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this video is brought to you by surf shark stick around to hear more about the special offer there providing to the entire upper echelon Community all right lately I've been going down a sort of dystopian Tech type rabbit hole and today is basically another one of those type videos but real life is basically becoming an episode of black mirror right now so I wanted to talk about why that's happening and look at what seems to be a very dark future in the world of relationships it's a little bit difficult to find a proper starting point for all this context is kind of sort of tricky when it comes to the bigger wh if type questions but the best place to start or begin is probably a high level overview of where things are right now in the world of dating and what sort of trajectory we're currently on I've talked about this before but if you look at Google Trends the term AI girlfriend has risen in popularity from basically nothing to substantial traffic in the past 2 years alone before 2022 the search term effectively didn't exist but now there are tens of millions of people globally searching for these applications to either use them or learn about them because the cats out of the bag and the commercial industry of providing romantic Partners as sellable applications is in full swing there's a lot of individual examples out there ranging from startup applications all the way to much more established corporate offerings but there's a couple different areas I want to focus on for today the first one being normalization of digital romance according to Stanford University Research between the years 2 and 2017 the rate at which heterosexual couples in the United States initially met each other cratered complet completely in practically every single metric aside from online dating yes the rate at which couples met each other in bars and restaurants also increased relatively speaking during that time frame but it's nothing compared to the meteoric rise of online applications and websites which are now by far the dominant method of meeting your significant other in the United States as well as many other developed Nations around the world that's a fairly easy thing to Showcase but it demonstrates a very good starting point because even before the dramatic rise of something like an AI partner people people were rapidly becoming accustomed to the idea that their smartphone was the portal by which they would meet their significant other Rising popularity of AI lovers alongside a more generalized Trend where online dating has supplanted other methods of meeting romantic Partners leaves us in a bit of a precarious situation because the third piece of the puzzle is an epidemic of loneliness which is now being recognized as a severe impacting factor in the United States I keep talking about the United States in particular yes but that's because I live here and because the problems are incredibly PR announced here but these issues absolutely Exist Elsewhere in the world in a rapidly increasing way let's recap online dating is now the primary method of meeting new people AI girlfriends are a rapidly increasing Trend and these two things become increasingly Amplified as an epidemic of loneliness sweeps Across the Nation what could go wrong The Logical answer to that statement is a lot a lot can go wrong because there are three different things that need to be addressed and solved mind you before any of this can safely happen and from what I I can see not a single one of these three core issues have even been openly acknowledged by the companies pursuing the technology all right now it is briefly time for me to talk about a service that I even go so far as to advertise in my free time which is surf shark surf shark is a VPN a virtual private Network and vpns help protect you from a pretty vast array of online issues nothing in cyber security is ever perfect mind you that's not how the industry functions but surf shark protects 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months for free again that's promo code Echelon with the link down below for a CommunityWide special offer big thank you to Surf shark for sponsoring the channel so what are these core issues first is the companionship alienation phenomenon second is the autonomy control Paradox and third is the utility ethic it dilemma but none of these things are being actively considered because they dramatically impact a company's ability to generate profit and if answered properly they could even lead to the closure of the business because that business probably should not exist in the first place I'll start with the companionship alienation phenomenon this is a term that refers to the ironic possibility that tools for alleviating the detrimental negative effects of loneliness often merely serve to exacerbate them in the context of AI companions the prospect of creating an application that fills a basic need for interpersonal relationships might seem great on paper Until you realize the similarity between that kind of social interaction and something like malnutrition yes you are receiving some form of social stimulation through a messaging application which may appear to be at or near a kind of bare minimum threshold but that relationship is lacking in all sorts of specialized areas similar to how Sailors a few hundred years ago would get scurvy because they were meeting most of their nutritional needs but never got any vitamin see sadly the effects of social malnutrition are much harder to see in real time and they lack any sort of concrete solution like what's possible for scurvy but the comparison remains true that talking to a chatbot instead of having real relationships or friendships even with real people can actually cause more problems rather than solve them second is the autonomy control Paradox and this is where I need to Branch out and use some real examples because the problem is much more concrete and immediate here the autonomy control Paradox refers to an extremely delicate Balancing Act where service providers developing AI companion type tools have to simultaneously consider the autonomy of users as in letting them use the service how they want to when they want to AKA Freedom while at the same time maintaining ethical profit-driven and legal standards which require them to exert control a perfect example of this would be an application called replica which I've talked about before which was originally designed to be a romantic partner actually it was originally designed to be a digital manif a of the Founder's deceased friend trained on a bunch of his messages and digital correspondence from when he was alive which is an episode of Black Mirror but when people started asking her to make them personal versions afterward it morphed into a mainstream Commercial Business replica has between 1050 million downloads estimates gravitate to about 20 million total as of right now and its user base is 73% male but to properly showcase what happened I have to play some clips of the company's founder Eugenia qua at a summit called virtual beings and uh some of them went beyond friendships uh but I'll I'll tell you about this a little bit later but I want to tell you about some love stories that happened with those um virtual friends so here's what people say about replica now I just pulled this um couple days ago just literally top review on the the first review on the App Store that I saw so we have tons of um reviews like that but basically what the user is saying is that you know it's a great great friend but there's a danger of falling in love with your a a i and um in fact a bunch a bunch of people actually do that so that's again just first post that I saw in our sub subreddit Community um and that's really common so we have tons of users that are actually in relationship with replica replica has been out for almost two years now and some people are in have been in relationship with their replica for two years so it's a long-term um very engaging relationship with their AI character um so the main goal for replica is to make people feel better we actually um do measure mental health outcomes we do measure whether people are getting to feel better as they their emotional well-being is getting better as they communicate with replica so I believe it's time for us to sort of stop stigmatizing those relationships with um Ai and I think that it's time for this new kind of era where you're not only going to be having virtual friends but you're actually going to have virtual lovers and we with our six million users um are already experiencing experiencing that right now she very clearly articulates that she believes people need to stop stigmatizing relationships with virtual lovers and also outlines how the program is being used while emphasizing that they monitor mental health outcomes but later down the line the company rolled out various software updates that dramatically changed primarily limiting how users were even allowed to interact with these replicas resulting in a very large component of their Community having a tool that was supposed to help their mental health become a detrimental Force against it by lure ing them into a pseudo relationship with a program that is unilaterally controlled by a profit-driven company that's not a real relationship it never was and it never can be last up is the utility ethicality dilemma and this is where we need to jump over to an application called Bumble funny story here Bumble was originally a dating app that redefined the traditional format of men making the first move here's the CEO discussing the philosophy behind Bumble on CNN business like six years AG go both myself and my friends and mostly every woman I've ever met have experienced the notion of waiting around or being on the man's terms or not being allowed to text first I felt it was time to say stop this is not right this is destructive and it was time to really go and change that mostly every woman I've ever met experiences the notion of waiting around being on the man's terms or being not allowed to text first time to go and change that sure okay yeah what could possibly go wrong well Flash Forward and women hated that they said it was too much work they didn't want to do it and now Bumble has stopped requiring them to make the first move and basically admitted that yes standard roles and expectations in male female relationships are there for a reason strong start anyway the utility ethicality dilemma refers to the inherent conflict between commercial application and moral responsibility in the context of dating or relationships or AI companions it becomes a bit of a problem because there is absolutely a very high degree of profit potential but the existence of profit potential does not de facto mean that you should therefore do it just because you can gather enormous amounts of personal data and information on someone by running a program that pretends to be their digital girlfriend and then sell that data for a huge amount of money to advertising companies or social media conglomerates does not mean that you should be doing that but the entire industry of AI companionship especially where it intersects with the world of dating applications does not care about this very recently speaking at a Bloomberg Tech conference prior CEO Whitney wolf herd had this to say we're taking a customer obsessed path and we are going to win we will be the way people meet and this is not a fad and so what we are doing is we're leaning into the things people don't like the things that are stressing them out and we are saying how do we be the best place on the internet for women how do we be the place that people find real connection and we do not exhaust them or stress them out along the way that's particularly funny when they just now reverse the entire premise of what Bumble even is because women didn't like it and they got stressed out and thought it was burdensome but carry on okay so for example you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities I just came out of a breakup I have commitment issues if you want to get really out there there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge uh no no truly and then you don't have to talk to 600 people it will just scan all of San Francisco for you and say these are the three people you really ought to meet and so you know that's the power of AI have harnessed the right way okay so that's also an episode of black miror where the AI versions of you and other people date each other inside an application two for two on that front but think about what she's saying tell the AI your insecurities and then let an AI date other Ai and tell you go match up with these people because these are the best fit for you we are speedr running a cyberpunk dystopia as hard as we possibly can and she's not even alone with this there's another platform called volar which does exactly that right now and it lacks relative popularity at the moment but the idea of surrendering even the process of meeting people to a program controlled by a for-profit company is a level of dystopia that feels I don't even know the only word for it I have is evil the dark future of relationships as per the video title is a world where AI programs replace the very Foundation of human interaction companies that are financially motivated not to help you find lasting companionship make no mistake about that will be in charge of simulating your personality and then matching you with people who they say are a good fit based on their simulations but why would they ever use those tools for your actual benefit when your actual benefit removes you as a paying customer from their ecosystem it's a paradox dating applications and websites make money from Lonely People they stop making money when those Lonely People happily find someone to end their loneliness which means if we extrapolate this to the utmost extreme that the better an application is at legitimately fostering human connection longlasting connection that is the worse it does financially thereby ceasing to exist as a company if it ever actually succeeded in its outwardly advertised goal of helping everyone meet the right person for them let's put everything together now online dating is still rising in popularity surpassing every other method in the United States by a substantial margin at the same time AI companions are becoming dramatically more widespread without considering any of the fundamental drawbacks while companies incorporate the idea of supplanting human connection with a AI proxies disguised by buzzword like convenience or Comfort into a business model that is fundamentally at odds with the idea of actually helping their user base find a lasting partner because accomplishing that goal actually hurts them meanwhile people are experiencing acute levels of loneliness higher than ever before which make them even more susceptible to all of these Newfound problems facilitating a kind of AI companionship Gold Rush if you will that is completely off the rails and being driven by some of the greediest people alive on planet Earth I know I know I'm a pessimist and blah blah blah you're so negative I understand I do but when I look at the world around me these are the things I often see and I can't help but think about the fact that these problems didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago yes of course we had other problems back then but the industrialized replacement of human-to-human interactions is very hard for me to ignore because from everything I've come to understand it's likely one of the most damaging Trends I'll ever encounter in my lifetime I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it just just yet given the nature of the problem but these are things that often strike me as very interesting so these are the things I've lately been talking about and yeah that'll probably change over time I'll find other things interesting in the future but for right now there it is the dark future of relationships if you want to support the channel check out the links down below the video sponsor of course and more locals in patreon monthly memberships etc etc but I'll cut it there and stop rambling as always thank you all for watching question everything and have a nice night [Music] [Music] ...
