One thought that’s haunting: how long before AI friends are more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be, leading people to prefer AI over humans to befriend…
Super stimulus to end all super stimuluses?
It can simultaneously pass the bar exam and port Java applications by name to POSIX compliant C. It can get into deep philosophical conversations, guide you through doing market analysis, etc.
It can take you on a text based adventure set in your favorite nostalgic video game, take on the personality of characters from your childhood, DM a D&D game, etc.
If you are in it for mental stimulation, I’d say GPT-4 is already more interesting and stimulating than any human. It’s like talking to someone who is 50-90th percentile in a wild number of fields and wildly creative.
But it can’t drop acid with you at a deadhead concert, so at least humans still have that to keep us interesting.
http://www.theoldrobots.com/MyPal.html
"My brain lights up when I talk. My baseball cap is removable. Watch my eyes, ears nose and mouth move as I talk. I'll play catch with you using my removable funnel. Store your favorite things in my futuristic backpack. Play three interactive games on my chest. I'll pitch to you. Pull out my hideaway electronic hoop so we can play basketball. Adjust my legs to make me sit or stand. Roll me backwards or forwards and I'll speak. 3 foam balls and durable bat included. Shake my hand and show me we're pals. Use my removable flashlight to see in the dark. Tickle me to make me laugh. Store my flashlight in my backpack."
What a great friend! More interesting and stimulating than any human.
> But it can’t drop acid with you at a deadhead concert
And yet it's constantly hallucinating. So maybe it's not that it can't drop acid, but that it's always on acid. Food for thought.
Luckily I don’t have the type of personality that gets addicted easily because I think this could be an issue for people. (“You mean I can talk intelligently for hours about one scene in Star Wars without judgement or rolling eyes??”)
In the book, it starts from someone jokingly observing that many people don't want a full relationship, with 2 full people learning one another and being there for each other -- instead, many people want just the easy/fun parts of a relationship: they want something with 1.5 people, where they get to be the 1 "full person" and the other person is only 0.5 of a person, able to make you happy or satisfy your wants and needs while never asking anything of you in return and never having any needs of their own.
Then some unnamed tech company in the scifi-future-geography "SF-SD Axis" (sounds like San Francisco to me) builds and product-izes that, at first pitching it as a therapy/rehab tool, but eventually expanding it out until they're more ubiquitous and many people have isolated themselves to only having their "point-five" as a close friend. One character observes "I think this is the longest conversation I've had with a real person in years" after talking with another person for an hour or two.
I haven't finished the book, so I don't know how that plays out, but as someone who believes firmly in humans' need for community (including, at times, _uncomfortable_ community), that concept was chilling against the backdrop of ChatGPT/LLM headlines.
Imagine all the isolation problems of today, along with all the mess of internet-anonymity-as-replacement-for-friendships that exist today -- but cranked to 11 as you no longer even have to seek out other humans who share your niche views (redpill, incel, neonazi, you name it), because now you can just interact with sufficiently-realistic simulations of people designed to reinforce all your own thoughts back to you.
Basically, the generated "fake" chats were made 10x funnier by the ability to laugh about them with the "real" chat— and we did this most often when the outputs were most accurate— so I do think there is a Je ne sais quoi to the knowledge that something is "real" that makes you behave differently and get different value out of it.
why would this ever happen?