Comment by idle_zealot

Except in those stories the machine is actually a synthetic person with an internal world, a character unto themselves. There's plenty to explore in a setting where humans can make machine people to be their partners, but what we have is in my view incomparably worse. Mass-scale centrally-controlled information processing machines wearing paper-thin human masks and serving the powerful, built to engender intellectual and emotional dependence. It's sad that the charade is sufficient to enchant so many, but that's the nature of the human animal I suppose. I really don't like the idea of banning technology, but at a minimum a tool that has proven its greatest skill is deception should be difficult to access for that purpose. If some lonely geeks want to figure out how to pull weights off HuggingFace and wire up an AI girlfriend then that's probably not great for them, but so be it. Companies plastering all available surfaces with ads and apps for such? Burn that shit down.