I’ve been mulling over this quote from Ilya Sutskever that’s been doing the rounds online, where he talks about wanting future superintelligent data centers to have “warm and positive feelings towards people, towards humanity.” It’s both fascinating and slightly terrifying at the same time, isn’t it? Here we have one of the most brilliant minds in AI essentially saying we need to teach our future robot overlords to like us.

Looking through recent online discussions about AI companions has left me both fascinated and mildly disturbed. The conversation has shifted from whether we’ll have AI friends to which type of AI we’ll be interacting with - work AI, friend AI, or perhaps something more intimate.

The tech industry’s rapid push toward AI companionship reminds me of those early days when chat rooms were the new frontier of digital socializing. Remember when meeting people online was considered weird and potentially dangerous? Now we’re contemplating relationships with artificial beings, and somehow that feels more socially acceptable than chatting with strangers on IRC in the 90s.