Wow! I just saw Lisa Ling’s most recent segment about AI – Sex, Relationships and Technology. It opened my eyes to what AI the AI world, what it’s all about, what they’re doing and the kinds of products they make. She interviews four people who are heavily involved in the industry – one guy who is in the business of making sex dolls who talk and have personalities, and can become friends with multiple benefits; and the other 3 people share candidly their experience and involvement in (AI) relationships.
In this incredibly bold prophetic segment, Ling is not only showing us what’s in store for us, for better or worse – the potential power of AI to completely take over our lives, as it’s just getting started and is already going full bore.
AI is an industry developing technology that is intended and designed to replace people and relationships with holographic images, i.e., “replicas” that works and feel better than real people and real relationships. AI is an industry built on exploitation of our vulnerability, our need for connection and the pain of loneliness and alienation. They know how much pain we’re in, how hungry and desperate we are for relief.
Looking from a clinical lens, I see AI pushing the envelope that is leaving us at a crossroads of an existential crisis and an addiction crisis.
We’re now living at a time when the virtual world overlaps and is interchangeable, with the human world, leaving us to choose. How do you distinguish between the two? How does one choose which way to go? This becomes an existential crisis because there is so much on the line… our humanity.
They’re asking us to suspend disbelief so we could engage emotionally, and pretend they’re real, and to keep pretending until your whole world becomes a pretense. So, what, you’re giving up a three-dimensional life for a two dimensional one, that there is nothing real or nourishing about them other than they work and feel than real people and relationships. Wow, but what a relief it is and how much better I feel, and you don’t have to rely on real people and relationships anymore or be left feeling alone or lonely anymore.
Do you opt for what is real and true or for what works and feels better? It might depend on how much pain you are in at the time and how desperate for relief you are. It might also depend on whether there is a home in yourself where you reside and how nourishing your relationships are.
I see AI becoming the new addiction, that trumps all other addictions, that become the new norm, living an addicted life in an addicted world, in which AI becomes the norm, that algorithms become our primary relationships.
I define addiction as a relationship with a means of relief of pain from unmet emotional need. It’s a relationship in which you become emotionally involved and dependent, and that becomes your primary relationship, most trusted friend and confident. I liken AI to emotional porn.
I want to leave you with what R.D. Laing, the father of phenomenological psychology said some 50 years ago, “Real body excitement mixed with fantasy holds for many a fascination mixed with horror.”
I see the horror as an existential crisis that puts on the precipice of surrendering our humanity away, and render ourselves, our humanity, and relationships extinct, to feel better. Connecting with real people in real relationships will become a thing of the past and will no longer matter at all to anyone. Humans, all humans everywhere will become heartless and soulless ghosts. It’s really creeping me out!