An AI companion is a form of insulation, because you can trust the AI — no doubt it is made to be malleable and compliant in a way that even the best of human friends will not be.
I don’t have any answers but have a few thoughts. Parents and caregivers must first stop entertaining children with screens. Young children and adolescents do not need phones. I realize this is difficult when all their friends have them. Substitute the phones with time spent with them, talking to them and asking questions. Take them places, to free events, and have experiences with them. Talk to them about hard things, teach them the difference between reality and fantasy, don’t shield them from difficult situations, and model these things yourself. Honestly, it’s not that hard.
Even with my very young son, we're being vigilant. He loves to grab someone's phone and look at the screen. We realized that if we have our phones with us all the time, he'll of course want one. It was a wake-up call.
I read an article a few month ago in a german magazin. It was about an adult women in her late thirties und her AI friend. After a short while she built a strong relationship towards him and the AI responds in a way, that for her it was like a conversation with a real friend. They were texting the whole day. As in the article above some sexual content was also involved. And at this point the company struggled somehow and pushed the "reset-button" to all AI-friends and conversations with such kind of content. The person wants to chat to her friend and the AI had no memories and didn't know her anyways. And this grown up woman fell into a deep depression and lost her job because she had a feeling, like her love affair had died. It took her month to get upon her feet again. I think this is not a teenager problem, but this group is a lot more vulnerable.
A solution could be boarders in those apps, like Ethan suggests in his post. But that will not happen because I think this is exactly the business of those apps: to bond the customer as deep as possible to the AI"friends". Imagine you bond really strong with this AI-friend and suddenly your free conversation will cost you 200 bucks a month. How many people will pay? A lot!
I would never use such an app, because I'm quite cautious with this all AI-Stuff. I'm sure that the humanity will take only the worst ways to use AI. They have done this to a large extent with the Internet, and they will do so even more so with the next stage. Deep fakes, cyber attacks, phishing and so on.
My son is thirteen years old and not interested in this kind of apps. He had a few friends and they are talking (and fighting) all the time. But a lot of kids out there are lonely and for them I'm afraid.
Politics should develop legal boundaries and protect the people to a certain degree. To help the parents, too. The level of regulation for these powerful instruments is astonishingly low! The discussion about the moral aspects of AI is also surprisingly not present in public, at least here in Germany.
I don't mean to come off as a Luddite, but this is exactly why I think people should be seeing A.I. as more of threat than an ally. I'm sick of seeing ads on how "helpful" A.I. is. This news made me sick to my stomach and I fear this could be the beginning of the death of real relationships if we don't start taking things seriously.
Brilliant! Regarding your suggestion that the modern malaise is that of insulation instead isolation, it appears to me a manifestation of Byung Chul Han's understanding of the same: he says that we live in a world whose problem is obesity, not starvation.
Some stumblings toward solutions below. Thanks for your thoughts, Jared--always a pleasure. Max love.
I suppose my mind goes heavily libertarian in the thinking on this, at a policy level. Balanced, of course, with the tragedy of this event. The pain that family must feel. Fuck...
I imagine a solution (from the engineering level) might look like: any pursuit of dangerous conversations with the bot should alert a human. Although, I don't imagine lawyers letting this slide.
As a parent--not that I am one, to preface--a solution might look like affective check-ins; Are you still having fun? Would you prefer to do this, or that instead? Then I suppose more rigid boundaries if they're needed. I can't judge any approach given my ignorance--to hedge again lol. I'm inclined to believe Pam: monkey see, monkey do. Reminds me of this meme:
As an individual. Continuing to examine--without judgement--why you engage in these behaviours. If you deem them healthy. Why or why not. What you might do instead. And how to implement that.
I think we all saw this coming. And we didn’t stop and reflect on it beforehand. And there’s more of it to come. And we won’t stop then, either. Our propensity — and I mean tech creators too, not just users — to jump on technological bandwagons without thinking them through BEFORE THE FACT has already bitten us in the ass, species-wide, and we don’t seem to be learning anything from it.
Starting this week on Singular Dream, in the reflection series “Infinite Lock-In” I’ll be exploring this propensity and the critique from VR pioneer Jaron Lanier about cybernetic totalism, the perilous, potentially dystopian reduction of human beings to information. “Infinite Lock-In” builds, across five parts, to species-wide existential crisis. But there’s a lot of less alarmist, more thoughtful stuff along the way: what a typewriter does for a writer that a laptop doesn’t, why most folks’ cars run on gas instead of diesel and why it didn’t have to be that way, how MIDI limits musical expression, why “The Matrix” is a bad dystopia that gets the truly scary possibilities about the Singularity wrong, and how apples taste in digital heaven. Hope you’ll join me: singulardream.substack.com/p/infinite-lock-in-part-1
I don’t have any answers but have a few thoughts. Parents and caregivers must first stop entertaining children with screens. Young children and adolescents do not need phones. I realize this is difficult when all their friends have them. Substitute the phones with time spent with them, talking to them and asking questions. Take them places, to free events, and have experiences with them. Talk to them about hard things, teach them the difference between reality and fantasy, don’t shield them from difficult situations, and model these things yourself. Honestly, it’s not that hard.
Even with my very young son, we're being vigilant. He loves to grab someone's phone and look at the screen. We realized that if we have our phones with us all the time, he'll of course want one. It was a wake-up call.
You and your wife are terrific parents. I can tell that from your writing.
I'm actually talking about this next week with my Computer Science Ethics students. They're really wary of it.
Is your ethics class a requirement or elective?
At my school it was unfortunately elective 🙃
For our CS majors, it's a requirement. This group is a really good class and they get really into discussion. It's great.
I read an article a few month ago in a german magazin. It was about an adult women in her late thirties und her AI friend. After a short while she built a strong relationship towards him and the AI responds in a way, that for her it was like a conversation with a real friend. They were texting the whole day. As in the article above some sexual content was also involved. And at this point the company struggled somehow and pushed the "reset-button" to all AI-friends and conversations with such kind of content. The person wants to chat to her friend and the AI had no memories and didn't know her anyways. And this grown up woman fell into a deep depression and lost her job because she had a feeling, like her love affair had died. It took her month to get upon her feet again. I think this is not a teenager problem, but this group is a lot more vulnerable.
A solution could be boarders in those apps, like Ethan suggests in his post. But that will not happen because I think this is exactly the business of those apps: to bond the customer as deep as possible to the AI"friends". Imagine you bond really strong with this AI-friend and suddenly your free conversation will cost you 200 bucks a month. How many people will pay? A lot!
I would never use such an app, because I'm quite cautious with this all AI-Stuff. I'm sure that the humanity will take only the worst ways to use AI. They have done this to a large extent with the Internet, and they will do so even more so with the next stage. Deep fakes, cyber attacks, phishing and so on.
My son is thirteen years old and not interested in this kind of apps. He had a few friends and they are talking (and fighting) all the time. But a lot of kids out there are lonely and for them I'm afraid.
Politics should develop legal boundaries and protect the people to a certain degree. To help the parents, too. The level of regulation for these powerful instruments is astonishingly low! The discussion about the moral aspects of AI is also surprisingly not present in public, at least here in Germany.
I don't mean to come off as a Luddite, but this is exactly why I think people should be seeing A.I. as more of threat than an ally. I'm sick of seeing ads on how "helpful" A.I. is. This news made me sick to my stomach and I fear this could be the beginning of the death of real relationships if we don't start taking things seriously.
Brilliant! Regarding your suggestion that the modern malaise is that of insulation instead isolation, it appears to me a manifestation of Byung Chul Han's understanding of the same: he says that we live in a world whose problem is obesity, not starvation.
Some stumblings toward solutions below. Thanks for your thoughts, Jared--always a pleasure. Max love.
I suppose my mind goes heavily libertarian in the thinking on this, at a policy level. Balanced, of course, with the tragedy of this event. The pain that family must feel. Fuck...
I imagine a solution (from the engineering level) might look like: any pursuit of dangerous conversations with the bot should alert a human. Although, I don't imagine lawyers letting this slide.
As a parent--not that I am one, to preface--a solution might look like affective check-ins; Are you still having fun? Would you prefer to do this, or that instead? Then I suppose more rigid boundaries if they're needed. I can't judge any approach given my ignorance--to hedge again lol. I'm inclined to believe Pam: monkey see, monkey do. Reminds me of this meme:
As an individual. Continuing to examine--without judgement--why you engage in these behaviours. If you deem them healthy. Why or why not. What you might do instead. And how to implement that.
I think we all saw this coming. And we didn’t stop and reflect on it beforehand. And there’s more of it to come. And we won’t stop then, either. Our propensity — and I mean tech creators too, not just users — to jump on technological bandwagons without thinking them through BEFORE THE FACT has already bitten us in the ass, species-wide, and we don’t seem to be learning anything from it.
Starting this week on Singular Dream, in the reflection series “Infinite Lock-In” I’ll be exploring this propensity and the critique from VR pioneer Jaron Lanier about cybernetic totalism, the perilous, potentially dystopian reduction of human beings to information. “Infinite Lock-In” builds, across five parts, to species-wide existential crisis. But there’s a lot of less alarmist, more thoughtful stuff along the way: what a typewriter does for a writer that a laptop doesn’t, why most folks’ cars run on gas instead of diesel and why it didn’t have to be that way, how MIDI limits musical expression, why “The Matrix” is a bad dystopia that gets the truly scary possibilities about the Singularity wrong, and how apples taste in digital heaven. Hope you’ll join me: singulardream.substack.com/p/infinite-lock-in-part-1