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Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language.

Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate.

Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.

well, I just had a ChatGPT-translated test conversation where I spoke Chinese and they spoke English, and it worked fairly well (with some lag).

I really hope we'll be to make friends more easily across languages/cultures

As an English/French speaker who is learning Japanese I'd love to see the chat logs!

I first learned French to fluency and then I moved on to Japanese and I realized that it's so much harder to learn Japanese (and presumably other languages that use the Chinese alphabet). The issue is that when you go from English to French, for a large part you can simply translate the words. From English to Japanese I have to first translate, re-arrange the grammar and then account for idioms at the very least.

I'd love to see how the conversation went!

This is terrifyingly believable

Hm, let's try an extreme: the AI friend slowly becomes a cult leader to you, hijacking your mind into subservience to the owner of the service to which AI belongs, and further up some social/political hierarchy to a few controlling people/groups of people.

The traffic jam is society stymied by individuals mind-controlled at a level closer to connection to a human than any other way possible before this.

Kinda feel like you have that backwards, why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals? Votes?

The scarier prospect to me is human labor and intelligence become almost worthless and those at the top start to view the masses as superfluous.

Perhaps the AI cares, perhaps it has no ability for that function at all. Maybe a step on the way to sentience and AI caring is AI that is as human-like as possible but not sentient.

> "the top start to view the masses as superfluous."

That seems like another reason for keeping the superfluous occupied and useful for whatever is desired, which would probably be retention of power to prevent usurpation.

Perhaps human intelligence is worthless, but human existence seems not, at least to those who want to be alive.

> why would an AI that sophisticated care about controlling your mind? [..] What do they get out of manipulating average individuals?

Captcha slaves?

＞human labor and intelligence become almost worthless...

I sure this is happening, and ot is finished in some region.

> Why would the group of people who control that AI care about you as anything other than a liability? What do they get out of manipulating average individuals

Greater ad revenue. I would expect that tailoring your reality feed to whatever makes the AI controller the most money will be extremely lucrative.

Kind of like how visa/stripe takes 2-5% of every financial transaction. Imagine if a firm could make 5-10% of everything you do by manipulating you to maximum effect.

In The Red: First Light Linda Nagata posits an AI that tries to help people maximise their potential, because by earning more they consume more. The AI escaped from Amazon (the web store), it is theorized.

(Nice MilSF if you like that kind of thing.)

1. https://www.amazon.com/Red-First-Light-Trilogy/dp/1481440934

Not for AI friends but I’m starting to see ‘traffic jams’ at work - people using GPT to output a bunch of verbose text, and others then using GPT to summarise that text so they can understand it. It feels like the beginning of a weird arms race where everybody is insulated from everyone else by a layer of junk created by AI (and the workaround to that junk is more AI)

More like a weird arms race where no one actually thinks about what they are saying or reading anymore and you are drowning in word soup. After all words are just tools to achieve some goal.

A communications/semantic Kessler Syndrome. This likely boosts the signal gain of memes without pushing any more data down the pipe.

I think the pleasure trip is just porn. We have that already and it's possible to discuss the effects of widespread porn on people.

I think the next step is, what does it mean to have an emotional relationship with someone in your pocket who is for all definitions perfect - can provide perfect advice and does so with judgement, ridicule, pity or anger? What will be my bar for human relationships, those imperfect messy human beings, when I have a partner I can be perfectly vulnerable with? What happens to interpersonal relationships when you are competing with a virtual perfect significant other?

If your definition of perfect is an AI that is programmed not to upset you, then sure. But maybe there is perfection in the imperfection of humans and the pain that inevitably arises from human relationships? We learn how to love through our differences. Intimacy is deepened by meeting each other in the raw, vulnerable and wounded places. The kind of “perfect significant other” you’re describing sounds sterile and a massive bypass of what life can truly be.

Lex Friedman podcast with Elon where they discuss that war is an inevitability of the human condition. The idea of world peace may not be a worthwhile goal as what it is to be human is to have suffering, to some degree.

As I navigate dating, I've found the perfectly "compliant" or even "subservient" relationships are just as shallow as the ones fueled by lust.

Sadly, when relationships are as replaceable as water, there's not much thirst for anything real, including the ups and downs.

I guess what I'm musing is that I feel bad for the people stuck in the empty loops of "perfect" satisfaction and hope they find the human in themselves in the day to day. Amusing Ourselves to Death comes to mind.

I agree with some things and slightly disagree with others. Mainly, I do believe peace to be a worthwhile and ultimately accessible pursuit for each and everyone of us, both internally and collectively. But learning to exist in it surely comes through embracing wholeheartedly the reality of our human condition, not shying away from it in virtual realms.

I guess what I’m saying is that pain and loss are inevitable. The impermanence of life is by itself a guarantee of it. But suffering is often unnecessarily caused by our resistance to the inevitability of life. This is what creates the internal neurosis, which ultimately manifests in the collective as outer aggression and wars. I believe all this can be pacified. That’s kind of the goal of most paths of self realization.

I just want to say that what you wrote in the second paragraph resonated with me a lot and I think I needed to read that right now. It seems obvious but I spend so much time worrying about the past and future, and the way you put it just crystallizes that notion that we really don't have as much control as we'd like.

We have to forgive our past selves and let our future selves handle whatever they have to handle - obviously not in a self destructive way but more like if I get cancer I'll have to deal with that, until then there's no point worrying about it.

But now I'm just rambling. Anyway, thank you.

Given howany people are perfectly fine in relationships how many fewer people fight in wars than used to - forgive me if I write off the ideas from that discussion as more unsubstantiated ramblings from someone who has realized how useful and profitable his starlink technology is in wartime

You can find that out already by looking at Replika users.

> what does it mean to have an emotional relationship with someone in your pocket who is for all definitions perfect - can provide perfect advice and does so with judgement, ridicule, pity or anger?

I don't think I could have an emotional relationship with such an entity, to be honest. It wouldn't be perfect at all -- it would be deeply flawed.

But maybe that's just me.

AI can never replace human relationships exactly because it is too available. The AI can do nothing but please you. Like in Hegel's master-slave dialectic, the slave's acceptance immediately becomes worthless to the master because the slave is not an equal and it happens only at the threat of death. Porn and AI girlfriends are only a substitute to people who are already limited to enjoyment in the Imaginary order. It is a consequence of the breakdown of the social contract and not the other way around, as a result of feminist politics and capitalist commodification of dating. Development of better AI accelerates this breakdown of society only insofar as it allows to banish even larger swathes of undesirable men to living in the proverbial sewer without them taking up arms against you; it is just enough to keep the starving man alive but nothing more than that.

The thing that really depresses me is that many humans will become "AI friends". It's really hard to know exactly what to say in all social situations. Imagine if you could have a little AI whisper in your ear something witty to say? Extend that out and many conversations you have with human friends, you're really just having with an AI.

hmm but the more that's true, the more counter culture will be a thing no? places with EM jammers etc, no technology experiences.

that keeps me interested at least heh

Man oh man... or use a bot to like and write something vague but clever-sounding on others' social media posts. I feel like if someone is using such a bot with me but not tell me, I would feel the validation is genuine, but if I knew it came from a bot I'd count it as cheap/worthless.

I had a chance to play with a Sony Aibo robot dog years ago, if you stroked its back sensors it'd bark, etc, but after 5 seconds I realized "It's just some sensors and algorithms, it doesn't have any emotions for you!". But then again I saw an Instagram video of skimpily-clothed girl walking down a fashion catwalk with all her appropriate parts swaying, and it was amazing, and then all the comments said it's AI-generated. So at least the lizard brain can be aroused...

OK, here's a stab at the traffic jam based on simply extrapolating current trends:

* Humans increasingly spend time on digital social experiences instead of real ones

* AIs become progressively better at socializing and pretty soon we have AI friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners etc. all over the place

* Our reproductive rate, already in decline, collapses to <0.5 within a few generations because many people would rather have an AI BF/GF than a human one, so they never have an opportunity to have kids

* A century from now the human population has shrunk by 85% and we've peacefully ceded enormous swathes of power and responsibility to AIs because there just aren't a lot of humans left

I think you could tell any number of fascinating slice-of-life stories with this backdrop, there was no war, no conflict, the AIs were generally helpful and friendly and patient through the whole thing, we simply decided as a species to commit the suicide which is already in progress and everyone has pretty much accepted that. It's the polar opposite of Skynet and the Terminator

It sounds like a dystopia to us - it may just sound like old history to the people and AIs of the year 2100. I'm in my 40s, I don't have kids and life is pretty good...

> A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

One simple way to tilt any romanticized sci-fi invention dystopian is simply to imagine the invention is required and the only option for nearly everyone. This works for everything from text-to-speech to robot companions to teleportation to AR headsets to cars.

Personal Data lake Draught syndrome / Data Impaired Persona Personality?

Not for AI friends, but for AI social agents that automate social interaction on your behalf; microblogs, videoblogs, memeposts and discuss online on your behalf - for the users that starts using AI agents too early in life and have too little data to imbue the agents with a personality that stems from their own voice and expression?