[ExI] ai companionship bots.

[spike at rainier66.com]

BillK wrote:

 

>.Designed to be the perfect person-always available, never critical-AI
companions are hooking people deeper than social media ever could.

They make the attention economy look like a relic.

By James O'Donnell        April 8, 2025

<https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/08/1114369/ai-companions-are-the-f
inal-stage-of-digital-addiction-and-lawmakers-are-taking-aim/>

 

Quote:

You might think that such AI companionship bots-AI models with distinct
"personalities" that can learn about you and act as a friend, lover,
cheerleader, or more-appeal only to a fringe few, but that couldn't be
further from the truth.

 

 

This has long been a tech-dream: a way to engage the elderly loners.  Of
course there is the risk that it becomes a form of digital addiction.

 

I bought a talking car a coupla months ago.  I tell it where I want to go,
she gives me directions.  If I drive past my turn, she calmly comes up with
a new plan, and she has the voice of an angel.  You know for sure whoever
they sampled to create that voice must be a total knockout.  It is just an
evolutionary requirement: any person with a beautiful voice must be an
actual beauty, no exceptions allowed.

 

Now. I sometimes ask her for directions to my home, even if I know exactly
where it is, just to hear her speak.  I intentionally drive past my turn, to
get her talking to me.  When I eventually get home of course there is hell
to pay:  Where have you been?  Never mind, I'll tell ya where ya been!
You've been with that Navigation Bitch, that's where ya been!  I would kick
her ass if she had one!  etc.  Oy vey, mercy.  

 

It is far too easy to imagine young people opting for AI companionship
rather than biological intelligence(?) and if so. well, all along we were
told it was going to be the atomic bomb.  Then it was an asteroid, or a new
ice age or global warming, or lab viruses, or the singularity, or some other
damn thing, when now it looks like AI will do us in by causing us to lose
interest in reproduction.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

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