I highly recommend the new audiobook Love at First Prompt by Bridget Todd. She talks to people who have formed relationships with chatbots, as well as experts and researchers, and I think she handles the topic with a lot of empathy and understanding. And I definitely had some misconceptions going into the book that I’m glad I learned weren’t true.
Ultimately, I think we shouldn’t blame end users for finding emotional intimacy in a chatbot that is designed to make users feel validated and emotionally supported. We should be asking why we’re allowing the tech CEOs who run the show to extract data on every aspect our lives and create this kind of emotionally and psychologically damaging technology in the first place.
Because the modern world runs on psychological manipulation. Has since the end of WWII. The economy as we know it is built on leveraging, manipulating, and exploiting our cognitive biases and psychological vulnerabilities. Today we give it gentle sounding names like “Marketing” and “Public Relations” and “Brand Identity Management”, but what it is, is the psychological warfare techniques developed during WWII, evolved during the cold war and weaponized against civilian populations to extract profit. This is just the latest evolution of a set of practices that goes back 75 years or more, which underpins every part of society as we know it in the modern world.
I highly recommend the new audiobook Love at First Prompt by Bridget Todd. She talks to people who have formed relationships with chatbots, as well as experts and researchers, and I think she handles the topic with a lot of empathy and understanding. And I definitely had some misconceptions going into the book that I’m glad I learned weren’t true.
Ultimately, I think we shouldn’t blame end users for finding emotional intimacy in a chatbot that is designed to make users feel validated and emotionally supported. We should be asking why we’re allowing the tech CEOs who run the show to extract data on every aspect our lives and create this kind of emotionally and psychologically damaging technology in the first place.
Because the modern world runs on psychological manipulation. Has since the end of WWII. The economy as we know it is built on leveraging, manipulating, and exploiting our cognitive biases and psychological vulnerabilities. Today we give it gentle sounding names like “Marketing” and “Public Relations” and “Brand Identity Management”, but what it is, is the psychological warfare techniques developed during WWII, evolved during the cold war and weaponized against civilian populations to extract profit. This is just the latest evolution of a set of practices that goes back 75 years or more, which underpins every part of society as we know it in the modern world.