Humans are so good at imagining things alive that just reading a story about Timmy the pencil is eliciting feelings of sympathy and reactions.
We are not good judges of things in general. Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe, but that end-goal is a lot further away than the tech-bros want to admit. We have decades of absolute slop and likely a few disasters to wade through.
And there's going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don't experience the world in any way.
Maybe one day these AI tools will actually help us and give us better perception and wisdom for dealing with the universe
But where's the money in that?
More likely we'll be introduced to an anthropomorphic pencil, induced to fall in love with it, and then told by a machine that we need to pay $10/mo or the pencil gets it.
And there’s going to be a LOT of people falling in love with super-advanced chat bots that don’t experience the world in any way.
People fall in and out of love all the time. I think the real consequence of online digital romance - particularly with some shitty knock off AI - is that you're going to have a wave of young people who see romance as entirely transactional. Not some deep bond shared between two living people, but an emotional feed bar you hit to feel something in exchange for a fee.
When the exit their bubbles and discover other people aren't feed bars to slap for gratification, they're going to get frustrated and confused from the years spent in their Skinner Boxes. And that's going to leave us with a very easily radicalized young male population.
Everyone interacts with the world sooner or later. The question is whether you developed the muscles to survivor during childhood or you came out of your home as an emotional slab of veal, ripe for someone else to feast upon.