I see an additional service waiting to be sold.
A virtual counsellor? Psychiatrist?
Does this represent a messed up person or a messed up culture?
“I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
11–20 of 265 posts
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#12Reminds me of the movie "Her" about an invisible AI girlfriend. Worth watching!
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#13I found it so wrong... Sentiments are real, I don't think anybody should play with other person feeling... Of course the user signed up, and they think that this is what they want, but I honestly believe that nobody want to risk to fail in love for a nobody...
The concepts involved in the article are confusing attraction with love.
Independently of how arbitrary attraction and love are, there's certainly a difference between them, depth being the divider.
With this in mind, the "falling in love" the author is talking about, which may also apply to the crowds using such service, is the equivalent of a teenager "falling in love" with, say, Tom Cruise.
Although of course, services like this pose a "risk" of falling in such state, there's nothing really "wrong" (in the "damaging" sense of the term) with it.
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#14It's surprising how many people are dateable once you remove looks from the equation.
For most people, looks ARE part of the equation. It's like removing Pi from an equation. I wonder what's going to happen when science makes looks whatever we want, like hair color.
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#15Reminds me of the movie "Her" about an invisible AI girlfriend. Worth watching!
It reminded me of that too, since I read the article to the end.
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#16Reminded me of "The Entire History of You" from Black Mirror[1] tv series (I really don't feel like calling it that way, it's more like a separate movies). I highly recommend it. I wonder how long it takes before those lower(st) paid jobs for those that are not specialized in anything will be in something like mechanical turk. Especially in this example it's visible that those can sometimes require somewhat local wor…
Funny, it reminded me more of the episode "Be Right Back".
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#17People used to look at me weird when I explained how I was paranoid that someone was routing all of my conversations between multiple people, in an effort to cluster intelligence and intellectual contributions without any participant knowing what they were contributing to.
Take that, therapy. Yes, the paranoia was somewhat imaginative, but it was an exaggeration of something that actually can be mechanized. The people I explained this to didn't believe me that you could create chat streams this way.
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#18Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#19Reading this all I can think of are the "ractors" in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age).
Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”
#20A perfect application of the Forer effect: humans have an amazing ability to interpret what can apply to anyone as having special significance for themselves. It's the same reason why horoscopes and fortune cookies work. Stepping back and thinking logically, it's easy to see why their messages might apply to a lot of people. But when you're reading one, you can't help but think, "Ah! It says that I would encounter ad…
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