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Psychoanalytic reflections on technology did not begin with artificial intelligence (AI). Rather, they are rooted in a long-standing engagement with technological artifacts and devices that shape analytic practice, processes of subjectivation, and the configurations of psychic life and psychopathology.
Within this broader context, particular attention has been devoted to the study of the effects and transformations of psychic and social life that emerge from interactions with technological artifacts and devices that simulate, or in some way signal, a form of alterity with which one can relate. The so-called robotic moment (Turkle, 2011), marked by the social acceptance of robotic companionships in the form of robotic toys, robotic social pets, and other assistance devices that simulate otherness, is especially salient in this regard. Other developmental lines may also be included, such as what I have previously termed immersive or techno-stimulated life, including the mass adoption of algorithmically mediated interactions in social media and tangible-digital personal assistants (such as Amazon’s Alexa). Most notably, this also involves new generations naturalizing social interactions through video games, where the boundary between a computer-generated character, an avatar, or a digital counterpart and another human user becomes blurred within the undifferentiated space of the digital environment (Gutiérrez, 2008, 2023, 2024, 2025). What is striking, however, is the scale and sophistication that this process of anthropomorphization has now reached, together with its consequences for reshaping our reference points for what constitutes a living other.
It is possible that the year 2025 will be remembered in the history of human relations with technology. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test intended to assess the extent to which a computer might be capable of deceiving a human being and leading them to assume that its responses were those of another human (Turing, 1950).