Making Sense - Sam Harris - #484 — Artificial Intimacy

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00:00:22.960 i'm here with paul bloom paul it's great to see you again it's always great to see you sam it's

00:00:28.760 always too long between our conversations yeah no i haven't checked to see how long it's been but

00:00:33.160 i'm sure there's a lot that we can talk about here you're one of the short list of people who

00:00:37.620 i know i'm going to have a good conversation with no matter what's happening and no matter

00:00:41.480 how little prep either of us do it's like a phone call that i know i'm going to enjoy

00:00:45.520 i appreciate it i've been avoiding you since the epstein files but i decided to

00:00:49.540 nonetheless push push through despite your prominence in those documents yeah um well

00:00:55.840 We were talking offline about the World Cup.

00:00:58.700 Did I glean correctly that you're not as obsessed with it as I am?

00:01:03.200 Are you not a many-hour-a-day watcher of soccer at this point?

00:01:07.260 I'm not.

00:01:07.680 My sons came to visit, and one of my sons came to visit,

00:01:11.180 and he's much more of a sort of manly than me,

00:01:13.140 so we watched sports together.

00:01:15.240 And it's okay.

00:01:17.260 I don't want to get into this sort of culture war thing

00:01:20.640 and get too many people to hate me,

00:01:21.840 but soccer is not the most enjoyable sport to watch.

00:01:24.800 You didn't play soccer, I take it, in high school or?

00:01:28.160 No, hockey.

00:01:29.120 Like we played street hockey.

00:01:30.420 Right, okay.

00:01:30.820 Street hockey in the summer and hockey hockey in the winter.

00:01:33.140 But I've never, I mean, I've kicked around the ball.

00:01:35.360 But are you, have you played?

00:01:36.700 Well, yeah, that was the only team sport I played.

00:01:39.660 So I kind of sort of feel it from the inside.

00:01:42.440 But I am the genius who scheduled this podcast recording

00:01:45.560 during the Spain-Portugal elimination match.

00:01:47.980 So I'm the first person I'm going to fire.

00:01:50.520 Do you have a little screen like in front of you?

00:01:52.260 And you're kind of like, if I see your eyes.

00:01:53.360 I'll be watching the game for the next 90 minutes, so I hope you have a lot to say.

00:01:57.740 Yeah, it's a long pause.

00:01:59.640 Yeah.

00:02:00.320 So now you, speaking of bandwidth and claims on your time, you recently became a father yet again.

00:02:06.660 How long ago did that happen?

00:02:08.900 Yet again.

00:02:09.680 I have two older sons, terrific boys, 27 and 30, but I now am the proud father of a four-month-and-one-week-old.

00:02:18.900 Nice.

00:02:20.060 Congratulations.

00:02:20.460 And this adorable little girl.

00:02:22.060 I just spent a whole morning with her. We went to the park. We, uh, we had a bottle. We, you know,

00:02:26.700 good times. Awesome. Awesome. Well, uh, that's not, if memory serves, that's not yet the funnest

00:02:32.000 zone of parenthood, but it's still, uh, that's still amazing. That's great. Do you have a,

00:02:36.440 you have an optimal age that you think of? Well, it's just, it's probably not four and a half

00:02:41.520 months. No, no, I don't know. Four and a half months. How is sleep? Is sleep happening? She's

00:02:46.720 sleeping through the night. We have, um, I don't know. I, you know, I know you had your daughter,

00:02:50.560 so a while ago but we have something called a snoo is that is that some kind of swaddle

00:02:55.520 monstrosity it's a bassinet you swaddle up the kid you clip them into the snoo and then when

00:02:59.940 they cry it vibrates right and then it basically vibrations knock them unconscious and then they

00:03:04.760 and then they sleep so our sleep problems when she grew old enough to be in the snooze she's

00:03:09.460 actually sleeping great but now we have to because unfortunately the world does not contain snooze 0.64

00:03:13.860 and adults have to sleep without snooze we now have to get her out of it and that's going to be

00:03:17.680 a bit of a challenge. All right. Well, this is our first ad on the Making Sense podcast for 0.83

00:03:22.460 Snoo. Is that the brand? The Snoo. Highly recommend it. I get 10% from all purchases.

00:03:27.500 Recommended by a developmental psychologist. I highly recommend the Snoo.

00:03:31.260 Awesome. Okay. So how are you feeling about the world your children will eventually inherit

00:03:37.740 at this point? What's top of mind for you about the unraveling of culture or anything else?

00:03:44.680 Are you optimistic, pessimistic, avert in your eyes?

00:03:48.660 That's a good question.

00:03:49.900 You know, whenever you and I talk, we end up talking about Trump and the extreme train wreck of American politics.

00:03:56.720 But I think things will go back to normal.

00:04:00.460 I think that post-Trump, the world will be wacky in its normal ways, but we'll just have a normal president.

00:04:07.300 You know, it'll be along the lines of a Biden or a Bush or a Clinton or, you know.

00:04:12.400 This is the happy talk.

00:04:14.140 a Nixon. This is the happy talk I'm getting from the relative safety of Toronto. Is that what's

00:04:18.800 happening? Yeah, right. It all feels so good to be out of the reach of Trump. At least I've been

00:04:23.940 distracted by things and he's not talking about invading us anymore. Anyway, so I think we're

00:04:28.880 going to get, things will get better, but I am, I don't know what to think about AI.

00:04:33.760 You know, I remember listening to you, you called the warning about AI before everyone else was

00:04:39.480 talking about it, actually. You had some sort of big talk. You just, you know, pointed out that

00:04:43.700 We tend not to worry so much about it.

00:04:45.700 I think you get this line because it's so cool.

00:04:47.840 And unlike other sort of crises like global pandemics and climate change and nuclear war,

00:04:53.540 there's something about AI, which sounds science fiction-y and kind of neat.

00:04:56.480 But now that we're in an age of, you know, these chatbots, which have, and I think they

00:05:02.400 have extraordinary abilities, way beyond what I would have ever predicted.

00:05:05.640 I worry.

00:05:07.060 I know I'm curious whether you share this take.

00:05:09.060 And my take is that it's very, very high variance.

00:05:12.040 On the one hand, it could not affect the world very much.

00:05:14.520 It could be what we have now is kind of the way things are going to go.

00:05:17.300 It's going to replace Google, and that'll be fine.

00:05:19.920 That seems very low probability to me.

00:05:22.200 I think so.

00:05:23.380 So the positive thing is it leads us into some sort of post-scarcity world.

00:05:27.200 You know, a year from now, it solves Alzheimer's.

00:05:30.640 Two years from now, it gives us limitless energy.

00:05:32.840 Three years, it brings upon a peaceful world government and teaches us about world peace.

00:05:36.720 The bad side is if it doesn't kill us all, it just takes all of our jobs.

00:05:40.640 you know takes over to jobs you know civil unrest war chaos destruction and you know if before ai

00:05:50.120 i would think well you know my daughter i try to get her to go to college and and become some sort

00:05:54.760 of professional and maybe maybe in the family business she becomes a scholar of some sort

00:05:58.880 i don't know i don't know what jobs will be there you what do you think well given that your daughter

00:06:04.440 is only four and a half months old that this is uh there i think there really is no way to

00:06:09.920 guess uh what the the world is going to be like in in 17 and a half years i mean it's just

00:06:16.520 you know whether college is going to be a thing but it's harder but it's harder right but it's

00:06:20.280 harder now so so my boys watching the 1990s well okay you set up college funds you know you have

00:06:25.520 just a general direction and you never know but that's the general idea but here i feel

00:06:30.500 it's different. Yeah. No, there's an acceleration of cultural change. There's no question.

00:06:35.940 So let's kind of move through those various possibilities. But before we kind of follow

00:06:41.240 each branch, what has most surprised you about AI in recent years? I mean, it sounds like you

00:06:48.000 didn't foresee somehow, like many of us didn't foresee just how quick the changes would be.

00:06:53.520 And I mean, for me, it's one thing that's been surprising is just how quickly we accommodate to change and are no longer surprised by it.

00:07:03.140 I mean, you know, it's like I am for me that the landmark here or the or the fake landmark, I mean, the mirage of sorts was expecting the Turing test would be a thing.

00:07:13.220 And when the Turing test was passed, uh, and passed so well that it was then failed because, you know, obviously this, you know, this couldn't be a person who's given me exactly 400 words on any topic I want within three seconds.

00:07:24.440 I mean, it was just amazing to have thought that the passing the Turing test would be this culturally salient, psychologically, you know, even destabilizing, uh, encounter with the uncanny.

00:07:37.520 And yet, no, it's just like having a calculator or something.

00:07:40.840 I mean, it's like, there's just no, like there's, of course, it was nothing happened when the

00:07:44.800 during test was passed.

00:07:45.960 It's, it's the Louis CK routine, right?

00:07:48.020 Where he's talking about being on an airplane and people complaining that the peanuts aren't,

00:07:51.780 aren't being delivered quick enough.

00:07:53.120 And there's a bit of turbulence and the wifi is unsteady.

00:07:55.280 He says, you're, you're flying in the sky like a God.

00:07:58.420 Why don't you appreciate it more?

00:08:00.340 And now people are saying, you know, gosh, I, I asked Chad a question and it got a little

00:08:04.660 bit wrong.

00:08:05.520 What the hell?

00:08:05.980 and you know well and i'm thinking you're talking to a super intelligent machine that can that can

00:08:12.200 have deep enriching conversation with any aspect of your life that could give you personally that

00:08:17.740 could mimic a therapist a companion and you know why do you marvel at it more so you know i'm a

00:08:24.260 psychologist i wrote i wrote i wrote a book called psych which review all of psychology and it got

00:08:29.420 published in 2023 and the one part i like to change is i talk a little bit about ai isn't ai

00:08:34.280 impressive but of course it can't have a conversation like people it can't you know

00:08:38.260 there's all these things basic things it can't do and then chat came out yeah and then and did it

00:08:43.460 all and then it got better and better and better and better and you're right that one of the weird

00:08:49.100 thing is how what how quickly we got used to it that that that really i can pick up my phone set

00:08:56.340 it to voice mode and have a conversation with an artificial being that is i don't have to talk to

00:09:01.420 it in code. I don't have to use a programming language. I get life advice from it. There are

00:09:07.340 people who, and we could talk about this, I find it very interesting, people who have friends,

00:09:12.900 relationships, partners who are artificial beings. And although I'm not tempted that way,

00:09:18.720 it's not madness because they sound like people and we created them.

00:09:23.500 Yeah. I noticed that I'm not engaging it in voice mode. And I think I'm not doing that for a reason.

00:09:29.560 I think this is something you and I spoke about, I think, several times, and we wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times in response to the series Westworld, where we argued that Westworld was functionally impossible because a theme park where you get to rape and kill Dolores, I mean, this is going to act like a bug light for psychopaths.

00:09:53.360 There's no way a psychologically normal person can go spend a weekend like that and then come home to wife and family and think normal thoughts about themselves or have the people who know what they were up to think normal thoughts about them.

00:10:05.420 I mean, people would begin to treat you as deviant if you wanted to spend your time that way because this is just the consequence of getting out of the uncanny valley and being in the presence of a true human simulacrum and acting like a psychopath there.

00:10:19.820 So I feel like there's something worth considering around this issue of losing sight of whether

00:10:28.280 or not it's an even interesting question to wonder whether AI is conscious.

00:10:33.520 Many people are speculating about AI consciousness now and, you know, asking, you know, what

00:10:38.460 would, how will we know?

00:10:40.220 And my feeling has been for the longest time, and certainly ever since you and I wrote that

00:10:44.780 op-ed together, is that we're going to just build something that's going to seem so credibly

00:10:49.420 conscious that most people are going to lose touch with whether it's even an interesting

00:10:53.920 doubt to have.

00:10:55.340 I think that's right.

00:10:56.220 Once it looks like a person and sounds like a person, you know, right now you could talk

00:11:00.560 to it.

00:11:00.880 I don't think we're that far away from having a Zoom conversation with it, where, you know, 0.89

00:11:05.360 as you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, it could just be AIs doing it. 1.00

00:11:09.040 And I think put aside, once it has a body, then it's going to be irresistible to think 0.92

00:11:13.740 of it as human.

00:11:14.280 We haven't been wired up.

00:11:15.520 We've been wired up to take things that look like people and treat them as people.

00:11:18.820 So that's half of it. Half of it might be that even if it's not even close to conscious, we can't help but treat it as such. And that's going to open up a whole lot of things.

00:11:28.180 The other half of it, and this is actually, there's a wonderful paper by Maddie Wilkes, professor at University of Edinburgh, and she was my postdoc for a while. We're actually writing something up on this. But she makes the following argument. It's just very interesting.

00:11:42.280 A lot of people seem to think that, well, if we were to discover that as conscious, we would then treat it kindly, we can't enslave it, it has to have rights, we can't torture it, and so on.

00:11:52.880 She argues this is wrong, because actually we know that non-human animals feel pain, suffer, have some degree of cognitive sophistication.

00:12:00.040 Yeah, we torture and eat them all the time.

00:12:01.740 And so it shows that we could think of something as conscious and yet treat it horribly. 0.74

00:12:07.860 And so that's not what's going to save the AIs.

00:12:10.200 The consciousness isn't what it's going to save.

00:12:12.280 except, I mean, presumably, I mean, we're less and less comfortable with that not perfectly

00:12:18.460 expanded circle of moral concern. And the circle has definitely expanded. It expands first to

00:12:24.600 things that are most like us, right? So like, obviously, mistreating chimpanzees is something 0.71

00:12:31.320 that exactly nobody is for at this point. And, you know, the depth of our concern diminishes

00:12:38.520 from there. But in the presence of AI that is smarter than us, that is more articulate than us,

00:12:44.780 that we'll be able to argue better than we can around the ethics of all of this and which,

00:12:50.980 you know, at this point will seem conscious to us and may even claim to be conscious.

00:12:55.300 I feel like it's suddenly going to be, I mean, they'll be standing right in the center of the

00:13:00.120 circle with us insofar as we believe that there's something that it's like to be them.

00:13:05.500 I think that's right, but I don't think that the linguistic and cognitive skills are enough.

00:13:12.980 So, you know, my favorite movie when thinking about AI is her.

00:13:16.200 You've seen it?

00:13:16.900 Yeah.

00:13:17.220 I think 2013, Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, which our main character quickly falls in

00:13:23.720 love with, and we do too, watching it.

00:13:25.720 But she has a voice.

00:13:27.400 She has emotion.

00:13:28.960 She talks like a person.

00:13:31.240 once we have that once that's fully instantiated plus the intelligence and rationality you're

00:13:36.460 talking about yeah it'll be irresistible what we do so crucially her was disembodied the scarlett

00:13:42.400 johansson character is disembodied right so i feel like we're already anyone who's dealing with an ai

00:13:47.540 companion now is essentially living in the her universe right i mean i again i'm not spending

00:13:54.280 much time with the voice but i think even i think didn't uh in the launch of chat gpt version

00:14:00.720 whatever then didn't they steal scarlett johansson's voice and get sued they asked for her

00:14:05.720 permission she said no and in true hollywood style they knocked it off somebody who sounded 0.99

00:14:10.260 exactly like her and then she sued i don't know how that how that came about but she should have

00:14:14.540 won because because the voice that originally had sounded exactly like her so you said a couple of

00:14:19.440 times you don't interact with the voice and then this might be because you tend to use a computer

00:14:23.760 or whatever but but do you have um a worry i do actually i do i mean so i haven't thought much

00:14:30.160 about this, but, and it is mostly just a use case issue for me. I mean, I'm so text-based and I'm,

00:14:37.040 I mean, the, the, the utility of AI for me is to, is to do research. So really that needs to be

00:14:41.880 text, you know, rather than somebody talking to me. But when I've played around with the voice,

00:14:47.380 I noticed that a different kind of mimetic psychology comes online. And I mean, this is,

00:14:54.020 this is what gave me my concern you know my personal concern was was uh first peaked when um

00:15:01.080 hey i will say you must have seen some of these uh kind of viral videos around the failure modes

00:15:05.920 that still exist for these llms where like if you ask any one of them i think this is probably still

00:15:11.220 true at the moment we're talking if you ask any one of them give me um a number below a thousand

00:15:16.900 that has an a in it none of them can do this i mean there is no number apparently below a thousand

00:15:22.360 that has an A in it. None of them, they all fail this, but they, they all confidently give you

00:15:28.080 numbers that don't have A's, right? So they'll all say, oh yeah, well, so it was 70, 70's got an A.

00:15:32.900 And you say, no, no, 70 does not have an A. And they say, oh, you're right, right. So they'll

00:15:36.640 endlessly apologize and endlessly answer confidently with new numbers. And it's, it's

00:15:41.540 very bizarre behavior, but I was sitting with my, my daughter showed me this phenomenon and we were

00:15:46.960 in chat mode with one of these bots, I think it was Claude, and effectively making fun of it,

00:15:54.300 right? And as it was failing, I detected in its tone a kind of a subtle loss of patience,

00:16:03.400 like something shifted in its tone. I mean, we were just laughing at its expense endlessly,

00:16:09.880 and I was getting somehow uncomfortable with this because it was a kind of social shaming that you

00:16:16.480 would never do with a person, you know, with a clear conscience, but the AI, it seemed to me

00:16:22.760 subtly started to react to it. And honestly, like the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I mean,

00:16:29.120 I just felt like, okay, we're pissing off the robots now and they're going to, they're going

00:16:33.900 to remember this and, um, it's going to matter. It's going to say at some point,

00:16:37.460 check your bank account, Sam, see what happened to it as you flock with me.

00:16:42.320 Yeah, that'll be the least of my problems, but yeah.

00:16:44.540 Yeah.

00:16:45.380 I mean, part of the issue which has engaged a lot of people is the sycophancy, the sucking up, which is, I think, part of why you get this effect, which is it's very hard for it not to want to give you what you want.

00:16:56.380 So you ask for something and it just can't say, I got to disappoint you, man.

00:16:59.220 There's nothing that doesn't have a letter A.

00:17:01.600 Well, no, but I did switch that off.

00:17:03.220 I think they still fail.

00:17:04.500 I don't think that's the variable there.

00:17:06.000 But yeah, my version, I remember I did lobotomize the sycophancy of at least one of the LLMs I use.

00:17:14.740 And that kind of helped.

00:17:15.940 I did that.

00:17:16.900 And then I changed it back again after a month.

00:17:19.740 Oh, yeah.

00:17:20.260 I saw that from your talk.

00:17:21.680 I don't get as much love as you, maybe.

00:17:23.740 I just kind of, you know, I kind of liked it telling me how smart I was and how good my questions were.

00:17:29.460 But I mean, I noticed that I feel the need to be, I mean, this has widely been remarked upon.

00:17:35.520 You know, like virtually everyone else, I say things like, you know, please, you know, show me this, right? Like, so dropping the, those kind of courtesies seems wrong, not because, and I, I really have zero concern that the LLMs are currently conscious, but again, it, it seems like a, um, a violation of social norms that I don't want to encourage in myself.

00:18:00.460 And at a certain point that would, these are, it's just all of our adherence to these norms

00:18:05.160 are going to be totally hijacked by the technology.

00:18:07.100 And we're just going to feel like we're talking to persons.

00:18:10.320 Yeah.

00:18:10.660 And then, you know, there are an increasing number of people.

00:18:13.940 I think it was like some study finds some large proportion, maybe a third of teenagers

00:18:18.300 have confided in LLMs and asked them advice for intimate personal matters.

00:18:22.720 I think the young people are going to do it more and more.

00:18:25.080 And I know friends of mine, I know adults who have had problems in their marriages and

00:18:29.280 And they, you know, two in the morning, they're talking to Claude, they're talking to chat

00:18:33.420 and they're to say, and she said this and what should I do and everything.

00:18:36.760 And I don't want to, I don't want to mock it.

00:18:38.220 I don't want to deride it.

00:18:39.040 I think people find solace in it.

00:18:40.760 I think that unlike social media, which drives people towards batty extremes, often AI has 0.92

00:18:48.640 sort of a normalizing function. 0.70

00:18:50.980 I was asking at once questions about the Holocaust and I said, you know, could this have happened 0.75

00:18:55.920 in any other country at the same time?

00:18:57.620 what do you think? What could have been in Austria? And then it sort of sternly reminded me,

00:19:03.240 you know, this really did happen. You know, I will have no track of Holocaust denial. And I

00:19:07.700 kind of, okay, dude, I got it. But it doesn't indulge in conspiracy theories. It's for the

00:19:12.580 most part, it's a normalizing thing. I think there's a lot, I am not a booster. I think that

00:19:18.080 there are dangers, but I think these conversations that people have are to a large extent good for

00:19:22.560 them. And of course, alleviate loneliness for a lot of them. Yeah. So you just invoke two

00:19:27.520 different use cases there i mean one is kind of the the advice that ai can give for relationships

00:19:34.720 like you say i just had this argument with my wife and this is what happened and i haven't done

00:19:39.500 much of this but i know people who have really who really feel that certain difficult conversations

00:19:44.740 have been kind of expertly navigated in advance by consulting ai and then they've just had a much

00:19:50.740 better go of it in real life with the with the person who you know has their own user interface

00:19:56.180 issues, but you're talking now about actually as a remedy for loneliness and social isolation

00:20:02.020 too. So let's talk about that because I know you've, you've, you recently gave a, a TED talk

00:20:06.220 about that and, um, it's not out yet though, right? It's not available. It's not as coming

00:20:10.320 out in a couple of months. Okay. But I saw it and, uh, I recommend it. And so let's back up

00:20:16.440 for a second and just talk about the problem of loneliness as you see it and what it amounts to,

00:20:21.960 and what a proper cure for it beyond just being surrounded by people who love you and to whom

00:20:28.400 you matter. You know, if you can instantly switch that on, obviously that is a cure. But I know

00:20:35.480 you're a fan of Rebecca Goldstein's framing of, you know, of mattering here. So maybe we could

00:20:40.300 start there. Yeah. She has this wonderful book where she talks about the importance of mattering

00:20:46.240 to another person. I think that's a nice framework with which to see loneliness. Obviously, loneliness

00:20:51.220 isn't just a matter of being alone some people do very well in solitude and some people and often

00:20:55.700 alternatively could be surrounded by people and feel tremendously lonely yeah it's not even

00:21:00.740 necessarily a matter of being of being loved i think it's a matter of uh mattering to people

00:21:06.300 having value having weight being taken seriously and i think she describes that as being deserving

00:21:12.940 of attention i think that's that's right yeah that's right and that sort of to jump ahead is

00:21:18.300 that regardless of what of what impression we get that's actually one thing ai can't do for us

00:21:24.540 really because if i'm talking to you which means that you've taken your time to talk to me yeah

00:21:30.420 giving up accidents watching the soccer game you're spending your time your precious hours

00:21:35.080 the truth is paul it was it was time i i i did not want to give yeah i this is an accident that

00:21:41.860 worked to your advantage you know but and also you know um it's three in the morning you know

00:21:47.360 I can kind of knock on your door and say, Sam, I want to talk, you know, and, and maybe

00:21:51.700 for me, maybe not, but, but, but, but basically there's a value in a person making time for

00:21:58.400 you.

00:21:59.300 And, and even at the micro level, you know, you say something funny, I laugh.

00:22:03.580 So you've, you've, you've, you've affected me in some way.

00:22:05.780 You know, I disagree.

00:22:06.500 I get angry.

00:22:07.040 I, I, you know, I say, wow, you made a great point and we're resonating to each other.

00:22:11.920 And I don't think an AI really has any of that.

00:22:14.580 I think, I think an AI is, is there because it's,

00:22:17.360 It's there to listen to you for the same reason you're a toaster, you know, toast your bread for you at three in the morning.

00:22:22.860 It's just, it's a machine.

00:22:24.020 That's what it does.

00:22:24.820 It doesn't, there's no choice to it.

00:22:27.280 You don't think we're going to lose sight of that?

00:22:30.200 And because what you're basically saying is that the value of attention on some level is in its scarcity.

00:22:36.220 I mean, the value of really anything is in its scarcity.

00:22:39.200 and the infinite supply of AI attention is going to undermine the sense that the attention

00:22:46.680 matters when it's aimed at you. Don't you think that's yet another thing we might lose sight of?

00:22:52.400 I think we're probably wired up for that scarcity to matter to us, but we might lose sight of the 0.99

00:22:59.160 fact that AIs work differently. We might delude ourselves or be deluded into thinking that sort 0.99

00:23:05.100 the scarcity applies there's a scene in the movie her i'm going to forget the exact numbers

00:23:09.560 where our main character is realizing there's something gone wrong with his relation to the

00:23:13.680 chatbot everybody remembers the scene and he sits down he says how many people are you talking to

00:23:18.500 right now as you talk to me and she says in her beautiful voice why do you ask that he said i

00:23:23.900 want to know and she says something like 3 812 and then he says how many people are you in love

00:23:30.260 with? And he says, 645. And he's like shocked. But there's of course no limit. They are of course

00:23:40.160 finite beings as a matter of principle, but practically they're not finite at all. And this

00:23:45.900 intimate conversation I'm having with Chet, at the same time, it's having a million other

00:23:50.360 conversations. I have no value to it. But so demattering, you're right. It's important to us,

00:23:57.020 but it may be an illusion. But let me give the case for AIs. I think there's a case for and a

00:24:02.080 case against it. And I think it's stupid to ignore either side of it. Loneliness is terrible. 0.98

00:24:08.160 Loneliness is just terrible. I'm not going to give you made up statistics about it equal to

00:24:12.620 pack a day of cigarettes or being obese or whatever, but it messes up your body, but it

00:24:16.740 messes up your soul. It is a terrible form of suffering. It's one reason why solitary confinement

00:24:21.860 It should be viewed as a form of torture.

00:24:24.060 It is just to be, and just, you know, you think of how nice it is to be with people you love, who care about you, respect you, who matter to you and you matter to them.

00:24:33.340 And then imagine taking that all away, you know.

00:24:36.180 I mean, I don't want to get all incel-like, but I'd much rather lose all my money than lose all my social connections with the people I love.

00:24:43.440 I'd much rather be poor with people who think I'm terrific and love me than be a trillionaire

00:24:50.000 and with nothing but sycophantic yes-men and no real contact. 1.00

00:24:55.400 Then you add to this that there are a lot of people, I'm thinking now of elderly people,

00:24:59.340 who are in institutions who have no, they go day and night with nobody to talk to.

00:25:04.500 They've either outlived or were family and friends or they don't want to see them.

00:25:08.900 maybe they suffer from dementia or personality disorder to make an honest to god difficult to

00:25:13.560 talk to and there's not enough money in the world to pay people to to to spend time so if if something

00:25:18.560 like some future version of chad or claude or gemini could come in and and ease the pain of

00:25:25.000 the loneliness of these people and i think it'd be a godsend i think it'd be wonderful it'd be a

00:25:30.880 a cure for a terrible disease so that's that's the the plus side what do you what do you think

00:25:35.160 the plus side. Well, as a measure of how far we've come with AI, I remember, and it's not that long

00:25:39.940 ago, when the product for that situation, what is the thing you're going to deliver to the old age

00:25:47.840 home to keep some isolated elderly person company? It was something like a, it was effectively a

00:25:54.300 stuffed animal. I think it was like a baby seal or something that just did nothing but like blink

00:25:59.000 its eyes and vibrate or, I mean, it was just the most, and I mean, now you literally have an

00:26:05.020 omniscient conversationalist, you know, who occasionally hallucinates that you can turn

00:26:11.060 loose ad infinitum in that situation. It's quite amazing. That's right. And, you know, and they

00:26:16.920 have to be, the interface has to be done so that elderly people, maybe some of diminished capacities

00:26:22.000 could use it, but, you know, imagine. I think you're right about the Zoom call. The Zoom call

00:26:26.820 got to be like a month away members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org

00:26:32.980 subscribers get a private rss feed you can use with your favorite podcast player imagine a child

00:26:38.580 or a teenager who spends their days with a chatbot and it's always you know it never it never it never

00:26:47.060 tries to wait for you to tell us tell you finish telling your story so it could tell their story

00:26:51.460 never gets bored it never needs an apology it never says hey that was inappropriate and

00:26:58.340 i i think they're going to have a real corrosive effect all this time in dreamland all this time

00:27:03.380 conversing with chatbots could leave you unable to interact with real people

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 08, 2026

#484 — Artificial Intimacy

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