Something is happening to human social reality that most commentary on AI is missing entirely.

The conversation about artificial intelligence tends to run along familiar tracks like productivity and job displacement, or existential risk and techno-optimism. These are real debates and they matter but they are mostly debates about what AI does. What interests me is what AI is doing to the social glue that holds human life and society together.

Here is the core of it. Human society runs on a specific kind of exchange, one where both parties have genuine stakes, where both can be held to what they say, where both are changed by the encounter. That reciprocity is not incidental to trust, reputation, and meaning. It is the mechanism that produces them. Remove it, and the surface of the interaction can remain completely intact while something essential is gone.

AI can participate in that surface with remarkable sophistication. What it cannot do is provide the reciprocity. It has no stake, no skin in the game, no capacity to be genuinely obligated or changed. The exchange looks symmetrical. It is not. And we are conducting that simulation at a scale and speed that has no precedent.

But the deeper problem is this. The synthetic version is specifically engineered to feel smoother and taste sweeter than the real thing. Human connection involves friction, obligation, and the discomfort of genuine mutual accountability. AI removes all of that. So we are not just losing the real glue. We are being gently, pleasurably guided away from it. And brittle things don’t announce their failure. They hold their shape, they look sound, they feel fine, right up until the stress comes.

I call what fills that gap phantom social capital, by which I mean: the simulation of authentic social exchange by synthetic actors, producing the appearance of connection, recognition, and mutual positioning while remaining structurally exempt from the obligations that give those things their value.

A social psychologist named Rom Harré spent decades arguing that conversation is not just how we communicate, it is the actual substance of social life, the mechanism through which trust, obligation, and meaning get built. I think he was right and I think what AI is doing to conversations and similar human to human interactions is therefore more consequential than most people have begun to reckon with.

My research is investigating what that means, for individuals, for institutions, for the social glue itself. What I write is grounded in serious academic research centred on communication theory and positioning theory, but I write for a general audience. The arguments and evidence should be clear enough to stand on its own. If it’s not please leave a comment or DM me as I’d appreciate your feedback.

Melanie James