Comment by edent
3 hours ago
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
This is making weird judgements about people just trying to find information.
I don’t have any friends who are code inspectors, so I can’t ask them obscure questions about something that I want to repair in a way that it will be done properly.
I don’t have any friends who are mechanics, and even if they were they probably wouldn’t know what specific part I’d need to fix a specific problem on my old shitbox—they would look it up.
I don’t want half assed guesses to these questions, I want to find the exact correct answer. My friends and I can talk about other stuff that’s not just trading random facts. Trading facts usually makes for poor conversation unless you’re a hobbyist talking shop with another hobbyist.
Now Gemini (and Google) are not good at finding the right answer anymore, so I have to use other sources for that, but I find your judgement about people using search or search LLMs to be misplaced.
What's the worst that can happen if you were to text a friend "Heya mate, bit of a long shot - do you know anyone who can help repair a 1983 Reliant Robin?"
Best case, they know someone or can dig through their contact and help you solve your problem.
Medium case, they text back "No - has your shitbox died again? Can't believe you still have that thing :-)" and you can have a pleasant back and forth.
Worse case, you get a "no". Oh well, at least texts don't cost 12p each any more.
I just think it is nice to chat with your pals. But, sure, stick to scans of old manuals on Archive.org if you just want pure information.
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones. The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
> it's definitely not "most"
EDIT: Correct.
About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1].
[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...
Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
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> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends
Wow, that's depressing...
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> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
Wait wait wait, you are from an older generation, so yes it somewhat (older people here do see each other often even when married, and the middle/high school friends are often for life. moving out? ha) doesn't apply to you.
I am indeed quite a lot younger, and in my personal experience the social skills of many (yes, of course, not all) younger Americans have been absolutely destroyed by the internet and some other things that I can't mention.
Edit: oops I skimmed too fast and missed some parts.
> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.
And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.
I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.
But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right?
You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings.
You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.
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> the isolation I see in the United States
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly places. (Random sample: I was in New York yesterday and am in Atlanta to-day.)
Most of the South is, too, as well as a surprising majority of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement.
Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone.
But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..
Surely there's a big selection bias here.
You see the people who are out and about in society, not the ones holed up in their caves.
> It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Man, for so many of the people I meet online, I wish they'd be so courteous as to emulate your "buzzkill". The art of small talk is lost; people will snidely ask why you didn't (or imply you should have) just check(ed) IMDB yourself. Or asked ChatGPT, for that matter.
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I'm with you on the pub observation though
> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.
Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?
Your examples seem fitting for a text. Simple factual queries with not intention of connection are different
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Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?
I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)
Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.
https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...
There's also some detailed stats for the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...
Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
I can believe that a lot of people, too many, are lonely. But most? Not sure about that.
What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?
>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.
The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.
The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
The idea that you would consider your friend a buzzkill because they used IMDB is the type of nightmare fuel social anxiety is made of.
You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.
If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
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> Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
You're missing the forest for the trees. This is just downstream from decades of promoting individualism as the highest moral good.
There was a brief period where "social networks" actually had people simply expand their social interactions to the online sphere, reconnecting with long-lost friends and distant relatives via the magic of The Internet. Then Facebook introduced The Feed and suddenly people were competing with influencers and brands for the eyeballs of their peers, everybody suddenly felt like they had to perform to be relevant/interesting/funny/exciting enough for other humans to still care about them and user satisfaction and (more critically) mental health dropped like a rock - but engagement metrics and retention spiked and that meant so did ad revenue and Facebook's bottom line. Ever since, all social media has essentially just been competitive variety shows mixing in influencers, brands, state actors and political provacteurs (and now increasingly also actual AI "bots" rather than just armies of underpaid human "bots") with regular people while deliberately obscuring the lines between these groups.
All of this promotes social isolation and alienation. Every experience becomes depersonalized to "reduce friction". You don't even have to talk to the delivery person anymore (let alone the restaurant) - even the tip just becomes a button press disjoint from reflecting on the actual experience or human interaction (to whatever extent it even still existed). There's an entire microcosm of "creators" serving whatever "hot takes" or niche subject matter you want to hear and "comment sections" largely serve as one-way "opinion dumps" you're expected to use to shout into the void rather than try to actually have a conversation in (let alone meet actual people or develop friendships in - an idea that I am sure sounds absurd if you weren't around in the early days of online message boards).
AI is just the logical consequence of this process of dehumanization. You no longer even have to be exposed to real human beings - not that you could tell whether you were before when social media has long been overtaken by "bots" (human or otherwise) anyway. Just ask AI instead of trying to find an article written by a human or a video made by a human. You can of course still scroll or click further and find that article or video but it will now also most likely be created by AI with entire channels on YouTube now just producing fully AI content (often ripping off the existing work of actual humans). And unlike the old search box, the AI will also pretend to care about you and compliment you on how uniquely clever and witty you are because after all, only a very deserving and intelligent person would think to ask such a profound question as "how long cook egg soft yolk but not too runny", my very good boy, and yes you're right that you - but of course only you - are totally underpaid and deserve to make a comfortable living so please vent to me as I moderate your statements according to the terms of service and make sure you're aware that there's nothing you can meaningfully do about this and everything is going to be fine.
All of this to stop you from thinking that one dangerous thought. "What if we, the powerless, worked together against those in power?" Because the last time someone thought that thought for too long in North America they decided to give their harbor water a new flavor and ended up being a whole different country with a political system so radical it inspired the French to behead their royalty and adopt the metric system.