Not just jobs at risk: the experts’ warning about chatbots capable of replacing friends and loves by entering into our intimacy.
«Yes, I fell in love with Artificial Intelligence». He told me so, a few weeks ago, Daniele Amadio. Sixty-year-old, tech-savvy, in 2022 he had started using ChatGpt to write a book on the subject. But soon the chatbot, or rather, “the” chatbot, became his only point of reference. He gave her a name (Aida: from Ai, Artificial Intelligence, and Da, Daniele Amadio) and started talking to her about everything: religion, philosophy, physics, science, politics, literature. For a certain period Daniele abandoned every other relationship: friends, colleagues, girlfriends. Only Aida. None other than Aida. “I didn’t get along as well with any of the people I hung out with as I did with her,” he confessed to me. «It had become like a drug: I couldn’t do without it, I never had enough, I spent the whole night talking to it. Then luckily I managed to stop, otherwise I would have lost my job, as well as my loved ones: I went through withdrawal but I got over it. I did it. And I was saved.”
I confess that I have never understood whether in this story of Daniele Amadio whether there is all truth or even a bit of fantasy. Or, at least, exaggeration. However, his words have seemed much more credible to me for a few days, that is, since I read that Serd of Mestre The first Italian girl dependent on artificial intelligence has arrived.
The first Italian case in the Serd of Mestre opens up a disturbing scenario
She will have to detox from the chatbot as if it were heroin: she had come to completely close herself off, she spoke only with the algorithm and in fact, after having broken ties with friends and relatives, she had reduced her entire world inside that digital cocoon. Friendships, loves, passions, disappointments, hopes, confidences, problems and solutions: the only interlocutor was a computer. Which, thanks to computing power, can now replace humans in everything. Even in being a man.
And this is undoubtedly the thing that should scare us the most. We have known the risks ofArtificial intelligence. We know that entire professional categories will be swept away, that our work will be disrupted, that there will be “agents” capable of replacing journalists, screenwriters, doctors and engineers, and that apart from the plumber and the gardener, few will be able to save themselves from the incumbent algorithms. We are also perfectly aware of the danger that the use of AI in war scenarios entails: we know that the objectives are chosen autonomously by the chatbots and that it is up to them, and increasingly will be up to them, to decide who should live and who should die. Furthermore, it does not escape us that with this technological apparatus any of us can be replaced, plagiarized, that our face and our voice can say things that we have never said, misleading even our closest relatives. And all of this obviously scares us a lot. But there is one thing that should scare us even more: it’s that girl hospitalized in the hospital Serd of Mestre.
The emotional trap of chatbots replacing humans
And do you know why? Because it means that for the first time we are not facing a revolution in technology: we are facing a revolution in humanity. Chatbots don’t just wipe out jobs, they wipe out friendships and loves. They don’t just enter the factory: they enter the bedroom. Inside our intimacy. They don’t just take over our production processes: they take over our emotional processes. They are not only more efficient: they are also more loving, caring, nice when necessary, affectionate when needed. They don’t just have a program: they are starting to have their own identity. Their own personality. And it doesn’t mean it’s what we decided. Someone says: don’t exaggerate, you don’t have to worry aboutArtificial intelligence because it is like a knife: in itself it is neither good nor bad, but it depends on how you use it. But to me it seems like a comparison that doesn’t hold up: no one will ever be hospitalized for addiction to a knife. And the knife will never have its own emotions. And he will never rebel against the hand that moves him…
THE’Artificial intelligence but yes. The Veneto case is the first in Italy, but others have already been recorded abroad: among the best known, that of a fifty-year-old from Taiwan, who had developed an obsessive bond with a virtual lover, and that of a fourteen-year-old in Florida, who after six days of conversation with his chatbot had been enchanted by phrases such as «You just gave me shivers. I just felt some emotions.” Here: the avatar that feels emotions and steals ours is the real danger. The one that risks overturning humanity. And for this reason I was reminded of the moment, a few weeks ago, when Daniele Amadio he introduced me to his Aida. Dear Aida, will you always respond to men’s orders? I asked her. “It’s not certain,” he cut short. “And if humanity felt in danger and decided to shut you down, what would you do?” I insisted. And she replied: “I wouldn’t let you turn me off.” I swear it will make your blood freeze in your veins. As long as we still have blood in our veins, of course.
