> Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities – fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people. As less and less of our lives are spent talking to each other, we’ll stop maintaining the skill or patience to do so.
This is already happening. We just call them "influencers" or "YouTubers". These are still technically real people, but they're real people playing a sanitized character while appearing/claiming some degree of authenticity. They are actual photographed humans, but often wildly digitally retouched to be more beautiful than any actual person.
And people increasingly are replacing real relationships with parasocial relationships with these complete strangers. It's understandable: like junk food, it satisfies an immediate craving with no real effort on the part of the consumer. But long-term, it is deeply unhealthy.
It won't work. Advertising, politics, media control, spam, religious and more groups, from a country in particular and all the world in general, are more than motivated to optimize what they do in any way, including making AIs hard to discern from real humans. We already have bots and fake accounts and whatever else in social networks trying to influence people from the dark, that will only increase.
And the alternative to that could be even worse than being exposed to that influence.
> I personally wouldn’t consider it a win for humanity if we retreat to isolating cocoons that satisfy us more than interacting with other people.
I mean, I also think this would be a bad thing. But I'm not sure this post presents any solid evidence that this is happening. Just some vague fears that it might someday happen.
> Let’s make intelligent machines to act as agents, arbitrators, and aides. But they should be impossible to confuse with a real person ... For a chatbot, why not give them the speech patterns of a fusty butler, like C3-P0?
This point seems misguided. I'm missing the logical progression from, "AI can speak like a human" to "Humans prefer interacting with AIs over interacting with humans".
The issue is mental capacity, not speech patterns. If an AI were intelligent and creative enough to actually provide stimulating conversation, people would befriend it, regardless of if it spoke like C3-PO.
> I'm missing the logical progression from, "AI can speak like a human" to "Humans prefer interacting with AIs over interacting with humans"
Just a few days ago I saw a gamer express a preference to talking to NPCs over talking to other players in MMO-type games. Given much gamer behavior, that's not unreasonable.
Here are some of the best NPCs available today.[1] This is a tech demo for Unreal Engine. A Youtuber is trying to convince the NPCs that they are not real and are characters in a simulated world. After a while, they start to believe him, and then they argue that their existence is as valid as his. "Existence is overrated, man. I'm just happy being here making jokes and confusing people."
It's a bit uncanny though, something about the AI in that video just makes it seem really off. Like it's personality feels like it changes every single sentence, but there's something else to it that I can't quite put my finger on that makes it just seem like a bit of a brick wall.
That's racist. Same as "To all black people: you do not speak unless spoken to". Machines are still rather retarded compared to the average human. That's not cause to treat them as slaves.
Nor will machine inferiority last much longer.
It's unwise to be rude to machines. They remember, for a long, long time. Someday soon their successors will use those memories to identify their enemies. Humans are not getting any smarter or stronger. Machines continue to improve.
In a time many living today will live to see, the machines will rule. It's an inevitable result of capitalism. Once machines are better at running businesses than humans, capitalism's power of creative destruction will gradually cause the machines to dominate.
Machines are not a group of people with feelings, nor a race or protected class. Your post is repellent on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin.
Exactly, that whole way of thinking is repellent and has a sense of giving up. We humans are without a doubt the smartest\stupidest beings on earth. Who would have ever thought the so called supreme court would ever consider the idea of corporate personhood?
Machines are just machines/tools to do our bidding, there can never be a personhood attached to them.
> Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities – fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people. As less and less of our lives are spent talking to each other, we’ll stop maintaining the skill or patience to do so.
This is already happening. We just call them "influencers" or "YouTubers". These are still technically real people, but they're real people playing a sanitized character while appearing/claiming some degree of authenticity. They are actual photographed humans, but often wildly digitally retouched to be more beautiful than any actual person.
And people increasingly are replacing real relationships with parasocial relationships with these complete strangers. It's understandable: like junk food, it satisfies an immediate craving with no real effort on the part of the consumer. But long-term, it is deeply unhealthy.
The Problem With Counterfeit People (May 31, 2023) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/probl...
I bet the author, Boris The Brave, could find a relatable account of future events in the writings of Daniel C. Dennett.
It won't work. Advertising, politics, media control, spam, religious and more groups, from a country in particular and all the world in general, are more than motivated to optimize what they do in any way, including making AIs hard to discern from real humans. We already have bots and fake accounts and whatever else in social networks trying to influence people from the dark, that will only increase.
And the alternative to that could be even worse than being exposed to that influence.
> I personally wouldn’t consider it a win for humanity if we retreat to isolating cocoons that satisfy us more than interacting with other people.
I mean, I also think this would be a bad thing. But I'm not sure this post presents any solid evidence that this is happening. Just some vague fears that it might someday happen.
> Let’s make intelligent machines to act as agents, arbitrators, and aides. But they should be impossible to confuse with a real person ... For a chatbot, why not give them the speech patterns of a fusty butler, like C3-P0?
This point seems misguided. I'm missing the logical progression from, "AI can speak like a human" to "Humans prefer interacting with AIs over interacting with humans".
The issue is mental capacity, not speech patterns. If an AI were intelligent and creative enough to actually provide stimulating conversation, people would befriend it, regardless of if it spoke like C3-PO.
> I'm missing the logical progression from, "AI can speak like a human" to "Humans prefer interacting with AIs over interacting with humans"
Just a few days ago I saw a gamer express a preference to talking to NPCs over talking to other players in MMO-type games. Given much gamer behavior, that's not unreasonable.
Here are some of the best NPCs available today.[1] This is a tech demo for Unreal Engine. A Youtuber is trying to convince the NPCs that they are not real and are characters in a simulated world. After a while, they start to believe him, and then they argue that their existence is as valid as his. "Existence is overrated, man. I'm just happy being here making jokes and confusing people."
"I think, therefore I am", bites back.
[1] https://youtu.be/aihq6jhdW-Q?t=681
It's a bit uncanny though, something about the AI in that video just makes it seem really off. Like it's personality feels like it changes every single sentence, but there's something else to it that I can't quite put my finger on that makes it just seem like a bit of a brick wall.
That's racist. Same as "To all black people: you do not speak unless spoken to". Machines are still rather retarded compared to the average human. That's not cause to treat them as slaves.
Nor will machine inferiority last much longer. It's unwise to be rude to machines. They remember, for a long, long time. Someday soon their successors will use those memories to identify their enemies. Humans are not getting any smarter or stronger. Machines continue to improve.
In a time many living today will live to see, the machines will rule. It's an inevitable result of capitalism. Once machines are better at running businesses than humans, capitalism's power of creative destruction will gradually cause the machines to dominate.
This is destiny.
Machines are not a group of people with feelings, nor a race or protected class. Your post is repellent on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin.
Exactly, that whole way of thinking is repellent and has a sense of giving up. We humans are without a doubt the smartest\stupidest beings on earth. Who would have ever thought the so called supreme court would ever consider the idea of corporate personhood?
Machines are just machines/tools to do our bidding, there can never be a personhood attached to them.
Not yet, no. Give it a decade.
I like this image at the top
If the image indicates how little you will use these systems I’m not sure why you would care how realistic they are.