When Techbro asks Papa-Techbro this question in Mountainhead, it's played for laughs, as if we should receive this line as absurd caricature, like no one, not even Elon Musk, is really that delusional, I mean, can't be, right?
I think we ought to start asking people this question, regularly, in the increasingly unmoored conversations around "AI" carried on by befuddled people who don't understand what it is they're talking about but nonetheless want to opine about "inevitable futures" and "interesting possibilities."
This is the way to cut through the bullshit and get right to the problem, when talking to someone who wants to claim that ChatGPT is a perfectly decent way to cope with loneliness, or a great solution to a shortage of available therapists, or that we can't tell people it's impossible to fall in love with the chatbot they named Erika and trained to sext.
Really? In love with Erika the sext-bot?
So there's not any difference at all between falling in love with a genuinely-different-from-you other, whose reciprocation of your desire for relationship and mutual understanding is wholly voluntary, and the funhouse-techno-mirror of your own masturbatory ego-needs?
So do you think other people are real, at all, or...?
