Happiness Is A Warm CPU

There was a short piece on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday; "Exploring concerns around users building emotional dependence on AI chatbots." To be sure, it didn't at all live up to the title. Rather it seemed to be an opportunity for banter between the hosts. They did play some commentary from Arizona State University's Liesel Sharabi, but she was given only around 100 words, not nearly enough to really open the topic, let alone explore it.

Which was unfortunate. This really should have been a longer story, or maybe even a podcast episode of its own, because the disappointments and complications of having relationships with actual humans have already led people to have relationships with life-sized dolls and virtual boy/girl-friends. To be sure, the numbers don't seem to be very large. I suspect there's a reason why every story I've encountered about men have dolls as girlfriends features this guy who goes by the name of DaveCat.

One of the recurring worries about these sorts of surrogate relationships is that they will normalize unrealistic expectations of what being in a relationship should be like. But it seems to me that particular train has already left the station. After all, DaveCat was talking about his relationships with his RealDolls in fairly unrealistic terms when I encountered his story in The Atlantic some ten years ago.

In this, I suspect the "danger" of automation and robotics in this instance isn't that it will change what people want. Rather it will become good enough to give them what they already want, but can't currently obtain. Replicant partners that are captive enough to be utterly reliable, yet offer just enough pushback to not seem captive? I can see the lines for that going around the block. It simply takes so much of the perceived risk out of being in a relationship. And that's part of the reason for so much of the automation that we currently have. After all, I've had dishes be broken during cleaning before, but never by the dishwasher.

For all that I find hand-wringing about how people are too selfish these days to be moronic, I understand the critique that people go into relationships mainly as a path to personal happiness, mainly because it (among other things) lowers people's patience for rough edges in potential partners. But then again, most people wind up marrying other actual people in their lives, so I doubt that this is ever going to be a big problem regardless of how alarmist one's take on it is. What I think it will become, however, is mediagenic, precisely because it can be spun as a looming crisis that could spell doom (doom, I tell you!) for humanity. And nothing drives ratings like the promise of a good crisis story. Sometimes, even when the promise isn't at all delivered on.