Scott Galloway is one of my favorite thinkers writing on complex topics, like the impact of COVID, the ever-rising cost of higher ed, how the emergence of Ozempic might curtail chronic and expensive long term health issues associated with obesity, and the many and varied implications of AI. This article looks at how companion bots might/will get weaponized to target a generation of lonely young men.
As an aside, anyone who has gone toe-to-toe with ChatGPT knows how the system’s human like responses, and the resulting back and forth can feel like a real relationship.
Excerpt: “As social networks shrink, anxiety and polarization rise, and we become soft targets for bad actors and self-inflicted harms. The military is justifiably concerned about a wave of lonely recruits betraying their country, and it’s relatively well positioned to monitor contacts. However, vulnerable people also work at nodes of critical infrastructure — power plants, data centers, hospitals, water treatment plants. With the tech getting better and cheaper, it’s likely that Putin, Xi, and Biden have programs under development to produce bots that can establish deep relationships with lonely soldiers and technicians — and weaponize them."
Read the full article HERE.