Neat that friendship is magic and connection is Hayekian. But perhaps LLMs will be alternatives to pets and general anthropomorphications - which already seems to happen with other humans too with actors, idols, twitch streamers, and technically anyone we aren't already conversing with.
"Hussies know the husband better the wife" is an old term, and perhaps AI would compete more so with this and e-SW with OF. All not as good as finding a person as you don't get go to sleep with the knowledge they'd be there for you.
But these haven't destroyed society yet - though yet is a load-bearing term. But what would it do to children ? Maybe they like parties inherently, so they'd not like AI. Maybe the decreased disadvantage of being alone would push more people towards the idea that they don't need friends - or perhaps that population that would be weak to this trade has already traded it for their favorite disconnected personalities.
Maybe it'll just be more crazy cat ladies/m'ladies but their "cat" gets to "talk" to "them".
One thing about AI is that is really annoying and frustrating to use. By the time AI stops being super annoying (like cutting me off mid-spiel), we'll have other problems to worry about. Hopefully that takes longer than ~3 years
That Harvard Business School study is really bad. They're not surveying users, they're counting online posts about it, and specifically mention reddit and quora.
Excellent flat, severe layout of economic evidence for the importance of social life with believable speculative warnings about what could come next with more Internet and AI distortions and amplifiers in the mix. I appreciate the call back to this piece I found excellent before, https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis. It builds on it well.
Neat that friendship is magic and connection is Hayekian. But perhaps LLMs will be alternatives to pets and general anthropomorphications - which already seems to happen with other humans too with actors, idols, twitch streamers, and technically anyone we aren't already conversing with.
"Hussies know the husband better the wife" is an old term, and perhaps AI would compete more so with this and e-SW with OF. All not as good as finding a person as you don't get go to sleep with the knowledge they'd be there for you.
But these haven't destroyed society yet - though yet is a load-bearing term. But what would it do to children ? Maybe they like parties inherently, so they'd not like AI. Maybe the decreased disadvantage of being alone would push more people towards the idea that they don't need friends - or perhaps that population that would be weak to this trade has already traded it for their favorite disconnected personalities.
Maybe it'll just be more crazy cat ladies/m'ladies but their "cat" gets to "talk" to "them".
One thing about AI is that is really annoying and frustrating to use. By the time AI stops being super annoying (like cutting me off mid-spiel), we'll have other problems to worry about. Hopefully that takes longer than ~3 years
That Harvard Business School study is really bad. They're not surveying users, they're counting online posts about it, and specifically mention reddit and quora.
https://hbr.org/2024/03/how-people-are-really-using-genai
https://hbr.org/2025/04/how-people-are-really-using-gen-ai-in-2025
Excellent flat, severe layout of economic evidence for the importance of social life with believable speculative warnings about what could come next with more Internet and AI distortions and amplifiers in the mix. I appreciate the call back to this piece I found excellent before, https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis. It builds on it well.