6 ms·

> But, does humanity really need an AI friend? This reminds me of the Fredrick Pohl line "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automo

> But, does humanity really need an AI friend? This reminds me of the Fredrick Pohl line "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." So I wonder what the traffic jam is going to look like given that the car seems to already be parked outside with the engine running. Faster depopulation across the developed world? Probably, but maybe there's something even more important. I'd put what the author describes into the category of "pleasure trip," which is what the car was mainly used for initially. As infrastructure to support the car was built, it became a necessity. And that's what created the traffic jam: network effect. The suburb and the car fed on each other. You don't get a traffic jam worth talking about without a suburb and a network effect. So I'm curious about the network effects something like an AI friend might have. What kinds of new infrastructure and new lifestyles will they enable/encourage? And how will this infrastructure fuel future demand?

dpflan 3y ago
Hm, let's try an extreme: the AI friend slowly becomes a cult leader to you, hijacking your mind into subservience to the owner of the service to which AI belongs, and further up some social/political hierarchy to a few controlling people/groups of people. The traffic jam is society stymied by individuals mind-controlled at a level closer to connection to a human than any other way possible before this.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  Kinda feel like you have that backwards, why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals? Votes? The scarier prospect to me is human labor and intelligence become almost worthless and those at the top start to view the masses as superfluous.
  - dpflan 3y ago
    Perhaps the AI cares, perhaps it has no ability for that function at all. Maybe a step on the way to sentience and AI caring is AI that is as human-like as possible but not sentient. > "the top start to view the masses as superfluous." That seems like another reason for keeping the superfluous occupied and useful for whatever is desired, which would probably be retention of power to prevent usurpation. Perhaps human intelligence is worthless, but human existence seems not, at least to those who want to be alive.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    > why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? [..] What do they get out of manipulating average individuals? Captcha slaves?
  - melagonster 3y ago
    ＞human labor and intelligence become almost worthless... I sure this is happening, and ot is finished in some region.
  - prepend 3y ago
    > Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals Greater ad revenue. I would expect that tailoring your reality feed to whatever makes the AI controller the most money will be extremely lucrative. Kind of like how visa/stripe takes 2-5% of every financial transaction. Imagine if a firm could make 5-10% of everything you do by manipulating you to maximum effect.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      In The Red: First Light Linda Nagata posits an AI that tries to help people maximise their potential, because by earning more they consume more. The AI escaped from Amazon (the web store), it is theorized. (Nice MilSF if you like that kind of thing.) 1. https://www.amazon.com/Red-First-Light-Trilogy/dp/1481440934 https://www.amazon.com/Red-First-Light-Trilogy/dp/1481440934
nemothekid 3y ago
I think the pleasure trip is just porn. We have that already and it's possible to discuss the effects of widespread porn on people. I think the next step is, what does it mean to have an emotional relationship with someone in your pocket who is for all definitions perfect - can provide perfect advice and does so with judgement, ridicule, pity or anger? What will be my bar for human relationships, those imperfect messy human beings, when I have a partner I can be perfectly vulnerable with? What happens to interpersonal relationships when you are competing with a virtual perfect significant other?
- louison11 3y ago
  If your definition of perfect is an AI that is programmed not to upset you, then sure. But maybe there is perfection in the imperfection of humans and the pain that inevitably arises from human relationships? We learn how to love through our differences. Intimacy is deepened by meeting each other in the raw, vulnerable and wounded places. The kind of “perfect significant other” you’re describing sounds sterile and a massive bypass of what life can truly be.
  - bronco21016 3y ago
    Lex Friedman podcast with Elon where they discuss that war is an inevitability of the human condition. The idea of world peace may not be a worthwhile goal as what it is to be human is to have suffering, to some degree. As I navigate dating, I've found the perfectly "compliant" or even "subservient" relationships are just as shallow as the ones fueled by lust. Sadly, when relationships are as replaceable as water, there's not much thirst for anything real, including the ups and downs. I guess what I'm musing is that I feel bad for the people stuck in the empty loops of "perfect" satisfaction and hope they find the human in themselves in the day to day. Amusing Ourselves to Death comes to mind.
    - louison11 3y ago
      I agree with some things and slightly disagree with others. Mainly, I do believe peace to be a worthwhile and ultimately accessible pursuit for each and everyone of us, both internally and collectively. But learning to exist in it surely comes through embracing wholeheartedly the reality of our human condition, not shying away from it in virtual realms. I guess what I’m saying is that pain and loss are inevitable. The impermanence of life is by itself a guarantee of it. But suffering is often unnecessarily caused by our resistance to the inevitability of life. This is what creates the internal neurosis, which ultimately manifests in the collective as outer aggression and wars. I believe all this can be pacified. That’s kind of the goal of most paths of self realization.
d4nt 3y ago
Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language. Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate. Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.
- yawnxyz 3y ago
  well, I just had a ChatGPT-translated test conversation where I spoke Chinese and they spoke English, and it worked fairly well (with some lag). I really hope we'll be to make friends more easily across languages/cultures
  - ClimaxGravely 3y ago
    As an English/French speaker who is learning Japanese I'd love to see the chat logs! I first learned French to fluency and then I moved on to Japanese and I realized that it's so much harder to learn Japanese (and presumably other languages that use the Chinese alphabet). The issue is that when you go from English to French, for a large part you can simply translate the words. From English to Japanese I have to first translate, re-arrange the grammar and then account for idioms at the very least. I'd love to see how the conversation went!
- whearyou 3y ago
  This is terrifyingly believable
dwroberts 3y ago
Not for AI friends but I’m starting to see ‘traffic jams’ at work - people using GPT to output a bunch of verbose text, and others then using GPT to summarise that text so they can understand it. It feels like the beginning of a weird arms race where everybody is insulated from everyone else by a layer of junk created by AI (and the workaround to that junk is more AI)
- fullshark 3y ago
  More like a weird arms race where no one actually thinks about what they are saying or reading anymore and you are drowning in word soup. After all words are just tools to achieve some goal.
- yourapostasy 3y ago
  A communications/semantic Kessler Syndrome. This likely boosts the signal gain of memes without pushing any more data down the pipe.
antiterra 3y ago
> A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. One simple way to tilt any romanticized sci-fi invention dystopian is simply to imagine the invention is required and the only option for nearly everyone. This works for everything from text-to-speech to robot companions to teleportation to AR headsets to cars.
russdill 3y ago
The thing that really depresses me is that many humans will become "AI friends". It's really hard to know exactly what to say in all social situations. Imagine if you could have a little AI whisper in your ear something witty to say? Extend that out and many conversations you have with human friends, you're really just having with an AI.
- apsurd 3y ago
  hmm but the more that's true, the more counter culture will be a thing no? places with EM jammers etc, no technology experiences. that keeps me interested at least heh
- netsharc 3y ago
  Man oh man... or use a bot to like and write something vague but clever-sounding on others' social media posts. I feel like if someone is using such a bot with me but not tell me, I would feel the validation is genuine, but if I knew it came from a bot I'd count it as cheap/worthless. I had a chance to play with a Sony Aibo robot dog years ago, if you stroked its back sensors it'd bark, etc, but after 5 seconds I realized "It's just some sensors and algorithms, it doesn't have any emotions for you!". But then again I saw an Instagram video of skimpily-clothed girl walking down a fashion catwalk with all her appropriate parts swaying, and it was amazing, and then all the comments said it's AI-generated. So at least the lizard brain can be aroused...
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
e12e 3y ago
Personal Data lake Draught syndrome / Data Impaired Persona Personality? Not for AI friends, but for AI social agents that automate social interaction on your behalf; microblogs, videoblogs, memeposts and discuss online on your behalf - for the users that starts using AI agents too early in life and have too little data to imbue the agents with a personality that stems from their own voice and expression?
safety1st 3y ago
OK, here's a stab at the traffic jam based on simply extrapolating current trends: * Humans increasingly spend time on digital social experiences instead of real ones * AIs become progressively better at socializing and pretty soon we have AI friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners etc. all over the place * Our reproductive rate, already in decline, collapses to <0.5 within a few generations because many people would rather have an AI BF/GF than a human one, so they never have an opportunity to have kids * A century from now the human population has shrunk by 85% and we've peacefully ceded enormous swathes of power and responsibility to AIs because there just aren't a lot of humans left I think you could tell any number of fascinating slice-of-life stories with this backdrop, there was no war, no conflict, the AIs were generally helpful and friendly and patient through the whole thing, we simply decided as a species to commit the suicide which is already in progress and everyone has pretty much accepted that. It's the polar opposite of Skynet and the Terminator It sounds like a dystopia to us - it may just sound like old history to the people and AIs of the year 2100. I'm in my 40s, I don't have kids and life is pretty good...

dpflan 3y ago

Hm, let's try an extreme: the AI friend slowly becomes a cult leader to you, hijacking your mind into subservience to the owner of the service to which AI belongs, and further up some social/political hierarchy to a few controlling people/groups of people. The traffic jam is society stymied by individuals mind-controlled at a level closer to connection to a human than any other way possible before this.

ericmcer 3y ago
Kinda feel like you have that backwards, why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals? Votes? The scarier prospect to me is human labor and intelligence become almost worthless and those at the top start to view the masses as superfluous.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Perhaps the AI cares, perhaps it has no ability for that function at all. Maybe a step on the way to sentience and AI caring is AI that is as human-like as possible but not sentient. > "the top start to view the masses as superfluous." That seems like another reason for keeping the superfluous occupied and useful for whatever is desired, which would probably be retention of power to prevent usurpation. Perhaps human intelligence is worthless, but human existence seems not, at least to those who want to be alive.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? [..] What do they get out of manipulating average individuals? Captcha slaves?
- melagonster 3y ago
  ＞human labor and intelligence become almost worthless... I sure this is happening, and ot is finished in some region.
- prepend 3y ago
  > Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals Greater ad revenue. I would expect that tailoring your reality feed to whatever makes the AI controller the most money will be extremely lucrative. Kind of like how visa/stripe takes 2-5% of every financial transaction. Imagine if a firm could make 5-10% of everything you do by manipulating you to maximum effect.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    In The Red: First Light Linda Nagata posits an AI that tries to help people maximise their potential, because by earning more they consume more. The AI escaped from Amazon (the web store), it is theorized. (Nice MilSF if you like that kind of thing.) 1. https://www.amazon.com/Red-First-Light-Trilogy/dp/1481440934 https://www.amazon.com/Red-First-Light-Trilogy/dp/1481440934

nemothekid 3y ago

I think the pleasure trip is just porn. We have that already and it's possible to discuss the effects of widespread porn on people. I think the next step is, what does it mean to have an emotional relationship with someone in your pocket who is for all definitions perfect - can provide perfect advice and does so with judgement, ridicule, pity or anger? What will be my bar for human relationships, those imperfect messy human beings, when I have a partner I can be perfectly vulnerable with? What happens to interpersonal relationships when you are competing with a virtual perfect significant other?

louison11 3y ago
If your definition of perfect is an AI that is programmed not to upset you, then sure. But maybe there is perfection in the imperfection of humans and the pain that inevitably arises from human relationships? We learn how to love through our differences. Intimacy is deepened by meeting each other in the raw, vulnerable and wounded places. The kind of “perfect significant other” you’re describing sounds sterile and a massive bypass of what life can truly be.
- bronco21016 3y ago
  Lex Friedman podcast with Elon where they discuss that war is an inevitability of the human condition. The idea of world peace may not be a worthwhile goal as what it is to be human is to have suffering, to some degree. As I navigate dating, I've found the perfectly "compliant" or even "subservient" relationships are just as shallow as the ones fueled by lust. Sadly, when relationships are as replaceable as water, there's not much thirst for anything real, including the ups and downs. I guess what I'm musing is that I feel bad for the people stuck in the empty loops of "perfect" satisfaction and hope they find the human in themselves in the day to day. Amusing Ourselves to Death comes to mind.
  - louison11 3y ago
    I agree with some things and slightly disagree with others. Mainly, I do believe peace to be a worthwhile and ultimately accessible pursuit for each and everyone of us, both internally and collectively. But learning to exist in it surely comes through embracing wholeheartedly the reality of our human condition, not shying away from it in virtual realms. I guess what I’m saying is that pain and loss are inevitable. The impermanence of life is by itself a guarantee of it. But suffering is often unnecessarily caused by our resistance to the inevitability of life. This is what creates the internal neurosis, which ultimately manifests in the collective as outer aggression and wars. I believe all this can be pacified. That’s kind of the goal of most paths of self realization.

d4nt 3y ago

Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language. Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate. Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.

yawnxyz 3y ago
well, I just had a ChatGPT-translated test conversation where I spoke Chinese and they spoke English, and it worked fairly well (with some lag). I really hope we'll be to make friends more easily across languages/cultures
- ClimaxGravely 3y ago
  As an English/French speaker who is learning Japanese I'd love to see the chat logs! I first learned French to fluency and then I moved on to Japanese and I realized that it's so much harder to learn Japanese (and presumably other languages that use the Chinese alphabet). The issue is that when you go from English to French, for a large part you can simply translate the words. From English to Japanese I have to first translate, re-arrange the grammar and then account for idioms at the very least. I'd love to see how the conversation went!
whearyou 3y ago
This is terrifyingly believable

dwroberts 3y ago

Not for AI friends but I’m starting to see ‘traffic jams’ at work - people using GPT to output a bunch of verbose text, and others then using GPT to summarise that text so they can understand it. It feels like the beginning of a weird arms race where everybody is insulated from everyone else by a layer of junk created by AI (and the workaround to that junk is more AI)

fullshark 3y ago
More like a weird arms race where no one actually thinks about what they are saying or reading anymore and you are drowning in word soup. After all words are just tools to achieve some goal.
yourapostasy 3y ago
A communications/semantic Kessler Syndrome. This likely boosts the signal gain of memes without pushing any more data down the pipe.

antiterra 3y ago

> A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. One simple way to tilt any romanticized sci-fi invention dystopian is simply to imagine the invention is required and the only option for nearly everyone. This works for everything from text-to-speech to robot companions to teleportation to AR headsets to cars.

russdill 3y ago

The thing that really depresses me is that many humans will become "AI friends". It's really hard to know exactly what to say in all social situations. Imagine if you could have a little AI whisper in your ear something witty to say? Extend that out and many conversations you have with human friends, you're really just having with an AI.

apsurd 3y ago
hmm but the more that's true, the more counter culture will be a thing no? places with EM jammers etc, no technology experiences. that keeps me interested at least heh
netsharc 3y ago
Man oh man... or use a bot to like and write something vague but clever-sounding on others' social media posts. I feel like if someone is using such a bot with me but not tell me, I would feel the validation is genuine, but if I knew it came from a bot I'd count it as cheap/worthless. I had a chance to play with a Sony Aibo robot dog years ago, if you stroked its back sensors it'd bark, etc, but after 5 seconds I realized "It's just some sensors and algorithms, it doesn't have any emotions for you!". But then again I saw an Instagram video of skimpily-clothed girl walking down a fashion catwalk with all her appropriate parts swaying, and it was amazing, and then all the comments said it's AI-generated. So at least the lizard brain can be aroused...

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

e12e 3y ago

Personal Data lake Draught syndrome / Data Impaired Persona Personality? Not for AI friends, but for AI social agents that automate social interaction on your behalf; microblogs, videoblogs, memeposts and discuss online on your behalf - for the users that starts using AI agents too early in life and have too little data to imbue the agents with a personality that stems from their own voice and expression?

safety1st 3y ago

OK, here's a stab at the traffic jam based on simply extrapolating current trends: * Humans increasingly spend time on digital social experiences instead of real ones * AIs become progressively better at socializing and pretty soon we have AI friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners etc. all over the place * Our reproductive rate, already in decline, collapses to <0.5 within a few generations because many people would rather have an AI BF/GF than a human one, so they never have an opportunity to have kids * A century from now the human population has shrunk by 85% and we've peacefully ceded enormous swathes of power and responsibility to AIs because there just aren't a lot of humans left I think you could tell any number of fascinating slice-of-life stories with this backdrop, there was no war, no conflict, the AIs were generally helpful and friendly and patient through the whole thing, we simply decided as a species to commit the suicide which is already in progress and everyone has pretty much accepted that. It's the polar opposite of Skynet and the Terminator It sounds like a dystopia to us - it may just sound like old history to the people and AIs of the year 2100. I'm in my 40s, I don't have kids and life is pretty good...