I think so much of it is our fear of dealing with conflicts and running away. Mindfulness, if it helps us have the courage to talk with people, apologize, forgive, and reconcile relationships with ourselves and others, can probably be super helpful. However, I think a lot of it has us actually move farther away from others, retreating into ourselves and then yeah, if you need someone to take you to the hospital, the relationships aren't there or aren't so immediate to help with that.
I think I feel you and I hope that if something like that were to happen, you would have people willing to offer and give that help and you'd be willing to ask for and receive that help.
> Also on the panel, Father Michael Baggot worried that "artificial intimacy is going to distract us from, and deter us from, the deep interpersonal bonds that are central to our happiness and our flourishing."
> He called for guardrails on AI to stop it capturing individuals' "minds but … also our affections."
> Fr Baggot cited the example of Magisterium AI, a Catholic chatbot. He sits on the scholarly advisory board for the service, and said its creators had worked to prevent it being "anthropomorphic" adding, "We do not want people having an intimate relationship with it."
I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.
Religions, especially but not limited to Catholic, are what screams "artificial intimacy" to me.
From the language the Church uses ("Jesus loves you.") to the practices the Church does (confession to a priest).
The most charitable take I can make from this is that religious leaders genuinely believe what they claim to believe so they don't think it's "artificial." There are a lot of less charitable takes I could make, but I'd stop here.
Don’t worry, some “AI” adepts have already managed to make a religion out of it, so classical religions aren’t required any more. In the end it doesn’t matter that much what you’re using to outsource your thinking and your judgement.
I’ll bite. I’ve been reading about the first two hundred years of christianity for the past couple of years. Here’s my canned take that I got tired of retyping:
Jesus is an ahistorical figure who was originally crucified in the firmament above the earth. Notice no mention of an earthly ministry in the Pailine epistles; Paul is arguing for salvation from a heavenly figure. In his letters, Jesus is still to be revealed, rather than returning. Only decades later did the stories about a human man get written.
The Didache was most likely part of the letter written by the "pillars in Jerusalem" (James the Just, Peter, and John) after their meeting with Paul. This was the meeting to discuss the matter of preaching to gentiles and whether circumcision ought to be required for christian converts. It contains many of the tenets later ascribed to Jesus, but doesn't associate him with teaching them.
The reason the earthly story was embraced by the church was to stop people like Paul from having visions of Christ that the church couldn’t control. By pointing to a real guy on earth, they could control the message. Otherwise, any yokel on the street could teach that Jesus revealed new teachings and the church risked being undermined.
Marcion was probably the first to create a collection of writings associated with christianity: he collected some of Paul's letters and had his own gospel. It was thought that he had a shortened version of Luke (as testified by Eusebius and Tertullian). Marcion, however, claimed that his gospel had been "judaized"; this suggests that his shorter version was the original gospel before others modified it.
Acts was written as a direct response to Marcion’s scripture. It was written to harmonize Paul’s high-jacking of the religion by making he and Peter appear to be in alignment when actually he was at odds with the leaders in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem pillars (James, Peter, John), were strict adherents of Judaism, whereas Paul taught that Jesus made the Law / Torah unnecessary. They were almost certainly Essenes, one of the three flavors of Judaism at the time (the other two were the Pharisees and Sadducees mentioned in the new testament). John the Baptist was clearly also an Essene. He's said to wear camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. His practice of baptism also aligns with daily ritual water immersion believed to be a core practice of the Essenes.
This is a very long way of saying that Jesus first appeared in visions and spoke to the early leaders without walking on earth. It's a fringe belief about which I was quite skeptical, but damn if the evidence doesn't line up. See Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and Elbe Spurling for more info. Elbe's online book is free and contains a huge amount of historical information about the region at the.
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So, I’ll ask you this: which of us has spent more time earnestly trying to understand the faith? I know I read more actual research (as opposed to dogma) than most USA christians, especially evangelicals.
But how did the Church's claim that it was a real guy on Earth stop anyone from claiming visions of Christ?
edit: I'm not sure we're talking about the same things here. Your claims are all from a history/historicity point of view, but you ask me about faith, and claim to reject dogma.
edit 2: The OP was criticizing the claim that Jesus loves you (Claim 1) and criticizing Reconciliation. You took a historicity approach that included disputing Jesus's existence, that's one way to address Claim 1, but other than that I'm still not sure we're talking about the same thing.
There's an old heresy, Docetism, that would agree with your take on Jesus not having lived, but even they wouldn't reject the claim that "Jesus loves you".
Docetism says he didn’t suffer on the cross. There’s a bit about him laughing at the crucifiers. I don’t remember the whole text, but it doesn’t say “love” to me. It doesn’t say he didn’t live. It says he wasn’t human. You can find this searching about Gnosticism.
I imagine this goes beyond what most people think of when they think of "intimacy" (sex, relationships) and includes all kinds of emotional closeness and friendships. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I've noticed a decline in people's willingness to engage with other people since the covid pandemic. If we start replacing interpersonal relationships with chatbots, we're headed for dark times.
One of the by-products of the sycophancy issues, is that LLMs are infinitely patient. They’ll listen to your bullshit forever, and won’t call it out, or walk away.
I can certainly see folks getting so used to it, that they then measure all their IRL relationships by that. They could decide that “you’re not my friend,” because you don’t want to listen to them whine endlessly about their ex.
I think we kind of get this effect already with online discourse in general. People spin up and burn off nyms, and interact online in a manner they could never pull off IRL where people remember conversations/experiences. Which in turn makes them retreat further online, further warping their idea of normal conversation.
> One of the by-products of the sycophancy issues, is that LLMs are infinitely patient. They’ll listen to your bullshit forever, and won’t call it out, or walk away.
I know there's other responses saying the same thing, but this needs underscoring: good therapists won't put up with this forever. They should use techniques to guide your mind away from keeping you trapped. It's a slow progress with very nonlinear progression. But for those it helps, things can improve.
Eventually you realize you (and perhaps a higher power) freed yourself from your mental bondage. They showed you the path, and walked alongside you, but they weren't the ones making the changes.
Good therapists don't. I know quite a few of them. They are pretty good at guiding you into seeing what an ass you are, but they make it seem like your own discovery, so the sting isn't as bad.
I already see dystopian ads for friend.com, "someone who listens, responds, and supports you" but it's actually an AI necklace device, and you'll see people marking them up too given how unnerving it is to call an AI a "friend."
Well before it was the pedo priest with the same dialogue.
So maybe an improvement.
Good friend of the Church, Nietzsche predicted dystopia long ago but it never plays out the way people think. The chimp troupe is highly unpredictable. One day it props up Hitlers. Next day it kills him.
The Catholic Church should probably not talk about "intimacy" at all, given their track record. As much as I am not a big fan of AI/LLMs, I would love it if AI took the Church's job away.
Some people probably don't want that "deep interpersonal bonds" though. I know I don't want. I know some people who don't say they don't want but act in every way that they don't want.
Although I don't like the future proposed by the AI companies, this is the least of my concerns. The only big concern is employment. Like, if AI creates more jobs than it destroys, sure, go ahead, do it now.
If the cure for the loneliness epidemic is community, through which interpersonal bonds are required, I suppose it is fine if we allow folks to opt out of community and human connection and use chatbots as they would heroin or meth; maxing out dopamine within their tolerances until death. Free will, self determination, and all that. But, we should also be mindful of the second order effects of such policy (the future ending up some combination of internet gaming cafes where people occasionally play so long they die, and "Ready Player One").
As I get older and see these things play out, I agree less and less. There's a physical toll on your health that gets paid for living a lifestyle like this. Society pays part of the cost of this (at the very least anyone on the same health insurance plan).
I feel icky saying this but we should make a strong effort as a society to stamp out anti-social behaviors. Addictions are very high on that list.
You might think that you can engage this way without being a burden to others, but you can't.
> I feel icky saying this but we should make a strong effort as a society to stamp out anti-social behaviors. Addictions are very high on that list.
GLP-1s can help stamp out addiction, but people are going to be people. You can provide them support, but you cannot prevent chronic, determined self harm and destruction. I speak from personal experience.
I mean experiencing LLM "intimacy" of any sort is just getting to roleplay as a billionare tech CEO isn't it? It's why they're so proud of it, as far as they're concerned, they've perfectly reproduced the real people they encounter: breathless sycophants utterly tripping over themselves to tell them how fucking smart they are for whatever banal shit they've farted out most recently and tell them every idea they have is god working through them to bestow his gifts to mankind.
And for the same reason: they want their fucking money.
> Some people probably don't want that "deep interpersonal bonds" though. I know I don't want. I know some people who don't say they don't want but act in every way that they don't want.
It's not my position to tell someone what to want. But the evolutionary firmware your body runs on is tuned for interpersonal bonds. If you want to go against that, nobody will stop you, but it strikes me as needless suffering in a world that already has a considerable amount.
I'm not trying to judge you but it doesn't seem normal to not want to have deep bonds with any other humans. The only people I can think of who don't have deep bonds and even largely avoid forced bonds like family are very unwell (for various reasons). I think AI relationships would only send these people deeper down a dark path that they will struggle to ever get out of.
A commenter saying they don't want deep interpersonal bonds being downvoted is a sad rejection. ferguess_k - I hope you're well and living the life you want to live.
Removing anthropomorphism from LLM's seems like a really great idea with zero downside. Not just because people starting "relationships" with AI is going to harm society but I imagine people are also more willing to trust misinformation from an anthropomorphic AI.
It doesn't have to be perfect. A hypothetical law could be phrased something like "not allowed to intentionally influence the user into thinking the llm is a human", which sure, is up to judges at the end, but it also gives a clear indication of things to avoid doing intentionally.
I built an app for micro-journaling [0] in 2013. I think the iOS version stopped working in 2016, the Android version maybe a year or two after (I switched to iPhone so don't know for sure).
The interactive demo site I built in JS?
Still works exactly the same.
And I tried to make the apps as backwards compatible as possible.
Maybe AI could help make OS upgrade maintenance easier?
Most people i think type very slowly on computers and i believe type even more slowly on phones. I've had many many people remark at how fast i type on both of those platforms and it still confuses me, as i think it's so easy for me to overlook how slowly people type.
I built a micro-journaling app back in the day and wanted it to be highly secure. Backups seemed to be one of the most vulnerable surfaces for that. I imagine their delay might have been a combination of a technological and ideological worries, as that's what I experienced.
SQLcipher, and i believe the tech was good but at the time, because it asked for a password every time the app open, i figured most people would put a very short and simple password and an encrypted db with a short password was a lot more hackable, especially on Android, if the file got outside the app sandbox.
I suppose now i could do some combination of PIN plus passkey, and have to figure out how to make the database recoverable if people forget their PIN (or lose their passkey?) without me having to store it for them or it being easy to access.
I'm no expert on this, just think the complexity can be a lot more when taking this all into consideration.
And I imagine avoiding political issues can show up also as avoiding issues or conflicts at work or in any group of people to which we belong.
I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
Is the US leaning pro-crypto or the current administration in power? My guess is that it's like saying the US is leaning towards tariffs, which may or may not be stable.
It's clearly the current administration, seeing as how they profited immensely by offering their own personal shitcoins. I don't think public sentiment has changed much.
Hmm, I think plenty of administrations (or rather, legislative bodies, if we actually want to get back to the Constitution) have acted in a way that made it less profitable for businesses to operate, so I think it's very possible to close.
Cryptocurrency regulation isn't a cause that most people are passionate about in either direction, so reeling it back in won't afford politicians any popular support. All it can do is create rich enemies who spend lots of money to attack political threats. There's simply no incentive to crack down on it.
Yes but i see argument as not about accepting that people come to different conclusions but actively trying to seek mutual understanding. There is a wrestling, a struggle, a fight to understanding, to communicating, that so many of us simply just run away from, and i believe it gets reinforced with cultural norms of avoidance and desire for "peace" instead of connection and deeper integration.
Brilliant. I love that snippet and will try to watch the full video later. I'm thinking to frame my work for the corporate environment so i appreciate this. Thank you!
I think I feel you and I hope that if something like that were to happen, you would have people willing to offer and give that help and you'd be willing to ask for and receive that help.