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It's too steerable and just echos back whatever direction you take it. No own emotional state, interests, agency, variability etc. Even as a substitute for social interaction it feels so inadequate to be pointless.
Plenty of people do roleplaying and AI girlfriends etc so I guess it depends on the person?
Social media rose to prominence with ubiquitous always-on internet. That means that more people were connected than with prior internet technologies (which were always inherently somewhat social).
The biggest negative associated with social media IMO has been organizations using the ease of creating accounts to fake social proof for political and monetary gain. Whether we like it or not, humans like to align with the majority of their social set. So by manufacturing social sets you can push humans toward all sorts of crazy ideas.
The impact of AI on social behavior will be different. Some of it will be bad and some will be good. One that we're already seeing is that AI makes it even easier to spin up fake personas to pretend to be human and advocate for particular opinions.
He makes a pretty detailed argument about why loneliness can be a much bigger and more complex problem than its tame name suggests, and the subtle ways in which AI has the potential to exacerbate it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.
> The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out. I'm a bit confused here, as someone who doesn't go out and never did. Do young people get accosted about generational birth rates if they go out?
But I do think this is overstated. I have a small number of children and the main reason that we don't have more is that its incredibly expensive over the course of a lifetime to raise a child who isn't going to be some wage slave somewhere or worse, end up in poverty and treated like shit by the world. If our society was genuinely dedicated to allowing a slower pace of life and ensuring the unconditional dignity of human beings, we'd probably have more kids, but having more now feels like pitching them into the meat grinder.
Loneliness is a benefit, not a curse. I need some degree of loneliness to keep sane. But it would be very interesting if a beautiful AI companion can teach me Math and Physics. I wonder when they will be able to do that, and with what kind of cost?
Loneliness is not mere solitude. Loneliness is not being happy with being alone, solitude is the state of being alone. I couldn't find a word for specifically being happy about it. So, loneliness is intrinsically negative, otherwise one wouldn't feel that way.
Even though I'm arguable among the target audience here so to speak I can't really wrap my head around this. It's too steerable and just echos back whatever direction you take it. No own emotional state, interests, agency, variability etc. Even as a substitute for social interaction it feels so inadequate to be pointless. Plenty of people do roleplaying and AI girlfriends etc so I guess it depends on the person?
I've been of the opinion that the web itself has already done this to a large degree. Web surfing (when is the last time you heard that phrase?) has never been a group activity.
There’s also doomscrolling. I genuinely think a large portion of Gen Z would rather stay in bed watching Instagram reels than go out to a bar or club. I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
Sex is decoupled from birth rates, due to access to 100% effective birth control (IUD/morning after pill/abortion). Hence there is no reason to think it would have any positive effect. I would be surprised if even a single person I know had had an unplanned kid.
There could be a future generation that decides for whatever reason, high technology like AI and smartphones, just isn’t cool. What can you do about people who just walk around with a dumb phone and a pocket size digital camera that takes DSLR quality photos that are way better than a smartphone? Probably nothing.
I think the two drivers of this shift in trends would be:
1. Millennials and Gen Z’s persistent use of social media and high tech gets perceived as an old people thing, instead of shiny new objects mostly young people and kids are using.
2. As the 1980s and 1990s grow more distant, the time period becomes increasingly romanticized, and a source for lifestyle inspiration, 1999 was peak human civilization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.
I assure you, as a young person, nobody has ever commented on my birth rate when I went out.