalence of the idea of the mechanical friend. What if we could build machines that replicated the experience of friendship? Would we not then triumph over the horror of friendlessness? Defeat the cruelty that sits adjacent to friendship? Unlock all its benefits and destroy all its iniquities?

Or is the idea of the mechanical friend somehow much sadder or more pathetic than having no friends? Would a significant number of us not pity, even mock or deride, anyone who thought they were friends with a robot, a computer, an algorithm?

Definitions of friendship

Despite being common to the point of ubiquity, friendship is extremely difficult to define. That is probably why the theme has attracted the attention of philosophers since ancient times. We all know what it is to have a friend. But what is friendship? What are its essential characteristics?

Philosopher Valerie Tiberius’s enviably lucid Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots takes up these questions. For Tiberius’s book is not really about chatbots at all. It is about the way that a world of chatbots – one in which a growing number of humans interact with language generated by probabilistic analysis of colossal data sets as if it were another human – allows us to sharpen our understanding of real friendship.

Tiberius thus begins by noting that, when it comes to the phenomenon of humans who claim they have established friendships with chatbots, she would prefer to be “curious rather than judgmental”. She is not going to tell them they are ridiculous or deluded. Instead, she proposes to itemise the various values of friendship, or the reasons why we value friendship, and to........

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