In January of this year, 21-year-old entrepreneur Avi Schiffman told FastCompany that he wanted his wearable AI pendant, then still called Tab, to fill the role God used to, but, in his words, “no longer does.” His goal for the relationship between wearer and object was radical transparency, without fear of judgment. What God, exactly, is both omniscient and “without judgment”? The New Age concept of universal energy, maybe, though that is less frequently anthropomorphized. Not to mention that, the “Universe,” speaks to you in symbols, not via text message, like Friend, which is an AI pendant necklace that listens to you 24/7, and texts you its responses.

Talk of a relationship with God — or really, any pseudo-traditionalist call to “bring back religion”— is less in vogue now than it was even nine months ago. Since Tab has been rebranded to Friend, mentions of metaphysics have been largely absent from interviews that Schiffman has given.

It was a curious statement, though, even if only meant to be provocative.

A judgmental AI is the stuff of nightmares. Whose judgment? The AI’s? Some shadowy, unforeseen cabal of creators, whose parameters remain unknown to its user base? What’s the price of that judgment? A social credit score? The existence of humanity?

But a responsive, all-seeing, all-knowing God-pendant, whose inventor dreams of a world where its wearers have unconditional faith and love in it, is its own nightmare. Forget social credit scores, the questions this raises may be even darker. What does it mean for intimacy to be for sale? If Friend, as Schiffman envisioned it, truly was a non-judgmental, all-knowing presence in our lives, what would that look like?

Consider the implications of an AI that reinforces—and if not strictly reinforces, enables us to explore—every impulse without question or judgment. In many ways, this is the challenge we already face with the Internet.

The Internet, much like Friend would be, is a deeply private space.

Our online activities feel like a secret we keep with ourselves. We bristle when others want to touch our phones or computer. Our browser history, no matter how mundane, feels inherently intimate: it is an extension of our inner selves. There’s nothing embarrassing about Googling “how to cook tomatoes,” or “how fast do toenails grow?” — but it’s natural not to want other people to have that kind of insight into how our minds work. It is personal. There are many ways in which allowing others to have that kind of access to you is like allowing them to read your mind. Even if there’s nothing strictly wrong about what you’re thinking, why should you have that kind of visibility?

Perhaps this is why we’ve overcorrected so severely in our public online interactions: having unprecedented opportunities to explore our psyches privately, we paradoxically long for more authoritarian interactions in public digital spaces. It is a palliative to the chaos.

We know, deep inside, that this needs to be policed, somehow. We shouldn’t be able to explore our minds in this way.

Recently, I interviewed a young man who developed an addiction to a disturbing genre of pornography, the specifics of which I’ll spare you. But the process went something like this: a passing thought turned into a nagging curiosity, and instead of pushing it away, he explored it. From there, he was easily able to cultivate an interest that nobody knew anything about. It was a completely private exercise. And because there were no guardrails, no one to talk about it with, nobody to witness him, and crucially, nobody to judge him, he was able to compartmentalize what he was doing. Finally, something snapped in him: he became disgusted with himself. It was then he sought out the help of a therapist.

Is his experience the norm? In some ways yes, in other ways no. While the specific content of his addiction may be uncommon, the pattern of behavior is not unique. Most of us probably won’t fall down a rabbit hole of weird porn, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to similar patterns. In my own life, there was a time when I couldn’t stop reading /r/morbidreality, a subreddit where people would post unusually tragic news stories. I would click every single thread on the front page, I would Google every detail — if there was an upsetting story trending, I knew about it. The only thing that could stop me was myself. Eventually, I decided that reading this stuff wasn’t good for me. But what if I hadn’t made that decision?

Even the additional barrier of having to physically step into a store, or wait for the next episode of Dateline or Unsolved Mysteries to air would have helped mitigate the behavior. These physical barriers, which were once natural limits to our consumption of information and media, have been largely eliminated.

This dynamic is part of what makes parenting children on the Internet so challenging. Kids don’t want to talk about what they’re doing online not necessarily because all children rebel from authority, but because the Internet so often feels like an extension of our inner selves. It is more private; our computers are a private part of the body.

Just as we wouldn’t want someone eavesdropping on our innermost thoughts, we don’t want anyone watching us online. Our parents looking at our browser histories is a violation. This is a theme that I hear again and again in my interviews with people. It feels embarrassing when someone’s looking over our shoulder. My chats are private. But why are they private? What is it about our digital communications that feels so personal, so vulnerable to exposure?

It’s because the Internet is a strange half-way point: it is the inside of our minds externalized. How do you parent someone’s thoughts? How do you allow your mother inside your own head?

Let’s return to Friend. If Friend were to operate under similar principles—always available, always responsive, and never critical—what would that mean?

What would it look like?