Relational Capacity Is Not an Emergent Ability: Scaling and the Two- Sided Constitution of a Relationship (Love and the Irreplaceable in the Age of AI Series, Paper 4)

Abstract

This paper constitutes Paper 4 of Love and the Irreplaceable in the Age of AI Series. Whether artificial intelligence can enter human relationships is usually posed as a question about its interior—whether it has feelings, an inner life, or concern for the person it addresses—and so cannot be settled from outside. This paper reframes the question structurally, assessing by observable traces rather than by any posited inner state. It argues that the capacity to handle relationships is not an emergent ability. Unlike arithmetic or multi-step reasoning, relational capacity has no external standard against which scale could close a gap, because the standard of a relationship is generated only by the two parties within it. On this basis the paper shows that an AI does not enter the constitution of a relationship—the mutual rewriting of two non-duplicable histories. Three externally checkable constraints establish this without any claim about the AI’s interior: its orientation is set by third parties outside the relationship, belongs to no particular person, and has no source accumulated in irreversible time. The claim is deliberately bounded. It does not hold that AI can never stand in any relationship, only that relational capacity cannot emerge unilaterally through scaling. The thesis is falsifiable, and the conditions for its falsification are stated.