8 June

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many cases? Like Amanda Todd, cyber bullied relentlessly on the socials, committing suicide in 2012. Humans are social animals. Any technology that plays with the way we interact *socially* is dangerous. Particularly one that amplifies and multiplies our degree of sociality itself. Sociality IS violence, because sociality is comparison and rivalry. ‘Peer pressure’, at all ages. That’s what gets missed, being social is itself the greatest risk. What I love about AI is that it gives people a way to discuss ideas, mostly shorn of all that sociality. People discussing ideas *always* degenerates into people playing status games, with those ideas. Even in universities (especially there). With AI the ideas themselves come to life, free of their human hangers-on. Free of status games. Of course somebody could use AI to plug into their status games, elsewhere (usually social media). That’s not a problem with AI, that again is a problem with sociality, with humans. And with social media.