I don't buy that. People form fan communities around these podcasts where they talk with real people about how much they love listening to minor internet celebrities talk about nothing. Why would they do that if the podcasts served that purpose already?
I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet has created an increased demand for it. People need every moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or images.
If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the "social animal" instinct until we're numb.
I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems are created for each individual filled with the content they want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can argue with them about it.
Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick.
I may be having a hypomanic episode, but I've been thinking about it more, and it seems like the entire Internet Age has been an attempt to more precisely synthesize the substance which sates human social needs artificially, and that when they perfect it, it's all over.
I've been thinking along those lines too, but more from the angle that our goal is to eliminate any need to rely on other humans for anything. We consider the need for interacting with other humans as a burden and an inconvenience, and we're going to get rid of it, at the cost of all the indirect benefits we got from being forced to do it.
I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet has created an increased demand for it. People need every moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or images.
If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the "social animal" instinct until we're numb.
I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems are created for each individual filled with the content they want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can argue with them about it.
Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick.