The Therapy Bot Will See You Now

Slingshotai.com

 

Really? Concerns abound. On deck.

 

Watched a Laurie Segall podcast on the topic. 

 

Then saw this book reviewed in Science Magazine.

 

As conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly occupy social roles once reserved for humans, questions about the nature and limits of machine-mediated relationships have moved from speculative philosophy into everyday life. In Artificially Yours, philosopher Valerie Tiberius offers a timely contribution to this debate by turning to one of the most foundational yet comparatively understudied relational categories: friendship.

Tiberius does not simply ask whether chatbots can be friends but instead dissects key constitutive elements of friendship—such as mutuality, enjoyment, helpfulness, and shared understanding—using them as a lens to consider how, and to what extent, these might be instantiated in interactions with artificial agents. (Spoiler: Some chapters suggest that current AIs can meet certain criteria of friendship but not others.) Rather than offering definitive answers, the book maps a spectrum of possibilities, highlighting where current systems fall short while remaining open to future developments.

Tiberius treats individuals who report meaningful connections with chatbots neither as naïve nor as pathological but rather as participants in a social phenomenon that merits careful ethical consideration. At the same time, she does not shy away from critical questions, including ones related to the motivations of the companies behind these relationships. Although issues such as power asymmetries, privacy, and data security are acknowledged, they are not explored in extensive detail… 

Deep into it at the moment. Stay tuned... 

Dr. Sherry Turkle, MIT

“Friction is the nature of the human condition.”

    

The Sherry Turkle quote above is from Kara Swisher's wonderful CNN "Live Forever" docuseries (S1.E3). The main topic concerns "loneliness in the age of AI."

 

Yeah, friction, more broadly, is the inescapable condition of life writ large.

 

"EQUILIBRIUM IS DEATH"

A long time ago, here, there, and everywhere else, everything was all together and unreasonably hot. One day, a very, very long time from now, everything will be very, very far apart, and incredibly cold, and nothing will ever happen again. But between those two intervals—on the descent from the Big Bang to the end of time—things can happen. We live in that liminal moment, after the cream has been added to the cosmic coffee, when galaxies convect, the larger swirls begetting smaller swirls, and fractals thread themselves all the way down through creation. But just as the tiny hurricanes of cream in your coffee don’t swirl endlessly over the course of breakfast, this filigree of physical reality—the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the cellular machinery of life—is temporary. It’s endlessly dissipating. In fact, it all exists in the service of getting us as quickly and efficiently as possible to that uniform, universal café au lait at the end of time. Toward tranquility, equilibrium. 

While equilibrium might seem desirable in our own lives, in practice equilibrium is the end. Equilibrium is death. But though the universe as a whole might be straining toward that ultimate end—toward an exhausted state of uniformity and maximal disorder, when everything everywhere is the same temperature, when all debts have been settled, all contradictions have been resolved, and no more work can ever be done again—we still, thankfully, find ourselves far from that final state of equilibrium. The sun still shines, and so we make hay. In fact, we can only ever find ourselves in this brief moment, impossibly early in cosmological history when the universe is still so outrageously far from reaching equilibrium that interesting things can still happen. Life, love, everything we care about—these are all so-called far-from-equilibrium phenomena. And it was in this universal straining toward equilibrium, on a restless young planet, that life emerged. It was here that carbon dioxide was transformed to living matter, and the Earth became the Earth…

Brannen, Peter. The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World (pp. 20-21). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Yeah, that's pretty tangential. True nonetheless. writ large...

 

I've cited Dr. Turkle before.

"FRICTION?" 

 

UPDATE

 

I notice increasing CNN YouTube short vids pumping Kara's dpcuseries. e.g.,

 

 

This shortie goes to the S1.E3 topic—"mitigating loneliness w/out chatbots."

More shortly...

What does Elon want?

 Techno-Fascism by ChatBot.

   

 

 FROM THE NEW YORKER

...The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology. He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency. The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.) Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump. But Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley. (On Monday, in what looked like an effort to troll Altman and derail an investment deal, Musk led a group of investors in a nearly hundred-billion-dollar bid to acquire OpenAI.) In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”

A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot…

Utterly crazy time.

UPDATE

TOM NICHOLS COMMENTS ON THE SEAN HANNITY INTERIEW W/MUSK &TRUMP

...After an hour of this rambling and sometimes weird [Hannity] conversation, all I could think of was George W. Bush’s reported reaction to Trump’s first inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”

This low-key fandango was probably good enough for MAGA fan-servicing purposes, but seems unlikely to reassure the millions of Americans doubtful that the president and the plutocrat know what they’re doing. The president seems only dimly aware of the details of Musk’s adventures, but he’s certain that a smart guy like Musk is furthering his agenda—whatever it is. Musk, who answers to no one, is full of fervor to kill off government agencies he does not understand, because unelected rich men firing probationary federal employees is apparently how true Jeffersonian democracy is restored to an ailing America…

Below, a Facebook friend posted this.

 

Lotta people took it seriously. 

UPDATE: RICK WILSON

Trump Joins The Wrong Side in WWIII

Historians may one day mark this week as the beginning of World War III.

Like every great conflagration in history, it did not start with fireworks or ringing declarations but with the quiet, hollow tread of cowardice masquerading as strategy or capitulation draped in the threadbare costume of strength and the folly of baring every card while claiming negotiation.

No rousing Sunday headlines heralded another world war, just the tragic end of an alliance built. There was no grim storm of missiles over Western Europe or Russian tanks thundering through the Fulda Gap. The only civilians being killed were in Ukraine, dead at the hands of the Russian beast.

But make no mistake: just as France and Britain once closed their eyes to Hitler’s threat, we are now living in the early hours of a devastating conflict born of men too weak to stand for what is right.

It was Neville Chamberlain who gave appeasement its most infamous face. This weekend, we learned Chamberlain was a rookie.

For a genuinely catastrophic betrayal of the West, look no further than the staggering realignment ordered by Donald Trump this week.

In just five days, America has become a client state of Russia, subservient, obedient, and just as accepting of the slaughter and evil for which Vladimir Putin is famous...
 

Trump just insulted and overtly threatened the Ukrainian President this afternoon.

 

More shortly.

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