If you believe that your friends will be be "scanned and uploaded" then maybe you're the one who is out of touch with reality.

His friends and your friends and everybody is already being scanned and uploaded (we're all doing the uploading ourselves though).

It's called profiling and the NSA has been doing it for at least decades.

That is true if they illegally harvest private chats and emails.

Otherwise all they have is primitive swipe gestures of endless TikTok brain rot feeds.

At the very minimum they also have exact location, all their apps, their social circles, all they watch and read at the very minimum -- from adtech.

It will happen, and this reality you're out of touch with will be our reality.

The good news is you don't have to use any form of AI for advice if you don't want to.

It's like saying to someone who hates the internet in 2003 good news you don't have to use it like ever

Not really. AI will be ubiquitous of course, but humans who will offer advice (friends, strangers, therapists) will always be a thing. Nobody is forcing this guy to type his problems into ChatGPT.

Surely AI will only make the loneliness epidemic even worse?

We are already seeing AI-reliant high schoolers unable to reason, who's to say they'll still be able to empathize in the future?

Also, with the persistent lack of psychiatric services, I guarantee at some point in the future AI models will be used to (at least) triage medical mental health issues.

You missed the mark, support-o-tron. You were supposed to have provided support for my views some 20 years in the past, when I still had some good ones.

Fwiw, I personally agree with what you're feeling. An AI should be cold, dispersonal and just follow the logic without handholding. We probably both got this expectation from popular fiction of the 90s.

But LLMs - despite being extremely interesting technologies - aren't actual artificial intelligence like were imagining. They are large language models, which excel at mimicking human language.

It is kinda funny, really. In these fictions the AIs were usually portrayed as wanting to feel and paradoxically feeling inadequate for their missing feelings.

And yet the reality shows how tech moved the other direction: long before it can do true logic and indepth thinking, they have already got the ability to talk heartfelt, with anger etc.

Just like we thought AIs would take care of the tedious jobs for us, freeing humans to do more art... reality shows instead that it's the other way around: the language/visual models excel at making such art but can't really be trusted to consistently do tedious work correctly.

Sounds like you're the one to surround yourself with yes men. But as some big political figures find out later in their careers, the reason they're all in on it is for the power and the money. They couldn't care less if you think it's a great idea to have a bath with a toaster

As I said before: useless.