Joe Allen

That doesn't even include companies like Character AI, which already kind of allow for much more explicit material, or Replica.

Last I checked, Replica had something like, I think, 3 million users.

And Replica was among the first bot platforms where you had people basically saying, I am in love.

With this bot that was years ago now.

I mean this is becoming something that's very very normal human beings are being atomized After 2020 especially human beings are incredibly atomized hungry for any kind of connection these bots provide not unlike opioids

attached to endorphin receptors to satisfy a natural craving and leave the user in a downward spiral, these bots attached to human desire for connection and even sexual connection doing much the same.

Yeah, it was already there.

I mean, the way these AIs work is even when you have a guardrail in place, you can tease out violent or malevolent, satanic, or sexual content from them.

What they basically did was just open up those guardrails and say, okay, this is now just a normal thing for people to do.

And the crazy thing is, Steve—

to me yes of course conservative americans heartland americans are completely shocked by this or just disgusted by this and naturally so but it's not just them i mean i've spoken to open transhumanists and effective altruists who are basically transhumanist 2.0 who are just as horrified

These are people who want to see technology grow to the point that people are engineering themselves and putting chips in their brains.

And they are saying that the way that these companies are going about what they're doing is ultimately destructive and should be stopped completely.

Should be stopped completely.

Should be stopped completely.

transhumanism but they see the the grooming the perversion the potential for malevolence and saying that part of it's got to be stopped yeah it's uh one of the more i think counter-intuitive things about the arguments around this you have open transhumanists or let's just use that for shorthand for people who are cool with genetic engineering brain chips ai companions robots everywhere

But even with that goal in mind, they see companies, especially like OpenAI, they see companies, even Google and definitely Meta, which are just recklessly rolling these things out.

And in their hopes, let's take someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky, for instance.

He does hope for some kind of immortality by way of technology, or at least he did some years ago.

I assume that that's still a goal.