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Did you guys see the movie Her? It struck me the other day how all the pieces of technology are coming together to make the technological context for that movie's world OUR world.
If you haven't seen it, basically, advanced AI personal assistants live on everyone's phone. Things happen. When I first saw the movie (when it was released in 2014), if you asked me, I wouldn't have said we would never have this tech, but I wouldn't have predicted that we'd have all the pieces within 10 years. The main difference between its world and ours, at the time, was the human-level ability of AI to converse with users. Siri existed and still exists, but, very quickly, you need to take over for her. In Her's universe, Siri is reading your emails, summarizing them for you, and talking with you about how you want to reply and doing most of the work for you, like a real human assistant would... and I feel like we pretty much have everything we need to make that a reality. As soon as Apple puts Chat GPT behind Siri and gives it access to your entire phone, I think speech will become the main interface we use with our phones/computers. Combine C-GPT with other recent AI innovations such as voice reproduction and you at least have new ways to do the old things we've always done.
The central plot of the movie is the protagonist's love story with his AI. That might sound far fetched, but have you heard of the brouhaha about Replika AI? People are already falling in love with these things (and experiencing heartbreak when they're updated and aren't the same anymore).
To use an old phrase, I think we're in the weeks where decades happen, or we will be very soon.
I suspect nothing short of AGI would bring AI gfs/bfs into the mainstream. The problem is that it would be common knowledge that these AIs don't actually understand what we're saying. But I could see people using it secretly as a kind of stand in until they get a real gf/bf.
Edit: to be clear by mainstream I mean having an AI bf/gf is normalized and not considered cringe. I think that was the interesting thing about the world in Her. It makes sense because in that world AI is fully conscious.
Surely the bigger problem is that they don't have functioning genitalia?
I'm predicting a simple solution to this one: 'doll'-style sexworkers. They cosplay as your waifu, your AI instructs them through an earpiece like a porno director, and your augmented reality equipment fills in the gaps as best as possible.(Soon to be fully arranged by your AI waifu herself, to avoid breaking immersion - you give her an allowance, she surprises you with 'date night'.)
No technological reason why we couldn't do this right now, especially with GPT4 already having built-in img2text. Whether social pressure is applied to stomp out this sort of thing is another matter, I think AI is going to disrupt gender politics more profoundly than birth control, & institutional feminism is very quickly going to come down on the anti-AI side.
Sounds like a meat puppet from the 80s scifi book Neuromancer
More like Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollhouse_(TV_series)
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