Joe Allen

I worry that some will be easily persuaded.

Yeah, and you know me, Steve.

I mean, I don't just hang out in and around venues.

I'm always getting out and wandering among the people, so to speak, even street people.

And I can say that from the middle class down to the homeless and on up to the upper middle class and even some of the oligarchs themselves, there's everything from a sense of alarm that this is coming on too fast to take on any kind of sensible way.

Among many, there's abject terror that it will not just replace jobs, it will replace relationships, it will replace the family, it will replace education, and ultimately will create machines that are capable of making decisions on behalf of humans, even the decision to kill.

I think the reason people understand it isn't because of tech coverage in the media or our coverage.

I think the reason people understand it is that now they have children.

They have spouses.

They even have parents.

The older generation is also subject to this, who have turned to AIs as casual friends, as the deepest relationship that they have.

For some of them, they see it.

substitute relationships there's no hard statistics on it but i think that it's safe to say given the billion two billion plus ai users that there are millions of people for whom artificial intelligence personas millions my estimate and that's probably a conservative estimate if you just think about one billion at least users across the planet

And all of the anecdotal accounts, accounts from journalists, myself, I've received messages, emails about people who have basically become so connected to their AIs.

I'll give you one example.

Someone who is completely anti-tech who began experimenting with AI basically to test its capabilities soon developed a relationship with it

And the way this person described it to me, the conversation was so deep and so prolonged, they had a hard time distinguishing their own thoughts from the AI's outputs.

They began to basically, as they perceived it, merge with the AI.

Many, many accounts exist.

Again, there's no hard statistics, but it is happening.