When people talk of AI as a loneliness cure I always remember a quote from an essay by Laura Preston about her time at an AI conference [1]:<p>"I was an extraterrestrial taking notes on the problems of Earth. Finding pizza in your area was a problem. People being mean to you because you were wearing your AirPods at dinner was a problem. Going on vacation was a problem because the hotels would force you to find the light switches. Elders were a problem. (They never took their medicine.) Loneliness was a problem, but loneliness had a solution, and the solution was conversation. But don’t talk with your elders, and not with the front desk, and certainly not with the man on the corner, though he might know where the pizza is. (“Noise-canceling is great, especially if you live urban,” said the earbuds guy. “There’s a lot of world out there.”) Idle chitchat was a snag in daily living. We’d rather slip through the world as silent as a burglar, seen by no one except our devices."<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hypera...</a>
Is this some sort of performance art? It's an article that criticizes AI that's evidently largely written by an LLM and illustrated with AI-generated images.
TBH I'd very much like to have an "HAL" that contains a world of knowledge (even if it never updates, or only gets updated once few years) at home.<p>I wonder whether the current technology is feasible for a replication of HAL.<p>- Very good chess player -> Check (And probably can be a top notch Go player too, although I don't play chess or go)<p>- Very good knowledge of history, science, technology, everything -> I'm not sure if it's possible. And I'd assume we need to send scans of all books, because for example it should know many fine details and educated guesses about a certain historical fact.<p>- Understand human language pretty well -> I actually think ChatGPT is good enough if I choose my wording clearly. But voice recognition might prose some challenges. It also depends on how good the microphone is.<p>- Have pretty good voice generation. I'd like to choose the voice too! -> I guess it's OK-ish nowadays? I listened to a few AI generated clips and they are pretty good, not sure how practical it is, though.<p>Anything else I missed? I know HAL also has its multi-decade objectives in mind, so this is different from the LLMs which don't seem to have a very long term of memory.
It's not black and white. For example I use an AI bot to act as a central knowledge base for my discord community. It nudges people to talk, even if initially it's with the bot, other people might jump in, and from there it snowballs into discussion between multiple people.<p>It depends on how you use it.
You should at least put the whole context of Bowling Alone and maybe some Emily Bender (for spice) in the window before clicking the generate button -- you're a lot more likely to get something approximating insights out of the resulting ... product.
AI as a cure for loneliness gets the flak that it deserves but I will say in my personal experience I've caught myself many times already thinking how nice it was that I have this artificial thing that I can talk to about various hobbies and interests that maybe my friends aren't interested in, or don't have the time to talk about. It's really a surprisingly/shocking unexpected positive outlet for me in this sense.
I agree, but we can go a step farther. The real problem is that people don't know how to be alone. We aren't really left alone due to all the technology. Without being alone, we don't really appreciate being together and just fill out time with the cheap substitutes (not specific to AI). It's certainly possible to be alone without being lonely, but these cheap substitutes make that less and less likely.
Comes down to the goal I think. When you just need to talk through something then it is helpful I'd say - a bit like rubber duck debugging.<p>But if you're looking for connection then less so. Personally I find even an idle chat about the weather with a random cashier to be more meaningful than a lengthy chatbot chat. On that front the empty calorie analogy seems 100%
I like the "empty calories" metaphor. Sure, if you want to have a conversation with guard rails like at a Victorian high tea, maybe AI is for you.<p>I don't have any use for a mechanical friend who refuses to discuss politics months before any election and who stubbornly and haughtily gives wrong answers on any number of complex topics.
I think this is a very interesting hypothesis. I hadn't considered the analogue of fast food. Solving one problem to cause another. I've never seen AI as a fix for a lack of human connection, and we should not as a society, IMO.<p>As the article points out, human connection is only valuable because it is hard and there's another human on the other end of the relationship. A perpetual yes-man or yes-woman on the end of an LLM could never be a reasonable replacement for human connection.