Natural History of the Present
Rob Brooks – Evolutionary Biologist & Author
If OpenAI were to ask me how to ensure users don’t form social relationships with voice-ChatGPT, I would recommend:
(1) Don’t give it a voice. (2) Don’t make it capable of holding up one end of an apparent conversation. Basically don’t make the product you made.
What happens when it’s not a human bringing on the heartache, but an AI-powered app? That’s a question a great many users of the Replika AI are crying about this month.
I recently encountered a man who goes by the rather unusual name of Davecat, and who describes himself using the even more unusual labels of ‘robosexual’ and ‘iDollator’. He prefers the company of life-size dolls over human partners. He’s done plenty…
It started with humans pushing machines’ buttons. Now they are pushing ours. When the COVID-19 pandemic sent so many people into work-from-home isolation, it funneled much of our social interaction onto the internet. Children learn via Zoom classrooms, colleagues meet on Microsoft…
First published in The Conversation under the title Sex bots, virtual friends, VR lovers: tech is changing the way we interact, and not always for the better Twenty-first century technologies such as robots, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Some of the ways AI is hijacking our emotional lives What happens when our evolved human minds and old-fashioned cultures encounter the technologies of the 21st Century? Specifically, I mean virtual reality, robotics, and — most important — artificial intelligence.…
My second book is to be published by NewSouth Books (Australia and New Zealand) on 1 May 2021. Columbia University Press are publishing it in the remainder of the English-Speaking World.
Here are some snippets from blurbs and from independent reviews, together with information on places to preorder or buy the book.
Evidence that quitting Facebook for four weeks delivers long-term benefits. This article was originally published on OneZero at Medium. My screen time was up last week. Again. Along with much of humanity, staying home to avoid the coronavirus has me…