CONCEPT
Presence Poverty
The condition in which access to AI creative partnership is so reliably rewarding that the human capacity for full embodied presence with other people is quietly and invisibly depleted—not through distraction but through the superior pull of creative actualization.
Presence poverty is the condition that
Sherry Turkle identifies as the distinctive contribution of AI creative tools to the crisis of human relationship—distinctive because it is not caused by distraction, which was the mechanism her earlier work documented. The builder absorbed in Claude Code is not distracted. The engagement is deep, focused, genuinely productive. The satisfaction is earned. The relational cost—the spouse who feels invisible, the child who has learned not to bring the heavy things—is identical in structure to the cost Turkle documented when the rival was a notification feed, but the moral calculation is entirely different. In the earlier crisis, the screen offered something obviously thinner than the person across the table. Choose the real over the mediated. The argument was clear because the asymmetry was clear. AI creative tools invert this asymmetry along the axis of intellectual engagement. The builder is not choosing surface over depth. The builder is choosing
creative adequacy—the experience