The New Yorker:

A future where many humans are in love with bots may not be far off. Should we regard them as training grounds for healthy relationships or as nihilistic traps?

By Jaron Lanier

Is it important that your lover be a biological human instead of an A.I. or a robot, or will even asking this question soon feel like an antiquated prejudice? This uncertainty is more than a transient meme storm. If A.I. lovers are normalized a little—even if not for you personally—the way you live will be changed.

Does this notion disturb you? That’s part of the point. In the tech industry, we often speak of A.I. as if it were a person and of people as if they might become obsolete when A.I. and robots surpass them, which, we say, might occur remarkably soon. This type of thinking is sincere, and it is also lucrative. Attention is power in the internet-mediated world we techies have built. What better way to get attention than to prick the soul with an assertion that it may not exist? Many, maybe most, humans hold on to the hope that more is going on in this life than can be made scientifically apparent. A.I. rhetoric can cut at the thread of speculation that an afterlife might be possible, or that there is something beyond mechanism behind the eyes.

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