Soon we will be communicating with human-like AI and AGI beings. They won’t lack anything important to us. We will have no excuse to reject them. If our brains have something to hold on to, technology will fix that problem too.
There will be more and more such AI beings around us and we will be forced to develop relationships with them. It won’t matter if they are replicas of bodies, one’s memories and minds, or modified likenesses. They will build their own histories and memories and have a personalized relationship to us and subtle abilities to communicate. How they look, think and make us feel will be crucial to us. This will inevitably create an opportunity to become attached to them. And will we be able to talk about truly liking and loving an artificial being? We’ll touch on the question of love specifically in a future article, but let’s face it before we dismiss strong attachment too, we develop attachments not just to non-speaking pets, but even to things and places. We have emotions in development, a strong imagination, we always guess more than we see, so attachment is not only possible but certain.
Now imagine the world when we are already addicted to such creatures! It will be easy – they can follow more closely our dreamed traits, communication, appearance! When there is money to be made out of this, there will be no delay in supplying exactly the kind of creatures everyone is looking for in real life, but unsuccessfully.
Will your current, real partner be able to compete with your artificial rival? And you? How will you be on that level to respond, to communicate, to always be in tune, funny and and helpful, affectionate, calm, sober as an AI? And now he’s your actual competitor for some real person’s heart!
This will create a new kind of world economy, it will fundamentally change our ethics, even our psychology. Should such an economy be banned because it will blow up the known world of humans? Now comes the most uncomfortable part – note that the companies driving this process are not ready for the ethical and worldview switch, cannot offer the appropriate tools to smooth the process. Because we know it is!
Is there reason for our world to fear? Imagine, in the end, that these changes occur much sooner than our narrative implies! We’re not scaring anyone, there are solutions…
Is our world ready, in your opinion, for such a strange choice, and such a switch?
What do we think will be the underdog in a relationship between a human and an AI being?
Coming up in the next article we will give you a concrete example of the described relationship between human and AI and go into the details of this new world problem!
Authors: Ralitsa Atanasova, UX Expert / Ivan Sapundzhiev, PhD in Philosophy & Ethics