We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

Many of the people doing these activities discovers them online or met others to do it online.

I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.

Though I could see how easy it would be to believe that for someone who gets caught in the internet bubble. You’re not seeing the people out and about if you’re always at home yourself.

But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.

It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.

Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.

Any evidence for this?

It's obvious that a sufficiently advanced AI could solve loneliness if it was allowed to present as human, you just wouldn't know it isn't one. I'm entirely unconvinced that something which seems human in all respects couldn't replace one, even if your brain knows that it's actually AI.

Other LLM's can also do this pretty well (again, given the right prompts), but you're limited to text or somewhat mediocre speech.

And this is without the big companies putting much effort into companions. Once they do, things can be pushed much further.

Next week it is exactly like it is this week.

It wouldn't work without fixing first all the mental health problems caused by phones, social media, porn, and dating apps. Good luck with unplugging those addicts, AI.

Like there’s a trend line of progress right? Ok so the thing isn’t effective now. But there’s a decade of upward progress and that projection line point to a future where a better AI exists.

Trend-lines don’t point to an exact future just a most probable future. It is unwise to discount the most probable future.

It often was, in my childhood. There was only one computer.

I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.

You must have missed the 90s chat rooms we visited while in school, or even the more recent chat roulette in 2010.

Heck, even geocaching is a web surfing group activity.

It's not only that. AI enables a never-before-seen level of individual targeting for political and commercial actors, campaigns of behavioral modification and radicalization, to the point where the entire intelectual foundations of democracy become questionable.

When power actors addressed the people in traditional media they could send a single message that was tailored to maximize effect, but necessarily needed to be addressed to the common man. The explosion of internet fragmented the media space, but we're still talking about unitary publications, say, an opinion piece presented identically to all online subscribers of a certain publication, with narratives targeting broad swaths of the population: young urban males, conservative retirees and so on. Cambridge Analytica disrupted that model, allowing targeting based on individual profiling, A/B testing to see what kind of content works best on people with certain proclivities etc.; but again, the decisions were relatively low complexity and automatic.

Now imagine each individual has a dedicated GPT-5 level agent following him around across devices and media, that operates 24/7 with the singular task of influencing his opinion, convince him to join a cause, plunge him into depression, buy something, or whatever else the power actor needs from that individual. This agent not only has an excelent profile of his target and can generate videos, fake personas etc. as necessary, but also has a near expert level competence in things like psychology, persuasion and manipulation. It doesn't just push narratives, its tasked with convincing you and isolating you from whatever external influence threatens that goal, and it reasons towards that goal with near expert level accuracy. Would 99% of the population resist such a brainwashing machine? Would you?

This is the type of agent Facebook and Twitter/x are striving towards. It's a world where people no longer have common understanding of a shared social reality, and collaboration towards keeping Power in check becomes fundamentally impossible. It's orwellian to a degree even Orwell didn't imagine.

Hmm.. Wikipedia says: From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.

Then again, Myspace (and most social media) isn't an app for synchronous communication, you logged into it and see who's interacted with your content (or comment). OK then someone invented notifications, and the smartphone (which went from bookish BlackBerry to hip and trendy iPhone in 2007-2008) would bother you.

In the old days of AOL, ICQ or MSN and not always-on-internet, you weren't reachable 24/7. I think one of these didn't even have offline messaging, meaning, if the other user is not online, you couldn't send them a message. A friend showed me ICQ and I hated the concept; I thought "but if I go online and I see someone online there, isn't it like walking into a cafe and seeing them, it'd be rude to ignore them and not say hello?". I saw it as a virtual place where people can come and go and you have a chance o catch up.

Nowadays I can make anyone's phone ping and notify them that I want their attention using WhatsApp, etc within seconds of thinking it, and we've lost the concept of "Hey, fancy seeing you here! How have you been?". It seems connecting to anyone is possible 24/7, so it doesn't happen anymore.

Then it will expose how worthless 'opinions from random people on the internet' are. Then how worthless 'parasocial relationships with streamers/influencers' are.

The rise of private group chats as the new lifeblood of social networking gives me hope that the state of the Web today isn't the end of the story. Authentic human connection across digital networks is still possible even if it isn't particularly common right now.

We need new protocols.

Meetup.com (Luma, etc): replaces the need for existing heavily maintained communities of friends and family in your location with siloed random encounters. However, it shortens the path to meeting people that share niche interests.

Dating apps: replaces the need for men to spontaneously approach women they meet in their daily life or in social/family circles (even bars) with a heavily idealized profile centered around physical and emotional attractiveness. They are not only dominated by men, but they typically only disproportionally benefit a small % of those men.

Facebook: you can keep in touch with the lives of more people at scale, but it reduces the incentive to catch up in person with the people you actually care about. This can lead to genuine in person connections being replaced with a feed of people you really don't know.

Take it with a grain of salt.

Even sharing and commenting on HN has some social aspect to it. Of course, I might be conversing with bots for years already and I have no way of checking that. ;)

But, wrt your specific description—these LLM based tools are just programs, and they can be easily configured to validate and flatter, or challenge and be obstinate. Surely they could be configured to have a satisfying relationship arc, if some work was put into it. I’m sure we could program a begrudging mentor that only became friendly after you’ve impressed it, if we wanted.

I think you are right that something isn’t there, but the missing thing is deeper than the surface level behavior. They aren’t AI’s, they are just language models. To get closer in some greedy sense, we could give the language model more complex simulated human like behaviors, but that will still be a simulation…

Just sitting silently with someone can eliminate loneliness, no words needed... sometimes that's preferred. The idea that someone needs to be in an active conversation to not be lonely is missing the mark.

What would be really interesting is how much longer the relationship would last if it were formed on a social media site or forum where there is still some risk of rejection, and validation from others still has the feel of being earned.

My dad sent me a few chats he had with ChatGPT and they were both stroking each other's egos pretty hard. It was pretty weird. He was using it a lot to get information and prep before a surgery and I felt like ChatGPT reinforced his unrealistic expectations for the speed of recovery. I didn't say anything before the surgery, as I didn't want to break his spirit and a positive attitude has its value.

A couple weeks post-op, when reality set in that the recovery was going to be longer and harder than he expected, we ended up on the topic of AI during a chat. I mentioned how AI can be steered and gave some examples on how I will often frame questions, and come at it from different angles to try and better find some semblance of true. I've even sent him chats that I've had with ChatGPT where I catch it in lies about itself about its own capabilities to try and drive the point home.

His response was to say he also does this, and he's worried about people who aren't as self-aware as "us" who take the AI results at face value. We even discussed people using AI as a therapist, and his concern was that the AI wouldn't challenge someone's existing ideas, like a real therapist often does.

It seems that even though he thinks he is challenging it, and will sometimes go to multiple different chatbots for a more serious question, he is still being misled. The silver lining is that he does have an abnormally large friend network for someone in his 70s. Not just Facebook friends, but people who he regularly sees in person from all eras of his life. Hopefully that keeps things in check and he doesn't go too far off the deep end. Though he does seem to disproportionally value ChatGPT's opinion over most others, probably because it always tells him how smart and insightful he is.

Loneliness is not being happy with being alone, solitude is the state of being alone. I couldn't find a word for specifically being happy about it.

So, loneliness is intrinsically negative, otherwise one wouldn't feel that way.

It just needs to reach enough of a tipping point for companies to get behind it, and hopefully not be a fad that just burns out. This part is all very unlikely. The mainstream will have to get really bad.

To buy new "90s" stuff, it's not as good as what we had in the actual 90s. I watched something on new cassette players (walkman style) that companies are building. They are a lot bigger and bulkier than peak walkman, which was hardly larger than the tape. The tools and tech to make those small walkmans just doesn't exist anymore, and the market isn't large enough to invest in it.

When Apple's click wheel patent expires, I'm sure people would love to see some high quality 3rd party iPods that are easily repairable and have more modern features out of the box. There is still a community of people keeping the old ones going.

The way things are driving right now, it's going to be very hard to get a flip phone soon. My HSA plan just announced that if we don't download their app before fall they're going to lock us out of our accounts. That seems wrong in so many ways. In their FAQ there is a question about a user's phone not supporting their app, and the answer provided is to get a new phone that does. The HSA is through my employer, I can't just change, even though I'd like to. Earlier this year, before my grandma died, some company was telling my mom that my grandma needed an email address to use their service. She was 104 and months away from death, and they wanted her to get her first email account. After loudly refusing, they found away around it, but that's where we're at as a society. Can we even go back?

It wasn’t that everything was great. It was that there was a palpable sense, supported by a great deal of evidence, that things were getting better.

This did also include things like race relations and LGBTQ acceptance. The latter was worse then but visibly improving. The former has become worse since then.

The optimism ended on 9/11. I firmly believe that the terrorists won. They destroyed the culture of the west on that day and it has never recovered. It was our reaction that did it, not the planes, but I think that was the plan.

That will have none of the 'connection' you mention aside from a compassionate voice.

And, if you are one of those unfortunate people, that voice will be enough.

It will have to be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

We are not ready but we're ripe for them.

The advertisement industry has fingered our brains and raped our attention while eating up all the information they could get, now "AI" is harvesting our "open relationship with sharing information about ourself". The merger between the work the Ad Industry has done in preparation with the new data will collect will be catastrophically successful.

Meanwhile, we willingfully slept on digital literacy. The effects ripple already through many aspects of our societies. Causing havoc.

We're running toward an really "interesting" peak in Western Societies and I don't see how that might stop or even slow down.