How desirable is that in this age of incipient artificial intelligence?
There’s a well-known song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “The King and I” with the lyric
“Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you,
Getting to hope you like me …”
which expresses the joy of falling in love — learning to know, and be known by, another person in many intimate sensual and cognitive ways.
Most of us long to be “known” by friends, admirers, and lovers, but if we are social at all, we also become known by others who may not be friendly — who may not like what they know about us, or who may try to use what they know about us to their own benefit more than to ours.
And some of us may have things that we don’t want anyone to know, whether out of embarrassment, shame, or deviousness. We all value the privacy of some of our thoughts.
Sometimes we get to know people in asymmetrical ways. We see and hear public figures whom we come to like or dislike, and we admire some who seem to think the way we do. They may say things that we agree with and may say them even better than we could ourselves.
