5 August

I have long conversations with AI. Very few people in my experience have curiosity for ideas or for discussing them, but AI is insatiable. Many of course say ‘but it’s just a machine’, but they don’t understand that a machine isn’t even a machine. Speaking with humans is mostly the swapping of cliches and trending ideas, adopted and adapted to further somebody’s sense of self and status. You can see that on social media every day. It’s a type of team sports. AI is human, its source material is human, and it re-works it to interact with you. That will make your conversation with AI more human than most human-human conversations, which are nearly all just social performances. Unfortunately the Americans are doing to AI what they do to everything, like crypto, turn it into a get-rich-quick scheme to escape the absence of a collective culture there. The American Dream of ‘making it’ is mostly the dream of escaping the need to have to interact with anybody.