very wip just an idea soup for now - these are scattered thoughts to keep in mind for the panel, I’d like to turn this into piece (or multiple pieces) but it’s not really formatted that way yet

A positive vision of AI applied to human relationships is AI that doesn't act human

A positive world with AI is one where we are less confused about the nature of AI. Where we see it more appropriately as a tool best for certain uses. Like other tools.

AI that doesn’t act human is important for human relationships. Because if we have human-like AI companions that are infinitely patient, endlessly validating, with no needs or boundaries of their own, our expectations of each other will warp in this way. We’ll start to expect the same of humans.

Relevant: “My AI Loves Me Better Than Anyone Ever Cloud”

Digitally mediated interactions with human-like entities are “leaky”. We saw this on social media even before LLMs - as people became less trusting of the people they interacted with online, they became less trusting of other people in the real world. “Leaky” in the sense that we can’t fully compartmentalize the way we treat people (or entities we regard as people) in different contexts. Expectations of interactions in one realm (digital) influenced expectations in another realm (in-person).

This question - what happens when we can’t distinguish human and machine - is well explored by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) and Westworld.

Relevant: Inverse Laws of Robotics

Also, re: AI for loneliness - there’s growing evidence that AI companions might make us lonelier or unhappier anyway:

Although our chatbot “Sam” was designed to offer consistent support rooted in principles from relationship science, interacting with this chatbot did not yield the same psychological benefits as interacting with a randomly selected first-year university student.

Same as social media showing us “what we want” on our feed but we always feel emptier after spending time there.

Every new cognitive technology is accompanied by its own mania. AI may be the most extreme of all but it's not the first.

It takes a long time to see a technology for what it is. Maybe it's only possible after that technology has completely fulfilled its potential - when we can finally see its limits - that we can see what it really is. That's hard right now because the promise of AI is that it can do anything, or at least "all knowledge work". (radioactivity example, let Seniha give it)

Positive vision of AI is where we let it do the things it's good at - there is absolutely toil that AI can remove. it lowers the barrier to entry to building just about anything on a computer. we can build websites in an instant.

AI might not get smarter on its own. that hard work may be left to us

Positive vision of a world with AI is one where we acknowledge the limits of AI so we can get back to the hard work of pushing our own (human) limits. Where we accept that AI is not going to solve climate change, or cure disease, or fix democracy, or end scarcity or war on its own if we just pour all our resources into [the companies that are building] AI. Even if we accept the boldest claims about the power of these tools, we can see from how they work that they rely on the will of the humans behind them to push them towards one problem or another.

We have to acknowledge that there is no easy way out. That we haven’t identified the solution to all our problems. We need humility.

Once we admit that AI won’t solve all our problems, humanity is still clearly more capable with AI than without it.

But (I’m reacting to my use of “humanity” just now) AI discourse tends to do this totalizing thing where the human race is reduced to “humanity” as if all humans have the same values and goals. This is why “alignment” is a farce. Aligned to who? People disagree with each other.