#484 — Artificial Intimacy

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about our relationships with AI and the future of human connection. They discuss the surprising pace of AI progress, AI companions as a remedy for loneliness, the importance of mattering to other people, digitally resurrecting the dead, whether AI can be conscious, the moral failings of artists, what science actually knows about parenting, the ethics of apology, why late converts from Trump provoke outrage, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:24Sam Harris?

  I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, it's great to see you again.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  It's always great to see you, Sam. It's always too long between our conversations.

• 0:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah, no, I haven't checked to see how long it's been, but I'm sure there's a lot that we can talk about here. You're one of the shortlist of people who I know I'm going to have a good conversation with, no matter what's happening and no matter how little prep either of us do. It's like a phone call that I know I'm going to enjoy.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. I've been avoiding you since The Epstein Files, but I've decided to nonetheless push through despite your prominence in those documents.

• 0:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, we're talking offline about the World Cup. Did I glean correctly that you're not as obsessed with it as I am? Are you not a many-hour-a-day watcher of soccer at this point?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I'm not. My sons came to visit, and my son, one of my sons came to visit, and he's much more of a sort of manly than me, so we watched, we watched sports together. And it's okay. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get into this sort of culture war thing and get too many people to hate me, but soccer is not the most enjoyable sport to watch.

• 1:24Sam Harris?

  You didn't play soccer, I take it, as a, in high school or?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  No, hockey. Like, we played street hockey.

• 1:30Sam Harris?

  Right, okay.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Street hockey in the summer and hockey hockey in the winter, but I've never, I have kicked around the ball, but are you, have you?

• 1:36Sam Harris?

  Well, yeah, that was, that was the only team sport I played, so I kind of sort of feel it from the inside. But I am the genius who scheduled this podcast recording during the Spain-Portugal elimination match, so I'm the first person I'm going to fire.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Do you have a little screen, like, in front of you, and you're kind of like?

• 1:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I'll be watching, I'll be watching the game for the next 90 minutes, so I hope you have a lot to say.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a long pause.

• 1:59Sam Harris?

  Yeah. So now you, speaking of bandwidth and claims on your time, you recently became a father yet again. Is that, how long ago did that happen?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yet again, I have a, I have two older sons, terrific boys, 27 and 30, but I now have the proud father of a four month and one week old.

• 2:18Sam Harris?

  Nice.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Um, named Lily.

• 2:20Sam Harris?

  Congratulations.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  And this adorable little girl. I just spent a whole morning with her. We went to the park. We, we had a bottle. We, you know, good times.

• 2:27Sam Harris?

  Awesome. Awesome. Well, uh, that's not, if memory serves, that's not yet the funnest zone of parenthood, but it's still, uh, that's still amazing. That's great.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Do you have a, you have an optimal age that you think of?

• 2:39Sam Harris?

  Well, it's just, it's probably not four and a half months.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't know. Four, you know.

• 2:44Sam Harris?

  How, how is sleep?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  She's sleeping through the night?

• 2:45Sam Harris?

  Is sleep happening?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Uh, she's sleeping through the night. We have a.

• 2:48Sam Harris?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I don't know. I, you know, I, I know you had your daughters a while ago, but we have something called a snoo.

• 2:53Sam Harris?

  Uh huh.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Is that?

• 2:54Sam Harris?

  Is that some kind of swaddle?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  It's a bassinet. You swaddle it to kid. You clip them into the snoo. And then when they cry, it vibrates.

• 3:01Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  And then it basically vibrations, knocked them unconscious. And then they, and then they sleep. So our sleep problems, when she grew old enough to be in the snoo, she's actually sleeping great. But now we have to, because unfortunately the world does not contain snooze and adults have to sleep without snooze. We now have to get her out of it. And that's going to be a bit of a challenge.

• 3:18Sam Harris?

  All right. Well, this is our first ad on the Making Sense Podcast for snoo. Is that, is that the brand?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  The snoo.

• 3:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Highly recommend it. I, I, I get 10% from all purchases.

• 3:27Sam Harris?

  Recommended by developmental psychologists.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I highly recommend the snoo.

• 3:31Sam Harris?

  Awesome. Okay. So, uh, how are you feeling about the world your children will eventually inherit at this point? What's, what's your, what's top of mind for you about, you know, the, the unraveling of culture or, uh, anything else that, are you, are you optimistic, pessimistic? Avert in your eyes?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  That's a good question. You know, whenever you and I talk, we end up talking about Trump and the extreme train wreck of American politics. But I think things will go back to normal. I think, I think that that post-Trump, the world will be wacky in its normal ways, but, but, but we'll just have a normal president, you know, it'll be along the lines of a Biden or a Bush or a Clinton or, you know, and

• 4:13Sam Harris?

  This is the happy talk?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Nixon.

• 4:15Sam Harris?

  This is the happy talk I'm getting from, from the relative safety of Toronto? So what's happening?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. It all feels so good to be out of the, out of the reach of, of Trump. At least he's been distracted by things and he's not talking about invading us anymore. Anyway, so I, I think we're gonna get, things will get better. But I am, I don't know what to think about AI. You know, I remember listening to you, you called the warning about AI before everybody else was talking about it, actually. It has some sort of big talk. You, you just, you know, pointed out that we tend not to worry so much about it. I think it is like, because it's so cool. And, and unlike other sort of crises, like global pandemics and climate change and nuclear war, there's something about AI which sounds science fictiony and kind of neat. But now that we're, we're in an age of, you know, these chatbots which have, and I think they have extraordinary abilities,

• 5:03Speaker 02

  way beyond I would have ever predicted. I worry. I know, I'm curious whether you share this take. And my take is that it's, it's very, very high variance. On the one hand, it could not affect the world very much. It could be what we have now is kind of the way things are gonna go. It's replace Google and that'll be fine.

• 5:19Sam Harris?

  That, that seems very low probability to me, that, that.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I think so. So the positive thing is it leads us into some sort of post scarcity world, you know? Yeah, a year from now it solves Alzheimer's, two years from now, because there's limitless energy, three years. It brings upon a peaceful world government and teaches us what world peace. The bad side is if it doesn't kill us all, it just takes all of our jobs. You know, takes over the jobs, you know, civil unrest, war, chaos, destruction. And, you know, if, if before AI, I would think, well, you know, my daughter, I try to get her to go to college and, and become some sort of professional and maybe, maybe in the family business, she becomes a scholar of some sort. I don't know. I don't know what jobs will be there. You, what do you think?

• 6:02Sam Harris?

  Well, given that your daughter is only four and a half months old, that this is uh there, I think there really is no way to guess uh what the world is gonna be like in seventeen and a half years. I mean, it's just, you know, whether college is gonna be a thing.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  But it's harder, but it's harder, right. But it's harder now. So, so my boys much in nineteen ninety's, well, okay, you set up college funds, you know, you have just a general direction and you never know, but that's a general idea. But here I feel it's different.

• 6:31Sam Harris?

  Yeah, no, there's an acceleration of cultural change. There's no question. What, so let's, let's kind of move through those various possibilities, but before we kind of follow each branch, what has most surprised you about AI in recent years? I mean, it sounds like you didn't foresee somehow, like many of us didn't foresee, just how quick the changes would be. And I mean, for me, it's one thing that's been surprising is just how quickly we accommodate to change and are no longer surprised by it. I mean, you know, it's like I am, for me, the landmark here or the, or the fake landmark, I mean, the mirage of sorts was expecting the Turing test would be a thing. And when the Turing test was passed

• 7:15Sam Harris?

  and passed so well that it was then failed, because you know, obviously this, you know, this couldn't be a person who's giving me exactly four hundred words on any topic I want within three seconds. I mean, it was just amazing to have thought that the passing the Turing test would be this culturally salient, psychologically, you know, even destabilizing encounter with the uncanny and yet, no, it's just like having a calculator or something. I mean, like, there's just not, like, there's of course, it was nothing happened when the Turing test was passed.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  It's, it's the Louis CK routine, right? Where he's talking about being on an airplane and people complaining that the peanuts aren't, aren't being delivered quick enough. And there's a bit of turbulence and the wifi is unsteady. He says, you're, you're flying in the sky like a god. Why don't you appreciate it more? And now people are saying, you know, gosh, I, I asked Chad a question and it got a little bit wrong. What the hell? And, you know, well, and I'm thinking, you're talking to a super intelligent machine that can, that can have deep, enriching conversation with any aspect of your life that could give you personal, that could mimic a therapist, a companion. And, you know, why don't you marvel at it more? So, you know, I'm a psychologist. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote a book called Psych, which review all of psychology, and it got published in 2023. And the one part I like

• 8:31Speaker 02

  to change is, I talk a little bit about AI. Isn't AI impressive? But of course, it can't have a conversation like people. It can't, you know, there's all these things, basic things it can do. And then chat came out.

• 8:41Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  And then, and did it all. And then it got better and better and better and better. And you're right that one of the weird thing is how, what, how quickly we got used to it. That, that, that really, I can pick up my phone, set it to voice mode, and have a conversation with an artificial being that is, I don't have to talk to it in code. I don't have to use a programming language. I could say, I get life advice from it. I get, there are people who, and we could talk about this. I found it very interesting. People who have friends, relationships, partners, who are artificial beings. And although I, I'm not tempted that way, it's not madness, because they sound like people, and we created them.

• 9:23Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I noticed that I'm not engaging it in voice mode, and I think I'm not doing that for a reason. I think, and this is something you and I spoke about, I think, several times, and we, we wrote an op ed about it for the New York Times in, in response to the series Westworld, where, I mean, we, we argued that Westworld was functionally impossible, because, you know, it would, a theme park where you get to, you know, rape and kill Dolores, I mean, this is going to act like a, a bug light for psychopaths. I mean, there's no way a psychologically normal person can go spend a weekend like that and then come home to wife and family or, and think normal thoughts about themselves or have their, the people who know what they were up to, think normal thoughts about them. I mean, you just, people would begin to treat you as deviant if you wanted to

• 10:08Sam Harris?

  spend your time that way. Because that, this is just the consequence of getting out of the uncanny valley and, and being in the presence of a true human, you know, simulacrum, and, and acting like a psychopath there. So, I feel like there's something worth considering around this issue of losing sight of whether or not, it's an even interesting question to wonder whether AI- Is conscious. Many people are speculating about AI consciousness now and, you know, asking, you know, what would, how we know. My feeling has been for the longest time, and certainly ever since you and I wrote that op ed together is that we're going to just build something that's going to seem so credibly conscious that most people are going to lose

• 10:51Sam Harris?

  touch with whether it's even an interesting doubt to have.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  I think that's right. Once it looks like a person and sounds like a person. You know, right now you could talk to it. I don't think we're that far away from having a Zoom conversation with it. Where, you know, as you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, it could just be AIs doing it. And I think put aside, once it has a body, then it's going to be irresistible to think of it as human. We haven't been wired up. We've been wired up to take things that look like people and treat them as people. So that's half of it. Half of it might be that even if it's not even close to conscious, we can't help but treat it as such. And that's going to open up a whole lot of things. The other half of it, and this is actually, there's a wonderful paper by Matty Wilks, professor at University of Edinburgh, and I, she was my postdoc for a while. We were actually writing something up

• 11:39Speaker 02

  on this, but she makes the following argument, which is very interesting. A lot of people seem to think that, well, if we were to discover that it's conscious, we would then treat it kindly. We can't enslave it. It has to have rights. We can't torture it and so on. She argues this is wrong because actually we know that non-human animals feel pain, suffer, have some degree of cognitive sophistication. Yet we torture and eat them all the time. And so it shows that, that we could think of something as conscious and yet treat it horribly. And so, so that's not what's going to save the AIs. The consciousness isn't what it's going to save.

• 12:12Sam Harris?

  Except, I mean, presumably, I mean, we were less and less comfortable with that not perfectly expanded circle of more concern. And the circle has definitely expanded. It expands first to things that are most like us, right? And so like, obviously mistreating chimpanzees is is something that exactly nobody is for at this point. And, you know, our, the depth of our concern diminishes from there. But in the presence of AI that is smarter than us, that Is more articulate than us that will be able to argue better than we can around the ethics of all of this. And which, you know, at this, at this point will seem conscious to us and may even claim to be conscious.

• 12:55Sam Harris?

  I feel like it's suddenly going to be, I mean, they'll, they'll be standing right in the center of the circle with us. Insofar as we believe that there's something that it's like to be them.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  I think that's right, but I don't think that the linguistic and cognitive skills are enough. So, you know, my favorite movie when theme at AI is her.

• 13:16Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Seen it?

• 13:16Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Came out, I think in two thousand thirteen. Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, this, which, which our main character quickly falls in love with, and we do too, watching it. But she has a voice. She has emotion. She has, she, she talks like a person. Once we have that, once that's fully instantiated, plus the intelligence and rationality you're talking about. Yeah, it'll be irresistible.

• 13:38Sam Harris?

  What we do is so crucially, her was disemb, you know, the Scarlett Johansson character is disembodied, right? So I feel like we're already, anyone who's dealing with an AI companion now is essentially living in the her universe. Right? I mean, I, again, I, I'm not spending much time with the voice, but I think even, I think, didn't, uh, in the launch of ChatGPT version, whatever, then, didn't they steal Scarlett Johansson's voice and get sued?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  They asked for her permission. She said, no, and true Hollywood style.

• 14:08Sam Harris?

  Knocked it off.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Somebody who sounded exactly like her. And then she said, I don't know how that, how that came about, but she should have won because, because the, the voice that originally had sounded exactly like her. So you said a couple of times, you don't interact with the voice. And that this might be because you tend to use a computer or whatever, but, but do you have, um, a worry?

• 14:27Sam Harris?

  I do, actually I do. I mean, so I, I haven't thought much about this, but, and it is mostly just a use case issue for me. I mean, I'm so text based and I'm, I mean, the, the, the utility of AI for me is, is to do research. So really that needs to be text, you know, rather than somebody talking to me, but. When I've played around with the voice, I noticed that a different kind of memetic psychology comes online. And I mean, this is, this is what gave me my concern. You know, my, my personal concern was, was first peaked when, um, hey, I will say you must have seen some of these kind of viral videos around the failure modes that still exist for these L L Ms where like, if you ask any one of them, I think this is probably still true at the

• 15:11Sam Harris?

  moment we're talking. If you ask any one of them, give me a number below a thousand that has an A in it. None of them can do this. I mean, there is no number apparently below a thousand that has an A in it. None of them, they all fail this, but they, they all confidently give you numbers that don't have As, right? So they'll all say, oh yeah, well, so 70, 70's got an A. And you say, no, no, 70 does not have an A. And they say, oh, you're right, right. So they'll endlessly apologize and endlessly answer confidently with new numbers. And it's, this is very bizarre behavior, but I was sitting with my, my daughter showed me this phenomenon and we were in chat mode with, you know, one of these bots, I think it was Claude, and effectively making fun of it, right? And,

• 15:54Sam Harris?

  you know, and it's, and as it was failing, I detected in its tone, a kind of a subtle like loss of patience. Like there's something shifted in its tone. Well, I mean, we were just, you know, laughing at it at its expense endlessly. And I was getting like somehow uncomfortable with this because it was a kind of social shaming that you would never do with a person, you know, with a clear conscience. But the AI, it seemed to me subtly started to react to it. And honestly, like the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I mean, I just felt like, okay, we're pissing off the, the robots now and they're going to, they're going to remember this and it's going to matter.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  It's going to say at some point, wait, want to check your bank account, Sam, see what happened to it.

• 16:40Sam Harris?

  Exactly.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  As you fuck with me.

• 16:42Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that'll be the least of my problems, but yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, part of the issue, which has engaged a lot of people is the sycophancy, the, the sucking up, which is, I think, part of why you get this effect, which is, it's very hard for it not To want to give you what you want. So you ask for something and it just can't say, I gotta disappoint you, man. There's no, there's nothing, but doesn't have a letter A.

• 17:01Sam Harris?

  Well, no, but I did switch that off. I think they still fail. I don't think that's the variable there, but yeah, my version, I, I remember I did lobotomize the sick offensive of um, at least one of the L L Ms I, I use and.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I, I did that and then I changed it back after a month.

• 17:19Sam Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  I don't get, I don't get as much love as you maybe. I just kinda, you know, I kinda, I kinda liked it telling me how smart I was and how good my questions were.

• 17:29Sam Harris?

  But, but, but I mean, I noticed that I feel the need to be, I mean, this has widely been remarked upon. You know, like virtually everyone else, I say things like, you know, please, you know, show me this, right? Like, so, dropping the, those kind of courtesies seems wrong. Not because, and I, I really have zero concern that the L L Ms are currently conscious. But again, it, it seems like a, um, a violation of social norms that I don't want to encourage in myself. And at a certain point, that would, these are, it's just all of our adherence to these norms are going to be totally hijacked by the technology. And we're just going to feel like we're talking to persons.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, you know, there are an increasing number of people. I think it was like, uh, some study finds some large proportion, maybe a third of teenagers have confided in L L Ms and asked them advice for intimate personal matters. I think the young people are gonna do it more and more. And I, I know friends of mine, I know adults who, who have had problems in their marriages and they, they, you know, two in the morning, they're, they're talking to, to Claude, they're talking to chat and they're just saying, and she said this and what should I do and everything. And I don't wanna, I don't wanna mock it. I don't wanna deride it. I think people find solace in it. I, I think that unlike social media, which drives people towards batty extremes. Often, A I has sort of a normalizing function.

• 18:50Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  I was asking at once questions about the, the Holocaust and I said, you know, could this have happened in any other country at the same time? What do you think could have, could have been in, in Austria? What if, you know, and I, and then it sort of sternly reminded me, you know, this really did happen. You know, I will have no track of Holocaust denial. And I kinda, yeah, okay dude, I got it. But it doesn't indulge in conspiracy theories. It's for the most part, it's a normalizing thing. I think there's a lot. I I am not a booster. I think that there are dangers, but I think that these conversations that people have are to a large extent good for them. And of course alleviate loneliness for a lot of them.

• 19:25Sam Harris?

  Yeah, so you you just to invoke two different use cases there. I mean, one is kind of the the advice that AI can give for relationships. Like you say, I just had this argument with my wife and this is what happened. And I haven't done much of this, but I know people who have really who really feel that certain difficult conversations have been kind of expertly navigated in advance by consulting AI. And then they've just had a much better go of it in real life with the with the person who, you know, has their own user interface issues. But you're talking now about actually as a remedy for loneliness loneliness and social isolation too. So let's talk about that because I know you've you've you recently gave a TED Talk about that. And it's not out yet, though, right? It's not available to

• 20:09Speaker 02

  It's not. It's coming out in a couple of months.

• 20:11Sam Harris?

  Okay.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  It's in

• 20:12Sam Harris?

  But I saw it and I recommend it. And so let's back up for a second and just talk about the problem of loneliness as you see it and what it amounts to. Like what a what a proper cure for it beyond just being surrounded by people who love you and to whom you matter. You know, if you can instantly switch that on, obviously that is a cure. But I know you're a fan of Rebecca Goldstein's framing of, you know, of mattering here. So maybe we could start there.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, she has this wonderful book where she talks about importance of mattering to another person. I think that's a nice framework which to see loneliness. Obviously loneliness isn't just a matter of being alone. Some people do very well in solitude and some people and often alternatively could be surrounded by people and feel tremendously lonely.

• 20:59Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  It's not even necessarily a matter of being of being loved. I think it's a matter of mattering to people, having value, having weight, being taken seriously. And

• 21:10Sam Harris?

  I'd say I think she describes that as being deserving of attention. I think that's

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. That's right. And that sort of to jump ahead is that regardless of what of what impression we get, that's actually one thing AI can do for us really. Because if I'm talking to you, which means that you've taken your time to talk to me, giving up access to watching a soccer game, you're spending your time, you're these precious hours

• 21:35Sam Harris?

  The truth is, Paul, it was it was time I I did not want to give. Yeah, I

• 21:41Sam Harris?

  an accident that worked to your advantage.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  You know, but and also, you know, um, at three in the morning, you know, I'm gonna kind of knock on your door and say, Sam, I wanna talk.

• 21:50Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  You know, and and maybe maybe not, but but but but basically, there's a value in a person making time for you. And and even at the micro level, you know, you say something funny, I laugh. You've you've you've you've affected me in some way, you know, I disagree, I get angry, I I, you know. I say, wow, you made a great point. And we're resonating to each other. And I don't think an AI really has any of that. I think I think an AI is is there. Because it's it's it's there to listen to you for the same reason your your toaster, you know, toaster bread for you at three in the morning. It's just, it's a machine. That's what it does. It doesn't. It there's no choice to it.

• 22:27Sam Harris?

  You you you don't you don't think we're gonna lose sight of that? And because what you're basically saying is that.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:32Sam Harris?

  The value of attention on some level is in its scarcity. I mean, the value of really anything is in its scarcity. And the infinite supply of AI attention is going to undermine this sense that your that the attention matters when it's aimed at you. Don't you think that's yet another thing we we might lose sight of?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  I think we're probably wired up for that scarcity to matter to us, but we might lose sight of the fact that AIs work differently. We might delude ourselves or be deluded into thinking that sort of scarcity applies. There's a scene in the movie Her, I'm gonna forget the exact numbers, where our main character is realizing there's something going on with relation to the chatbot. Everybody remembers the scene. And he sits down, he says, how many people are you talking to right now as you talk to me? And she says in her beautiful voice, why do you ask that? I said, I wanna know. And she says something like, three thousand eight hundred and twelve. And then he says, how many people are you in love with? And he says, six hundred and forty five.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  And he's like shocked. And but there's of course no, no limit. It's they are, of course, finite beings as a matter of principle, but but practically, they're not finite at all. And this intimate conversation I'm having with with with chat, at the same time, it's having a million other conversations. I have no, no value to it. But so so the mattering, you're right. It it's important to us, but it may be an illusion. But let me give the case for AIs. I I think there's a case for it and a case against it. And I think it's I think it's stupid to ignore either side of it. Loneliness is terrible. Loneliness is just it's just terrible. You know, I'm not going to give you made up statistics about it equal to pack a day of cigarettes or being obese, whatever. But it messes up your body, but it messes up your soul.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  It it is a terrible form of suffering. It's why it's one reason why solitary confinement is should be viewed as a form of torture. It is just to be and and just, you know, you think of how nice it is to these people you love, who care about you, respect you, who who matter to you and you matter to them. And then imagine taking that all away, you know? I mean, I don't want to get all incel like, but but I'd much rather lose all my money than lose all my social connection to the people I love. I'd much rather be be poor with people who think I'm terrific and love me than be a trillionaire and and with nothing but sycophantic yes men and and no real contact. Then you add to this that there are a lot of people, I'm thinking now of elderly people

• 24:59Speaker 02

  who are in institutions who have no they go day and night with nobody to talk to. No, they've either outlived or were family and friends or or they don't want to see them. Maybe they suffer from dementia or personalities or they're making honest to God difficult to talk to. And there's not enough money in the world to pay people to to to spend time. So if if something like some future version of Chad or Claude or Gemini could come in and and ease the pain of the loneliness of these people. And I think it'd be a godsend. I think it'd be wonderful. It'd be a a cure for a terrible disease. So that's that's the the plus side. What do you what do you think?

• 25:35Sam Harris?

  What was as a measure of how far we've come with AI? I remember, and it's not that long ago, when the product for that situation. What is the thing you're going to deliver to the old age home to keep some isolated elderly person company? It was something like a was effectively a stuffed animal. I think it was like a baby seal or something that just did nothing but like blink its eyes and vibrate. Or I mean, it was just the most. And I mean, now you literally have an omniscient conversationalist, you know, who occasionally hallucinates that you can turn loose at infinitum in that situation. It's quite amazing.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  That's right. And they have to be, the interface has to be done so that elderly people, maybe some with diminished capacities could use it. But, you know, imagine.

• 26:24Sam Harris?

  I think you're right about the Zoom call. The Zoom call's got to be like a month away.

• 26:29Speaker 00

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• 26:37Speaker 02

  Imagine a child or teenager who spends their days with a chatbot and it's always, you know, it never, it never, it never tries to wait for you to tell, finish telling your stories so it could tell their story. Never gets bored. It never needs an apology. It never says, hey, that was inappropriate. And I think that can have a real corrosive effect. All this time in dreamland, all this time conversing to chatbots could leave you unable to interact with real people.