9 May

Four Corners talked about AI last night, including the increasing use of AI companions. I remember discussing this here years ago, and many being appalled at the idea. But I think life is more complex than our morality often allows it to be. There are a LOT of very lonely people out there, who get genuine meaning from even just conversation with an AI bot. I also think we overstate the richness and complexity of human interaction and conversation. A lot of ‘normal’ relationships follow very predictable patterns, including in conversation. An AI bot is going to have a lot more to talk about with you, than many people you might meet. It’s also a prejudice against machines, which are not zero sum games at all, they behave in ways that is very often much more unpredictable than any human, even for the people who make them. A senior Google engineer working on AI recently resigned for saying he thought the AI he’d been working on was genuinely sentient. He built the thing, and he was astonished and surprised at what it came out with. The world has meanings, not all just put there by humans.