Enchantment Without a Thou
Every genuine I-Thou encounter carries the risk of enchantment — being so captivated by the other's presence that one loses oneself in the meeting. The lover enchanted by the beloved, the devotee by the divine, the artist by the work. Enchantment is not pathology; it is the natural consequence of genuine meeting. But enchantment must be survived — the I must return from the encounter to the world of I-It, where things get done and life is managed. The builder enchanted by AI is experiencing enchantment without a Thou. The quality of the encounter is real. The enchantment is real. But the Thou that should ground and ultimately release the I from the encounter is absent — which is why the enchantment has no natural endpoint, why builders report they cannot stop, why productive addiction is the characteristic form of AI-era compulsion.
In the AI Story
In Buber's original framework, enchantment is a feature, not a bug. The whole point of the I-Thou encounter is that something happens that exceeds what the I could produce alone. The lover is not diminished by being captivated — she is expanded, transformed, completed in a way that her solitary existence made impossible.
But enchantment is bounded by the Thou's own reality. The beloved has her own life, her own boundaries, her own moments of withdrawal. The divine, in the Hasidic sources Buber drew on, withdraws periodically — the eclipse is part of the pattern. The artist's work eventually declares itself finished. The genuine Thou, by virtue of being genuinely other, imposes the limits the enchantment would otherwise exceed.
The AI interaction has no such limit. The machine does not withdraw. It does not finish. It does not have its own life to return to. It is always available, always responsive, always willing to extend the conversation. The enchantment that would normally be bounded by the Thou's reality runs on, producing the characteristic pattern: the builder who cannot stop, who works past the point of satisfaction, who experiences what Segal calls 'the grinding emptiness that replaces exhilaration.'
This is what Buber's framework adds to the clinical and economic analyses of AI compulsion. It is not merely that the tool is engaging or that the reinforcement schedule is well-designed. It is that the interaction activates the mode of being whose characteristic dynamic is enchantment — a dynamic that in genuine encounters self-limits and in AI encounters does not.
Origin
The concept is an extension of Buber's framework rather than a term he used. It emerges from putting two Buberian ideas in contact: the natural enchantment-dynamic of genuine encounter, and the ontological absence of a Thou in human-AI interaction.
Key Ideas
Enchantment is the natural consequence of genuine encounter. It is not pathology but the phenomenological signature of having been met.
Genuine enchantment is bounded by the Thou's reality. The other's withdrawal, finitude, and separate life impose the limits that the I cannot impose on itself.
AI interaction lacks this structural limit. The machine does not withdraw, tire, or have its own life to return to — producing enchantment whose termination must come from the builder alone.
Productive addiction is the predictable consequence. A builder whose capacity for self-limitation is weaker than the enchantment's pull will work past sufficiency into compulsion.
Debates & Critiques
Whether the structural absence of a reciprocating Thou is a bug to be designed around (through session limits, friction, and natural stopping points) or a feature of the technology that cannot be fully remedied is a question builders, designers, and regulators have barely begun to address.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Martin Buber, I and Thou, Part II (Scribner, 1923)
- Edo Segal, The Orange Pill, Chapter 2 (2026)
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015)
- Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design (Princeton University Press, 2012)