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Not to mention rights related to your "service android" on the plane or in the restaurant or the grey area of ai-based ambient recording and 3rd party privacy!

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That's a GIANT ball of madness about to crack open.

Do we fall back on photography's rule of thumb, where enough people mean you don't need permissions?

Or do people choose to formally opt out, either by declaration or - wait for it - software, perhaps backed by hardware? An anti-Friend device!

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So, moving into personalised, intimate and all-seeing chat rapidly becoming voice and facially inflected and never missing any aspect of your sensorial and even internal biorhythmic self, including social, physical and mental interactions and patterns...

All along, most certainly to be expected, controlling parties be that state/corporate/political/criminal are nudging, programming, stimulating and hypnotising which will magnitudinally increase as chips, bots, receptors, sensors and transmitters are physically incorporated, communicated, networked and 'infused with' Artificial Intelligence, be that via mathematically precise electromagnetic means, genomic engineering or earth system phenomena.

...or something

Count us all in, cause surely TINA ;)

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Forgot to mention that I thoroughly enjoyed this article, Bryan. Thanks for your interesting and well rounded presentation.

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Thank you, dear Sifu, for the kind words and the great comments.

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Sifu, your comments about the internal self make me think of connecting a Fried to, say, Apple Watch, busily gathering biometric data.

You mention control, so let me riff a little on that, based on your start:

-governments - thinking about the UK mandating observation powers over chatbots to monitor radicalization, or France to look for CSAM, or Brazil to check for friendly comments about the opposition

-corporations - depends on your role. As employee, imagine a firm "gently requesting" you use their own Friend hardware/software. You know, to help with productivity, wellness, professional development, forestalling unions, blocking dissent. As customer, we know this will serve up ads and perhaps some predictive analytics.

-communities of all kinds - how many would like to peer inside our companion bot conversations for all kinds of reasons?

-then there's hacking...

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Two completely unrelated thoughts:

-on the cleric topic or the companion topic esp. for women (or trans folx) I can see the lack of potential sexual threat/predation being one reason some might go this direction. Pluses and minuses here in terms of safety/comfort but also not learning how to navigate human interactions in ways that could make you more vulnerable...

-other thought is that both fiction and gaming train us to invest emotion and ascribe human affect to non-animate things-- which seems to set us up for these kinds of interactions w/chatbots and AI companions--kind of a long arc perhaps.

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Excellent points, Miriam. I'm reminded of dating simulation games, but with companion AIs one has a lot more range.

Investing in non-animate things: I have a video post on this coming up.

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