This is a deep question. On the surface, for economic reasons. If they don’t someone else will. It’s all a big race, somewhere.
On a deeper level, we live in a culture which privileges intellect over emotion, where mourning is something that makes people uncomfortable, where even forgetting to put on your emotional mask, and pretending everything is alright makes people uncomfortable. Authenticity bears a peculiar valence, being both attractive and scary. Attractive, because it is what we all need. Scary, because it calls to mind everything that has been swept under the carpet, closeted, closed off, unprocessed, most all of it painful.
In an abstract world, the world of the machine, there is no pain. There are only interesting problems to solve. AI itself is a very interesting problem, for people fleeing life.
We can ask: when do the robots become the slaves enabling our freedom from work, our freedom of time and creation? As I read the situation, only if we rework our financial system in a sane and equitable way. Absent that, we get something like Blade Runner: a dystopia characterized by general impoverishment and pockets of extreme wealth.
And here is the point I started to make: can we not point to all our gadgets as “parents” of a sort which, in always being there, ready to guide us, make it less necessary to use judgement for decisions? Any opinion you want, you can find preformatted to your liking on the internet. You don’t need to carry facts in your head, when they are just a search away. You don’t need maps: it’s all on the phone. You don’t need to think: the experts have done it for you.
Once you accept your phone as a repository of truth, you have become the perfect peon, the perfect pawn.
I would say that technology itself is contributing to the manifest infantilizing of our youth, as is the quasi-industrial demand for perennial and ubiquitous safety.
You can’t grow sharp people in rubber rooms.
Me, my hope is to find my home in a perennial center soon. All time and all space are always present. It is possible to connect both with this world, and with something beyond. I feel this clearly. One can only hope where this world is concerned that some benevolent Tao is flowing through it now. One can hope that somehow, somewhere, biologists allow a new, field based theory of life to come into being. That the world of people like Cleve Backster is studied, and the appropriate lessons learned.
The enemy of this is the emotional weakness of “scientists” who have a deeply rooted need to own life, to own the unviverse, by being able to reduce it to a machine with rules they have deciphered. This is not how this universe works, though, so violence is inevitable; indeed, only violence has kept the truth hidden thus far: violence to new ideas, violence to unorthodox people. As it has always been.