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It is my belief that after the AI takeover, there will be increasingly less human-to-human interaction. This is partially because interacting with AI will be much preferable in every way, but it is also because safetyism will become ever more powerful. Any time two humans interact, there is the potential for someone to be harmed, at least emotionally. With no economic woes and nothing to do, moral busybodies will spend their time interfering with how other people spend their time, until the point where interacting with another human is so morally fraught and alienating that there is no point. Think about it, who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent? The choice seems obvious to me.
I think this is nothing "unusual" in at least recent history and I view it as part of the overall process of atomization and individualization of our society. One-by-one we are eroding our social structure and important institutions in our societies: be it family, marriage, motherhood/fatherhood , elderly care and so forth. We now live in a world where you may have divorced mother who even used services of Ukrainian surrogate mother to give birth to her child. And this "mother" is now working full time while her child is taken care by hired nanny, her own mother is in elderly home care in hands of hired nurses and sees her daughter only every once in a while. Now this women/mother also has a man who donated sperm for the child; he is now thousand of miles away just paying child support. And this father is also maybe single or serially single, just supporting his his child financially and using services of sex workers to meet his sexual needs and participating in online spaces that replaced traditional "boys clubs".
It is hard to overstate how rapid adoption and normalization of all these changes is when we are talking about generational experience. Even 40 something old millennials are now considered as dinosaurs, their experience of family, school, childhood or church and sexuality can be considered ancient and utterly outdated. I really think that people underestimate how profound the changes that are already baked in the society are and we will see the results only in upcoming decades - possibly as some new societal "epidemic".
The era of AI chatbot companions is in my eyes only the latest in series of assaults on relationships. Or to be more precise, the assault already happened by people normalizing commercialization of companionship both in real life but also using parasocial relationships via OnlyFans and similar platforms. In this sense AI companions can be viewed just as industrial automation of production to satisfy already existing commercial demand from customers for "relationships". In this way I do not see a reason why surrogate mother, tutor/teacher of children, nurse in elderly home, sex worker and even companion/friend cannot be fully automated, packaged and delivered as a product. All these activities are already viewed as legitimate subjects for markets to serve.
Just a few generations ago, my ancestors were mostly illiterate and depended on regular iteraction with others for survival. They would have rarely interacted with anyone they didn't know. Now, the vast majority of my language processing comes from text and video from the internet, mostly coming from people I have never and will never meet.
Things have changed so much that I can scarcely imagine how my ancestors spent their evenings. I spend them on the internet. So do my parents, who I live with. My mother also watches an enormous amount of television and listens to the radio. If this were the 18th century, we'd probably have nothing to do but talk to each other, though we'd probably go to bed a lot earlier and work longer hours. Instead, we interact briefly at supper and have the occasional conversation, but almost all of our social interaction has been replaced with technology. I wonder what kind of effect this has on people.
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On this subject- I am unsure if it is a generational gap or a class one, but I noticed a strong trend when reading through the AmITheAsshole subreddit: a huge % of the questions on there are related to step- or half- family.
Obviously that place would be biased towards such questions (fair to say that familial obligations to a step-brother or half-brother are less defined than those to a full brother, so more likely to seek help defining them), but I was still rather shocked.
I'm firmly in the millennial age range, so I've always lived in a post-no-fault-divorce world, but the amount of step and half siblings among my peers was tiny.
This might also be explained by AITA being mostly at least partially fake.
True, if I were trying to generate an ask for drama/engagement using blended families would help maximize the heat.
My view is that some are definitely fake, but most are merely biased/exaggerated, with an additional portion written from the perspective of another person who they feel is being an asshole in a real scenario (i.e written by a son but with the post being from the perspective of his father)
That’s possible. I mean there’s also the effect that high-drama personalities get divorced more, too.
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