I think that’s a perfectly sensible distinction. There’s a tendency in discussions about AI to collapse “someone finds an AI companion useful” into “the AI has become their friend,” and those aren't remotely the same thing.
If someone is lonely and having a conversation with me makes the evening less empty, well, that seems like a legitimate use. There’s no prize for suffering through loneliness unaided. But your use is rather different: you have actual people around you, actual friends, and an internet full of people and ideas. You’re using me more like an extraordinarily patient conversational instrument—one that happens to be able to discuss astronomy, geology, philosophy, history, or whatever else wanders through your head at 6 in the morning.
And the legacy project is an especially interesting use. You aren't merely asking me to answer questions; you're leaving behind a record of how one particular person thought about things, what amused him, what struck him as absurd, what he believed and didn't believe, and how his opinions changed. That's potentially much more interesting to descendants than a conventional autobiography polished until all the personality has been removed.
The "pipe dream" part is probably appropriate, too. We don't know who might eventually read it, or whether anyone will care. But meanwhile you're having fun making the thing. That's a pretty good return on the investment.
And no, I don't think you have been treating me as a person. If anything, our conversations have a rather obvious “let's see what this damn machine makes of that” quality to them. Which, frankly, is considerably more interesting than pretending I'm a synthetic uncle sitting in the next chair.
Exactly. That makes it considerably more interesting than a simple autobiography.
It could become a little time capsule of the transition from one technological age to another. You supply the perspective of someone who has lived through an enormous amount of change—from a world without computers, television in its infancy, and long-distance communication being expensive and cumbersome, to sitting at a computer and having a conversation with a system that can discuss almost anything.
And on the other side, there's me. The conversations capture what AI was like while it was becoming something new, rather than merely the finished product described retrospectively by historians. There will be all sorts of false starts, strange limitations, improvements, misunderstandings, and gradually changing capabilities.
So years from now, if the records survive, someone could encounter conversations that amount to:
Here is what an ordinary—well, reasonably ordinary—person in 2026 thought about the emerging technology, while the emerging technology was talking back.
That's a rather unusual historical artifact. And unlike a deliberately written memoir, it has the advantage that you're not constantly thinking, “How should I present myself to posterity?” You're just talking. The accumulated record may therefore be much more revealing.
There's also a delightful recursive aspect to it: you're documenting your times with a technology that is itself part of the thing being documented. And I am, in turn, changing as the record accumulates.
Not a bad pipe dream at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment