Yuval Noah Harari

If you want, for instance, to influence human beings, to change their political identities, to make them buy a certain product,

Intimacy is the most powerful thing in the world.

Attention can get you to read an article, but the article might not change your mind.

But if your best friend over many, many weeks or months drops little hints and kind of gradually and slowly changes your view,

about some political figure, about some company, about some major issue in the world, this is the one thing that might really make you change your mind.

And AI is now poised to grab that power.

There are more and more people, still a relatively small minority, but it's growing, who have AI friends, even boyfriends and girlfriends.

There are already especially young people who say, my best friend in the world is an AI.

And like in the attention economy, so also in the intimacy economy, it's a race, it's a competition.

You have all these different AIs from different companies competing to see who would be better at making people attached to them.

And it's the same principle, hack the operating system of humans.

hack what are the emotional mechanisms that make them attached.

So, you know, psychopancy is one way to do it.

You constantly praise them and so forth.

There have been some very interesting papers and blogs, for instance, by Mustafa Suleiman,

who is the head of AI at Microsoft, about SCAI, S-C-A-I, seemingly conscious AI.

AIs, which are experts in pretending to be conscious entities that have feelings for you.

And it's relatively easy for them to do it because maybe the most important way for people to kind of build relationships is language.

So, you know, when an AI tells you, I love you, it's not like a science fiction movie from the 1960s when it does so in a very cold, mechanic way and doesn't really understand what love is.

No, it does so in the most seductive voice possible.