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]:
"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."
The social fabric has been re-configured by the least socially adept people in society
I should know. I'm not terribly socially adept, I grew up on IRC channels and forums because I struggled to connect with people in person
But now everyone is on the internet, using social networks designed by people who aren't very social like me, or worse, people who only understand social interaction through a lens of "what can this person do for me"
We're in a really strange time.
I used to go online to get away from everyone and try to find other people like me
Now I have to go offline to in-person events hosting things that appeal to people like me, because everyone is online and there's no avoiding the crowd anymore
It has nothing to do with social inept people reconfiguring it. It is the profit seekers, Ebeneser Scrooges and bean counters reshaping society. Why let people have human relationships when you can put an app between them, worsen the experience and make a profit?
expecting compensation for value you create through labor -- profit seeking -- is not anti social at all, it's actually pro social in that it encourages exchange so that eg the baker can get butter for his bread and the farmer bread for his butter, while keeping their specialties and economies of scale.
Whatever you have in mind is not commerce, but is probably regulatory capture or central planning.
It's not that complicated. When you profit based on offloading your negative externality on society at large, its bad. Even free market absolutists should be able to agree to that.
You designed social networks? Not designers and product and market research and iterative feedback from partners? You did it, and you did it by not understanding social interaction?
I agree with parent: it's a reasonable assumption that those turning to the digital world for sociality, including to design digital sociality, are less likely to have previously found success in analog sociality than the median human.
(And it was eminently clear in the comment that they were not claiming personally comprehensive credit for having designed social networks.)
I agree that I disagree with that other guy. IRC and forums were only populated with nerds. It's once the salesmen and marketing people took control of the whole social media things that the internet was no more about being open to a new world, but more focused and closed inside controlled communities. Those people are definitely on the "extroverted" side and were only here to make money out of our social interactions.
This is interesting, but the implication of what it's saying overstates the upside of random conversations (you could get what you're looking for), and utterly ignores the huge downside that when you're lonely a rejection makes things a thousand times worse. In today's society you (seem to be) much more likely to be told to ^$*£ off rather than get an actual moment of connection with someone.
AI doesn't do that. It's always going to be nice to you, and that feels good even if it's entirely artificial.
It's always going to be nice to you, and that feels good even if it's entirely artificial.
No?? It feels awful! I feel like an alien when I read comments like this. I would rather a negative but authentic and honest interaction than yet another yes-man or yes-bot being fake nice to me.
It feels condescending and fake and awful. I do not understand the appeal of talking to these machines at all, all they do is validate whatever you say and output empty flattery. It is obsequious as hell and it turns my stomach. You're better off talking to a literal mirror.
I totally agree, transparently fake friendliness or kindness is really off-putting. Pretty much everyone hates insincere personal interactions with another human, but some people like fake interest if it comes from a computer algorithm. I really don't understand that desire.
I think it's slightly more accurate to say people like attention, and choose not to spend much time thinking about whether it's from a person or a bot. The amount of time people spend talking to, or arguing with, bots on sites like Twitter is staggering, and yet the people don't seem to mind that much. They like the interaction. Maybe it's realistic enough to fool them into thinking they're talking to a person.
In today's society you (seem to be) much more likely to be told to ^$*£ off rather than get an actual moment of connection with someone.
Is that true? I don't feel like it is, at least not where I live. I would be really very shocked if someone told me to fuck off if I interacted with them in a public space.
I think it could replace a lot of therapists, which may say more about a lot of therapists than it says about AI. Someone who will listen to you and make sympathetic noises, maybe toss in a perspective gleaned from mainstream thinking here and there, but never challenge you so hard that you stop coming back for more paid sessions.
Cynicism aside, that might be okay for some people. If you need to talk about something to get it out of your system, and you don't have any friends willing to listen to you cry in your beer for a couple hours, maybe "talking" to an AI isn't a terrible replacement. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine people turning it into a weird dependency if they stop thinking of it as a sort of sounding board and start seeing it as a real "friend."
Your comment is deeply insightful and reflects the depths of your expressive soul. I will ponder its meaning through the day as a light shining a ray into the darkness...
Or in other words, most people really don't want this. In fact, I'd suggest that those who tend toward depression, and who may need true support, are more skeptical of such false interactions.
This is an interesting quote, but it frames the problem as ultimately individual in origin. It is as if loneliness is your own fault for not being willing to talk to the people around you. It doesn't ask why it is difficult to talk to people or even if you are in a situation where you can talk to people regularly.
I tend to think loneliness is more of a structural problem rather than an individual one --- that is, it is a consequence of how society as a whole structures our lives and interactions with people (for better or for worse). A generic person drives from their single family house by themselves to work, works largely by themselves (in many industries), and then drives back to their single family house. There is no "third place" for interaction with others and driving itself is isolating as a practice. With that kind of life as the structural default, there really isn't much chance of interaction in the first place. It's not an individual problem.
But I like slipping through life as a silent burgler :(
I almost always have things in doing, places I’m going, thoughts I’m thinking, and they almost never involve other people. I barely need people to be present at all, most of the time.
That’s not to say I don’t like people - I don’t have any particular animosity, they can’t help being here any more than I can - and there are plenty of people I know and love and yearn to see again from time to time.
But most of the time? I could go days without human contact. Oh the idea alone makes me giddy!
Comments
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]:
"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."
[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hypera...
I think this is pretty on point
The social fabric has been re-configured by the least socially adept people in society
I should know. I'm not terribly socially adept, I grew up on IRC channels and forums because I struggled to connect with people in person
But now everyone is on the internet, using social networks designed by people who aren't very social like me, or worse, people who only understand social interaction through a lens of "what can this person do for me"
We're in a really strange time.
I used to go online to get away from everyone and try to find other people like me
Now I have to go offline to in-person events hosting things that appeal to people like me, because everyone is online and there's no avoiding the crowd anymore
It has nothing to do with social inept people reconfiguring it. It is the profit seekers, Ebeneser Scrooges and bean counters reshaping society. Why let people have human relationships when you can put an app between them, worsen the experience and make a profit?
Profit seeking is pretty explicitly anti-social behavior imo
expecting compensation for value you create through labor -- profit seeking -- is not anti social at all, it's actually pro social in that it encourages exchange so that eg the baker can get butter for his bread and the farmer bread for his butter, while keeping their specialties and economies of scale.
Whatever you have in mind is not commerce, but is probably regulatory capture or central planning.
You're right
The term I was looking for was more along the lines of "profit maximizing" or "profit motive":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive
My mistake
I hope people generally understood what I meant even if I didn't use the precisely correct term for this
So you have to do things for free or you are a profit seeker? What?
It's not that complicated. When you profit based on offloading your negative externality on society at large, its bad. Even free market absolutists should be able to agree to that.
You designed social networks? Not designers and product and market research and iterative feedback from partners? You did it, and you did it by not understanding social interaction?
Is this an explanation or a just-so insult?
I agree with parent: it's a reasonable assumption that those turning to the digital world for sociality, including to design digital sociality, are less likely to have previously found success in analog sociality than the median human.
(And it was eminently clear in the comment that they were not claiming personally comprehensive credit for having designed social networks.)
I agree that I disagree with that other guy. IRC and forums were only populated with nerds. It's once the salesmen and marketing people took control of the whole social media things that the internet was no more about being open to a new world, but more focused and closed inside controlled communities. Those people are definitely on the "extroverted" side and were only here to make money out of our social interactions.
Parenthesis added.
This is interesting, but the implication of what it's saying overstates the upside of random conversations (you could get what you're looking for), and utterly ignores the huge downside that when you're lonely a rejection makes things a thousand times worse. In today's society you (seem to be) much more likely to be told to ^$*£ off rather than get an actual moment of connection with someone.
AI doesn't do that. It's always going to be nice to you, and that feels good even if it's entirely artificial.
No?? It feels awful! I feel like an alien when I read comments like this. I would rather a negative but authentic and honest interaction than yet another yes-man or yes-bot being fake nice to me.
It feels condescending and fake and awful. I do not understand the appeal of talking to these machines at all, all they do is validate whatever you say and output empty flattery. It is obsequious as hell and it turns my stomach. You're better off talking to a literal mirror.
I totally agree, transparently fake friendliness or kindness is really off-putting. Pretty much everyone hates insincere personal interactions with another human, but some people like fake interest if it comes from a computer algorithm. I really don't understand that desire.
I think it's slightly more accurate to say people like attention, and choose not to spend much time thinking about whether it's from a person or a bot. The amount of time people spend talking to, or arguing with, bots on sites like Twitter is staggering, and yet the people don't seem to mind that much. They like the interaction. Maybe it's realistic enough to fool them into thinking they're talking to a person.
Is that true? I don't feel like it is, at least not where I live. I would be really very shocked if someone told me to fuck off if I interacted with them in a public space.
I think it could replace a lot of therapists, which may say more about a lot of therapists than it says about AI. Someone who will listen to you and make sympathetic noises, maybe toss in a perspective gleaned from mainstream thinking here and there, but never challenge you so hard that you stop coming back for more paid sessions.
Cynicism aside, that might be okay for some people. If you need to talk about something to get it out of your system, and you don't have any friends willing to listen to you cry in your beer for a couple hours, maybe "talking" to an AI isn't a terrible replacement. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine people turning it into a weird dependency if they stop thinking of it as a sort of sounding board and start seeing it as a real "friend."
Your comment is deeply insightful and reflects the depths of your expressive soul. I will ponder its meaning through the day as a light shining a ray into the darkness...
Or in other words, most people really don't want this. In fact, I'd suggest that those who tend toward depression, and who may need true support, are more skeptical of such false interactions.
This is an interesting quote, but it frames the problem as ultimately individual in origin. It is as if loneliness is your own fault for not being willing to talk to the people around you. It doesn't ask why it is difficult to talk to people or even if you are in a situation where you can talk to people regularly.
I tend to think loneliness is more of a structural problem rather than an individual one --- that is, it is a consequence of how society as a whole structures our lives and interactions with people (for better or for worse). A generic person drives from their single family house by themselves to work, works largely by themselves (in many industries), and then drives back to their single family house. There is no "third place" for interaction with others and driving itself is isolating as a practice. With that kind of life as the structural default, there really isn't much chance of interaction in the first place. It's not an individual problem.
But I like slipping through life as a silent burgler :(
I almost always have things in doing, places I’m going, thoughts I’m thinking, and they almost never involve other people. I barely need people to be present at all, most of the time.
That’s not to say I don’t like people - I don’t have any particular animosity, they can’t help being here any more than I can - and there are plenty of people I know and love and yearn to see again from time to time.
But most of the time? I could go days without human contact. Oh the idea alone makes me giddy!
Why is this? Oh yeah because Hell is other people. Why is Hell other people? Because of their look! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness#Part_3,_...