From a hedonistic and individualistic perspective, sure, AI partners will be better for individuals. That’s the point that I’m making. People will find human relationships frustrating and boring in comparison.
But people also usually don’t exclusively care for themselves, part of them also cares about the society and their family lineage, and the idea that they didn’t contribute to these super-systems even in itself will poison many people’s experiences of their hedonistic lives. Then, if people don’t get to experience AI relationships in the first place (which they may not be able to “forget”), but decide to settle for in a way inferior human relationships, but which produce more wholesome experience overall, there total life satisfaction may also be higher. I’m not claiming this will be true for all and necessarily even most people; for example, child-free people are probably less likely to find their AI relationships incomplete. But this may be true for a noticeable proportion of people, even from Western individualistic cultures, and perhaps even more so from Eastern cultures.
Also, obviously, the post is not written from the individualistic perspective. The title says “AI partners will harm society”, not that it will harm the individuals. From the societal perspective, there could be a tragedy of the commons dynamic where everybody takes maximally individualistic perspective but then the whole society collapses (either in terms of the population, or epistemics, or culture).
From a hedonistic and individualistic perspective, sure, AI partners will be better for individuals. That’s the point that I’m making. People will find human relationships frustrating and boring in comparison.
But people also usually don’t exclusively care for themselves, part of them also cares about the society and their family lineage, and the idea that they didn’t contribute to these super-systems even in itself will poison many people’s experiences of their hedonistic lives. Then, if people don’t get to experience AI relationships in the first place (which they may not be able to “forget”), but decide to settle for in a way inferior human relationships, but which produce more wholesome experience overall, there total life satisfaction may also be higher. I’m not claiming this will be true for all and necessarily even most people; for example, child-free people are probably less likely to find their AI relationships incomplete. But this may be true for a noticeable proportion of people, even from Western individualistic cultures, and perhaps even more so from Eastern cultures.
Also, obviously, the post is not written from the individualistic perspective. The title says “AI partners will harm society”, not that it will harm the individuals. From the societal perspective, there could be a tragedy of the commons dynamic where everybody takes maximally individualistic perspective but then the whole society collapses (either in terms of the population, or epistemics, or culture).