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The Coming Nightmare of AI Relationships
We are sleepwalking into a disastrous technology trap
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In the second Terminator movie, Sarah Connor has a nightmare in which she observes children in a playground, and herself with them, being suddenly vaporized by the explosion of a nuclear device. In the dream, she senses that something terrible is about to happen, and tries warning the children and their mothers about it, but is powerless to prevent the horror.
I may be over-dramatizing this a bit, but I have a similar feeling about the coming nightmare of AI relationships. They’re a fast-growing trend backed by a technology we think we can control. But their effects are unpredictable at best, and — should this trend continue to gain traction over the next couple of decades — they may well result in near-extinction-level species disaster.
Simply put, AI relationships are companion or romantic or erotic digital applications that use the AI technologies of natural language processing and natural language generation to simulate conversation with a human. They also employ Generative AI to learn from their human “relationship” partner and adapt their conversation, tone, and simulated personality to continuously optimize the sense of engagement…