> You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.

I recently thought about this and fear that AI may further drive us humans apart.

Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.

▲

id34 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would recommend the work of Sherry Turkle, specifically her new book "Artifical Intimacy" - she is quite opinionated on this, in the sense that the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being. No real quick solution outside of deep, fearful caution when using these things - and we're not going to see that from John Q Public

▲

suncemoje 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being.

I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.

	▲	id34 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IMO, I think that frictionless experience comes at us from a bunch of angles - finding yourself in an echo chamber (by choice or not) online means that you may find yourself less comfortable talking with people you don't agree with, things like that. I grew up in a small town pre-social media, and that meant I didn't have much of a choice about who I was surrounded by. If I was growing up today, what would stop me from retreating to a comfy social media-mediated environment without any challenge or friction? If I was growing up 5 years from now, what would stop me from retreating even further to the comfort of my LLM "friends" who can be shaped to me perfectly? That world sounds terrifying to me.

▲

Loquebantur 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Human meaning arises in conversation between humans. In them reaching a shared understanding of the world and their perspective upon it.

When you talk with machines, you "outsource" that central human society-building element.

But machines never socialize back in any meaningful way. You gradually lose yourself.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Machines could socialize back in a (more) meaningful way. But to do so, they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).

I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.

[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)

I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.

▲

suncemoje 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).

I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.

Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.

▲

autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In some very very distant future we might someday have your typical sci-fi Data/R2-D2/Johnny 5/EDI style AI and yeah, at that point it'd be weird to not treat them as people, give them rights, etc. It'll take a lot more than solving the context problem to pull that off, and LLMs will never be that, but I agree whatever that technology ends up being it'd pretty much have to be able to hold onto memories. I doubt we'll ever see it in our lifetime, but who knows.

▲

pdonis 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Losing context is only part of the issue. LLMs don't have the rich connection to the world that humans have. The only connection LLMs have with anything is streams of text. Not only don't they have eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch--they don't have bodies. They don't have to deal with the real, physical world and have it push back on them.

That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.

▲

Loquebantur 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What an absurd premise. And not because it was "impossible": rather, why would you want that to begin with?

There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?

I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.

But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?

▲

autoexec 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> why would you want that to begin with?

I mean, why wouldn't you? Sci-fi AI robot people could be very cool, be capable of things we aren't, have a unique perspectives as a non-human with similar (if not superior) intelligence, have extremely long (potentially indefinite) lifespans, and provide us with insights into our own nature.

Wouldn't you want to interact with them?

	▲	SaucyWrong 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not the parent, but sorry, for me, no. And this is a perspective that I don’t think I will ever understand. This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.

▲

0c3ca83 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Horrifying.

▲

dspillett 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.

This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.

Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.

There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.

	▲	lr4444lr 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Think carefully. I left high school teaching to become a dev. I would never go back. Yeah, social isolation sucks. But doing a job where your students/clients/patients think you're nothing but a waste of their time is soul-crushing on another level.
	▲	ychnd 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is frightening that it took only a few comments from the top of the page to the first mention of a suicide and also that it doesn't look out of place at all.

▲

squidbeak 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.

I do too, but it means I have more time in my life to spend with people.

▲

yummypaint 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's more important now than ever to hold onto the fact that human beings have inherent value. This exists independent of their ability to generate wealth for an employer. I know HN loves a technical solution for every problem, and so do I, but this is a political problem requiring political solutions.

	▲	OroPla 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> human beings have inherent value I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.

▲

2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

coliveira 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, you don't work w/ a fleet of agents, you use them to do your work.

This is a general issue that is being forced on us by AI companies; AI is not a human being, it is a tool that we can use to do things. We don't have them as coworkers or subordinates, they're objects specialized in language processing. Thinking otherwise leads people to all kinds of existential and psychological issues that in the end make no sense.

	▲	azan_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway. It doesn’t matter at all if they are coworkers or tools (I really don’t see why would it ever matter).

▲

dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Personally I don’t care about that all that much. I don’t have any “sacred” inherent value for human beings. If they can make robots covered in real human skin, blood vessels and muscles (lab grown over the robot frame) with an LLM brain at some point in the future, I would definitely prefer that to a human lover.