You should not even try to create these sorts of technologies. Take a break from technology, spend time outdoors with plants and animals. These types of technologies will only lead to a worsening of this already sick society.
Some people suffer from a variety of disabilities which makes them unable to find friends and engage in meaningful relationships with others, etc.
WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
Many studies even use students themselves as a sample but university students are not really a representative sample of the population
Contrary to what one would assume, I don't have this problem. However I do work in the IT field, and am surrounded by perpetually sad and lonely people who have never experienced romance. It's really really sad. And no, none of these people are the "angry hateful incel" type that the internet loves to dismiss and villainize.
If you aren't attractive, your chance of finding romance is low. This is just a cold and ugly fact of the human condition. There simply isn't "someone for everyone".
Why should we disallow lonely people from having something, even if it's simulated?
https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/all-the-single-ladies-61...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-me...
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-demographic-dating-...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-022-09422-2
You can patch over the outcomes but there is no going back to the before times. Dating app dates and relationships for some, AI companions for others, single life for the rest. It’s not great, it just is.
But I agree, "should" discussions are rarely the most productive. Shoulda, woulda, coulda, I guess :)
there are some bad profit motives to keep people on SSRIs indefinitely. however at least they don't compete with other aspects of your life. and now that they are dirt cheap (at cheapest, $4 for a month supply at Walmart) the profit motives are much less than before.
hard to imagine an "AI girlfriend" that could be similarly short-term and bring positive changes. it's just dystopian. the most profitable way to run such a product is not to help, it's to eat up as much user time as possible and outcompete healthy activities and real human relationships.
Nit-picking rather than disagreeing, but feel it worth making more obvious in the wording: antidepressants can help people deal with the symptoms while they find/fix root causes. Being on them for an extended time can bring its own problems.
Feeling lonely has negative consequences, there's a famous study comparing it to smoking cigarettes. Lonely people can get fixated on that feeling. Mitigating it may help people look for other hobbies, that they kept putting off because they were so focused on their need of a girlfriend.
Hell, a realistic enough "woman AI" (not "girlfriend AI") could make you lose the fear of flirting, be useful as practice, to have more confidence when you have a real date.
> the most profitable way to run such a product is not to help, it's to eat up as much user time as possible
If you charge per-month (like OP), it's more profitable is to eat up less time.
How, exactly? Yes, some people experience depression as a symptom of something than can be addressed through various therapies, but what about people who just have it wired into their brains? How do we “fix” that?
And it certainly isn’t “cured” by antidepressants, however, they can make a huge impact on quality of life for many people.
Then there are all the other cases, some of which likely have simple causes that are just unknown, some of which have complex causes that are intermeshed deeply with the biology of human thinking. In that case, you have blunt tools, like anti-depressants, to address the pathway of the disease without knowing the exact cause, much like chemo-therapy can be used to attack cancer cells without knowing what prompted the cancer originally.
So in short, yes treat the causes, but when you don't know the cause it's not irrational to treat the symptoms as best you can
Isn't that what prostitution is though?
After coding this out for a few hours I realized I had re-created the company scrip, except on a blockchain. I ended up turfing the project and spending some time thinking about how horrific a future technology like this could create.
"You can work at a DAO and be paid on the blockchain"
"You can work at a company and be paid in script"
It's the same thing, but the modern technology masks what exactly is happening.
In other words, yes, because the entire framework is different.
A company that makes their own chains and contracts isn't really any different from a normal company situation.
Which animals? Blood ticks?
Naturalistic fallacies are common here :/
It’s awesome for society.
Incels need therapy and support, not a fake "girlfriend" program that charges them money to reinforce their existing horrific worldviews
But I guess if something like this keeps incels from spree shootings then it's a net win for society.