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Deeper Knowning

There is a big difference between knowing and familiarity as this article about companionship AI points out, I have been using ChatGPT to help me with travel itineraries and the results are somewhat useful. I get enough information to re-think my original plan or fine tune what I had in mind. In this case the AI knows information on the subject where I want help but is not familiar with me beyond what I share in the prompt itself. For example, it has not had the opportunity to review all pictures from my past vacations and identify the common themes for those in which I looked the happiest. There could a dimension there that helps with building me a custom trip-plan - one that was aimed to maximize my happiness. 

If your house caught fire and you asked a stranger walking by to help, they might be able to call 911 for you, which would be helpful! But if someone who knew you for 20 years was there, they’d be ready to grab your pet turtle, or remember you needed your insulin, or realize that they could run down the block to flag your cousin who lives down the street. They’d know your children’s names and personalities to help keep them calm. They might even show up six months later, when your house was rebuilt, with a casserole in hand to welcome you home. Such is the power of not just knowledge but familiarity, even a certain intimacy. And that’s what’s unlocked when you have a large language model (LLM) by your side, collecting bits of knowledge about you and your life.

The reason such a companionship AI is so alluring is that most of us do not have this mythical friend who goes back twenty years, knows everything about us and is there magically to help us when we find ourselves in trouble. We seek the comfort of having someone who is intimately familiar with us - the life we once had, when people lived in the same village for generations and the family unit was in a sense the village itself. There would be no lack of such friends who could help in a crisis. That way of life has long vanished but the craving for love and companionship has not - so that's the role we want a companion AI to play. Even if it were to be able to do so, it will come at the cost of even greater social isolation from the real people that form our personal worlds and lives. 

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