Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Is it important for your partner to be a real person, not an AI or a robot, or will this question soon seem like an outdated bias? This uncertainty is not just a passing meme, but something more. If falling in love with AI starts to feel normal — even if it doesn’t affect you personally — your lifestyle will change.
Are you worried about this idea? That’s the point. In the tech sector, we often discuss AI as if it were human, and humans as if they might become obsolete when AI and robots overtake them, which we say could happen very soon. This approach is sincere, and it’s also profitable. Attention is powerful in the world we techies have created online. What better way to get attention than to touch the soul with the idea that it might not exist? Many, perhaps most, people hope that there’s more to life than science can support. AI rhetoric can break the thread of assumptions that life after death is possible, or that there’s more to our eyes than just mechanics.
Until the recent rise of AI, it was fashionable to argue that consciousness was an illusion, or perhaps a property of everything in reality—in any case, nothing special. Such dismissiveness has become less common (perhaps because techies still believe that tech entrepreneurs are unique). More recently, consciousness is seen as something valuable and real that should be achieved through technology: our AIs and robots should achieve consciousness.
Therefore, love is also something real and a goal to be conquered. Conquering love will not be abstract, but very concrete for everyone, especially for young people, and it will happen soon. This is because we will soon be introduced to a new generation of artificial intelligence-powered human simulations on our phones, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will probably appear on the social networks we have become accustomed to. We will probably interact with them, and for some very active users on the Internet, there will be no easy way out. No one can predict how the new love will develop, but it may leave one of the deepest legacies of these unusual years.
I’m not going to predict the worst, but we are entering another near-instantaneous experiment in changing how people communicate and how we see ourselves. It’s a massive experiment, perhaps even bigger than social media. AI love is already here, but it’s still new and in its infancy. Will many of the people who are currently addicted to social media become attached to AI partners who are always attentive, loyal, flattering, and comforting? How will the emergence of AI lovers change humanity? We don’t know.
Strange and grandiose results in the world of technology can start small, and often quite innocently. Creating AI partners involves a certain degree of fairy-tale overload, but it is primarily due to simple, practical problem solving. Flaws in technology are usually not due to malice, but to amnesia and shortsightedness.
For example, with the increasing use of phone screens, the user interface is becoming increasingly limited. So chatbots offer a way to improve accessibility — or engagement, in commercial terms. This became clear with the wild success of ChatGPT. AI capabilities were growing, but mass adoption only came when they were presented in a conversational format.
Currently, if you ask a chatbot to plan your vacation, you still have to browse hotel, transportation, and attraction sites to book the bot’s recommendations. People often get frustrated when trying to do anything online, and in many cases, it has become the only way to do things. Each site has a different interface, often clunky or problematic. The tedium of, say, getting health insurance or registering a car can be maddening. Having AI interact with the internet on your behalf can provide some respite and a little joy.
And so we enter the long-awaited era of “agent” AI, scheduled to hit the mainstream by 2025. In this case, “agent” will likely mean two extensions of the familiar chatbots: one that remembers everything it can learn about you from your devices; the other that acts online, sometimes proactively. Agents will become more autonomous and less dependent on your constant supervision. (Indeed, anticipation of these capabilities may be one reason why some techies are comfortable with the Trump administration’s cuts to traditional government jobs: They assume that these workers will be replaced by AI soon enough, anyway.)
The agent will automatically change your vacation flights and arrange shared airport rides. It can plan your entire vacation based on years of your activity and communication. It can even collaborate with your friends’ agents to plan a shared vacation, though this, if the agents represent different companies, currently presents an intractable obstacle. A bunch of uncoordinated agents can regularly cause mathematical chaos or dysfunctional competition, similar to what we see in high-tech algorithms.
Sourse: newyorker.com
