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Comment by throwuwu | Hacker News Reader

Blow up dolls for grandpa, charming.

There are very few real-world-tasks where GPT-4 is worse at reasoning than the average person, right now only long-term memory, latency, TTS and STT makes virtual people suck. Once that is solved we should of course give them to old lonely disabled people.

I once met one, and it is extremely depressing. He was even rich, but had no idea how to get his life in order, and nobody cared about him. A helpful AI might tell him to go to alcohol therapy, hire people to clean up his house, explain bureacracy... That would help a lot.

People don't pop out old and lonely out of thin air. Don't you think that there were several real people who tried to help him and deal with him during this person's life? It is naïve to think that AI will make any beneficial difference. If these old folks won't listen or take advice from real people, they won't listen to a computer. Everybody reaches a certain age in life where they will be completely set in their ways and never change. For some it comes earlier or later in life.

Thats exactly the point I think, there are tons of people that for one reason or another (and it is none of our business to know) that are completely alone in their daily life, I don't see how a chatbot that effectively helps you (because it's being coded to do so) could be detrimental and not beneficial, they already have nothing.

He apparently got divorced and moved out of his home country. And here he has no social circle. There are of course hopeless cases, but he is not mentally ill, only alcoholic. It is possible that he will never overcome alcoholism, but it didn't look like he tried treating it or anyone suggested it to him.

It is easy to be lonely, I have talked to several charismatic and very cool people who complained about how hard it is to make friends in a new city. This combined with other negative factors can cause people to fall in a hole. (Of course, people who are delusional about their AI girlfriends like in /r/replika are also sad.)

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