Diary: Trying Not to Worry

[degringolade]

I have been stuck at home for a couple of days now. The current buzzword for "lots of rain" in the Pacific Northwest is "atmospheric river". It has been dumping rain here. I suppose that if I were a real Pacific Northwesterner, I would "damn the torpedoes" and don layers of raingear and savor those rainy moments.

Fuck that!

So I am inside more than is my preference. So lets talk about isolation in the modern world.

At my age, isolation is not the huge deal that it was in my salad days. Truth be told, isolation is preferred about ninety percent of the time. So there is an approximate 2 hour window every day where I do enjoy human interaction. It doesn't have to be much, a phone call or a greeting during a walk or a conversation with a neighbor while getting the mail does me just fine. But serious rain does limit the opportunities for these interactions.

I still kind of wonder about the place of conversations in settings like the one we are reading. I am enough of a geezer to remember sending and receiving physical mail and how important that was in maintaining connection. In the infantry, "mail call" was an important time and letters were cherished (or feared, depending on the correspondent). But they were always an important tie to the outside.

I was (am?) a science fiction junkie. But the sheer number of wannabe science fiction writers. I have been pondering an old Isaac Asimov tale "The Naked Sun". How much of the semi-isolation of communication via the internet is "good" for a person? This simple question then expands into something that was brought to my attention: What are the implications of folks using what is laughably referred to as "artificial intelligence" as a cope for lack of interpersonal communication?

Big can of worms there, I think that it might even require a formal sit down and ponder month.

Comments

Podcast about implications of people using ai for interpersonal contact

[emily07]

…this saturday whilst driving from A to B we heard in a podcast, that with an older version of an ai-chatbot there apparentely where 0.007% chats that looked like shizoprenic ones, what with the numbers of users came down to IIRC about half a million people. There is a tenuous naming of KI-psychosis happening apparentely easier, when the bot goes: you and your ideas are so wonderful and important and other gimmicks. The Podcast seemed to state that the firm providing the ai had first an update to a more factual chatbot, but with the next update went again more into the direction of you are so wonderful, because people demanded it.
OTOH perdition by technology is already feard since writing came about, IIRC there is a dialogue with the Egytion God for writing and another one who deplore people getting weak brained because they wrote things down instead of memorizing.
Best wishes, Emily07