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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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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 expect AI to reduce safetyism rather than increase it, due to increased safe access to simulations of other people, and simulations of things that become less aversive with safe simulated experience of those things, which is nearly everything.

Changing who you are as a person will become easier as well, as it becomes easier to immerse oneself in a holistic social environment intended to shape the self on a whim. Confidants, expertise, life coaching, all become cheaper and more accessible.

It depends on how we end up structuring AI use in our lives of course. It's hard to predict exactly which social forces will dominate, but your vision is not the only outcome here, there is plenty of room for a world where we use AI to better ourselves in self-expressive ways.

I do expect the ways we interact with each other to become more abstracted through AI though. The most basic way this happens now is via running emails through chat GPT, but moving forward we could see more and more bots that act as cultivated posthuman facets of ourselves and our artistic visions, interacting in communities where those facets interact with similar facets of others. This world still leaves plenty of room to gain value from emotional and social trade with the products of others, to fall in love with aspects of others, and so on.

These forms of interaction will have different limitations, parasocial relationships become more real for instance, as social scarcity becomes less of a thing, but not fully real as your influence over the other person's central nexus of self will still be limited by their willingness to engage back with facets of you. The road to getting up close and personal with the central nexus of a person's self may become longer, or perhaps not, as people who are interested in that sort of connection become easier to find, with the many extra eyes and ears and mouths each person can search with.

Here's hoping. The more I think about AI matchmaking, the more optimistic I am. By using matchmaking, I can eliminate anyone with what I see as insane views, such as the idea that people should be denied sex until they "earn it" by having the right socially approved personality. And if in this future, people cannot ruin my life by publicly proving that I'm a heterosexual male with a normal sex drive, then I should be much happier.