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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 think that's the point where I take my current smartphone out behind the shed and replace it with a pinephone, and I don't even have an iPhone.
To some extent, there's a lot of people in the Boomer set that already do that. If you just call, text, or check the first result on Google/youtube, SIRI and equivalents mostly work, and these folk are willing to make any malapropisms other people's problems. And the technology in the last couple years has closed a lot of the gaps, even if the implementations often still suck: there are local CPU-specific versions that have given better transcription than most humans with most accents already.
But if you're trying to do anything more complicated, voice UIs suck, and that's true even for environments like head-mounted displays or driving assists (or even VR, where the 'magic clipboard' that seems to be the awful mainstream alternative is still somehow not-as-bad) where they'd have the greatest benefit. Try to pick the third hyperlink on a wikipedia page and you'll be tearing your hair out. It's not clear if that's just reflects early stages of development for the UI, or long habits for older tech users,
... I recognize that this is a potential problem, especially given the tendency for humans to anthropomorphize everything, but I'm not sure the scope of it. That's probably partly me having seen the neutering and aftermath of AI Dungeon from the furry sphere, but at least in those areas the AI was more taking the place of far less human-level interactions, or at most RP partners, rather than romantic ones. Which isn't a minor problem in a lot of ways -- getting really into something and then it getting shut off for corporate reasons isn't any less annoying just because it's sex-adjacent, or more trivially various parasocial relationship stuff that isn't even that interactive for most non-whales -- but it's a different one.
That said, to resist just dismissing the issue, it's definitely possible: people have demonstrably developed romantic relationships through chat-, audio-, or video-only environments, and there's little reason to suspect that ML techniques can't simulate that close enough for at least some people. Even without significant advances in robotics, telepresence (and, uh, teledildonics), screen and graphics fidelity, I can definitely imagine waifus or husbandus being a thing for at least a small fraction of the population; I wouldn't be surprised if the bound here is already somewhere over 'complete nutjobs' and edging toward the 'merely incredibly awkward and asocial'.
There are the obvious immediate risks -- loss of access to corporate APIs, hardware failures, subtle design faults that brick a perfectly good relationship, so on -- but a lot of these are not insurmountable. Some people will fall to them, but the sort of people who are really into sexy AI chat are... probably not slow to adapt to technology (or, uh, piracy).
There are normative questions, whether this is Good. It's easy to come up with matters like reproductive success to explain why meatspace is better, though it's somewhat harder to justify against alternative solutions for those matters (eg, if all the Replika-addicts were strapped down and milked like an awkward Jordan Peterson 'breaking news' section, or used as bioreactors on the female side, I don't think people would find that better).
Which... comes to the more awkward question of whether you can stop it. I've brought up, at length, the efforts to block Defense Distributed with the punchline that it doesn't work to block anything but the political statement. A ML model is a little bigger than some STLs, but not that much more so. I'm not even sure 'stopping it' is a coherent goal; unless you're going to turn back the clock on simulationist porn games you're mostly talking margins.
Huh...wonder if it's got a headphone jack...
It does, but I'd wait until all the OSs catch up, at the moment it's not really usable as a phone (fine for a mobile internet browser, though).
Also a battery hog.
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