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Is it currently different? A college degree in the US costs tens of thousands of dollars. And years of your time. With an AI companion, you might have to pay $

• mcphage 5y ago
  A college degree also signals something: that you stuck with something for years, and finished it, and that your college believes you learned something along the way. With an AI companion, all you signal is that you have several hundred a month to spend on an AI companion.
• danaris 5y ago
  It's possible for someone born into poverty to get scholarships and college loans to get a higher education. (Sometimes it's not the best deal in the world, but that's not the point here.) It's a large expenditure, but it's a one-time expenditure; once you have the education, no matter how poor you are for the rest of your life, you still have it. No one's going to give you a loan to get a $500/month "AI companion" for the rest of your life—in part, precisely because it's for the rest of your life. What you are proposing can not be seen as anything other than a way to ensure that society is permanently stratified by socioeconomic class.