One day, not too long from now, you'll grow old. Your eyesight will fade, your back will hurt, and your brain will find it harder to process information.

Do people like you deserve to be protected by society? If a predatory company tries to scam you, should we say "sxp was old; they had it coming!"?

Why/how society should give more protection than people close to you? Why his wife let him go somewhere unknown, knowing about his diminished state?

With all the labels and disclaimers, there can always be this one person that will get confused. It's unreasonable to demand protection from long tail of accidents that can happen.

The point is that he could have just as easily suffered this injury in his home country going about day to day life, where his eyesight, balance etc. would have been just as bad. The causal link between the chatbot's flirting and his death is shaky at best. This was tragic, and also the result of something clearly unethical, but the death was still not a reasonably foreseeable consequence.

Protected by society by having better support for caregivers and effective old age care in general? Most definitely.

Protected by society by sanitizing every last venue into a safe space that can be independently navigated by the vulnerable? Definitely not.

Having said that, the real problem here are the corpos mashing this newfound LLM technology into everyone's faces and calling it "AI" as if it's some coherent intelligence. Then they write themselves out of the picture and leave the individuals they've pitted against one another to fight it out.

I often say if I'm diagnosed with some serious cancer I'd probably try to sail the northwest passage rather than seeking treatment. I'm sure some people want absolute maximum raw time but plenty of us would prefer adventure right up to the end and I don't think denying us that is appropriate either.