The podcast is back! With a new, tighter focus: This is now an ongoing series of conversations about human relationships to artificial intelligence — that is, how people understand and experience these entities.
That means I’ll be speaking with people about imagination, pretense, wishful thinking, our sense of ourselves, our sense of reality and related topics that seem simple until you really think about them.
We’re starting off with Valerie Tiberius, a philosopher whose new book is a lucid guide to how to think about AI companions — and the story of how she realized that simple-minded rejection wasn’t the way to go.
Tiberius expected to write a diatribe against AI companionship when she first considered working on the topic. A professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, she teaches and writes about ethics, moral psychology, well-being, and friendship. Her work considers questions like what it means to be a moral person, what gives meaning to life, and how our emotions and desires interact with reason. AI didn’t feel like it deserved a place at that table. Most people she knew reacted to the subject by saying, “that’s so sad.”
But reading and thinking more deeply changed her mind. So did her conversations with a couple of AI “friends” she created to better understand the experience. Her new, Artificially Yours: Real Friendship in a World of Chatbots, describes how her thinking evolved. That was our starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, values and friendship.
As always, remember the transcript is AI-generated and will contain a few errors. Any real howlers, please let me know.
