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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Tamagotchi are an ingenious psychological and social gambit, paving the way for smartphones. An electronic dependent, halfway between a doll and a game that hooks into the formative maternal and caring instincts of a child, almost 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016). Don't feed it? It dies. Fail to socialise it? It gets lonely for friends. B.J Fogg eat your heart out!

Now we grew up into mums and dads with adult Tamagotchi, always hungry for a battery charge, requiring constant attention, even distracting us from our real children.

This is one of the lesser seen dangers of AI in personal tech. Not that it will become a dominating , directing force, but that it will become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all our affections instead of with real people.

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> ... that [AI] will become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all our affections instead of with real people.

Business is way ahead of you in intentionally building this -- https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bqbp/can-you-be-in-relatio...

Turns out, mimicking emotional connection is something LLMs are also good at.

Also see here for the moral quandaries users are working through (e.g. do I tell my bot about my real life partner): https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/105g425/replika_as...

The really dystopian part is that Replika regularly pushes updates, which change the sensitive topics boundaries, which has the net effect of rewriting the personality, overnight, of a bot people spent substantial amounts of time getting to know.

We live in crazy times.

(DISCLAIMER for addiction-sensitive readers: maybe don't download an intimate AI chatbot? Your time would probably be better invested with human friends)

What I find disturbing about things like Replika is all your conversations are owned and stored by the company. At least with a real-life partner, there's not a database that someone can query to pull your intimate in-person discussions.

The fact that it's cloud-hosted and company-controlled is the most disturbing part for me.

Can you imagine creating an emotional space for something {subject to Microsoft's TOS and updated unilaterally}?

In addition to the drifting line with intimacy... suddenly you have a privileged position with a huge userbase.

How long until people's agents start recommending {product of the week} in conversations?

Current AI bots tend to be 1 trick dogs. And I have no desire to put emotional investment into a 'brain' that's wired directly to company HQ (especially commercial company). Tool: fine. Buddy: nope. For that I'll stick to the real thing.

That said: as the tech progresses, it wouldn't surprise me if the line between human-human friendships, and human-AI friendships blurs over time.

People are wired for connecting with other beings, but friendships come in many forms. Wouldn't rule out AI-based somethings filling some of those roles.

The level of addictiveness is definitely dependent on the individual though.

I was born in the mid 90s and had one of these things growing up. I couldn't care less about it, I must have let the poor bird die a dozen times.

On the other hand I got insanely hooked to my dad's very-old-even-then 486. Turned that into a career, so that didn't turn out too bad I guess.

The only "danger" with Tamagochi and friends is that some humans are so stupid that they can't get their priorities right. However, that "danger" easily transfers to something else. Taking away the "sharp edges" is no solution to stupidity, at least not for adults.

I saw a talk with a similar thesis once (don't remember who by, unfortunately, it was at least a decade ago). He was arguing that we're hard-wired for cuteness to appeal to us, and just as Bratz replace Barbie, cute tech will replace regular tech. If you want your tech to be successful, explore neoteny.

At least they don't generally require constant attention though. You can generally check in once every hour or so and it won't be the worse for wear. Definitely not as attention-hungry as a smartphone thankfully ;)

(and, at least these things don't come with the microtransaction / gacha elements that you see so often in mobile games...)

> 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016)

The first iPhone was released in 2007. You could argue that ”modern“ smartphones took a few more years, but definitely not until 2016.

Sure. What I'm really talking about is the modern ensemble of smartphone, social networks and app-centric economy. In 2007 they were still mainly "just phones".

It would be nice to have a better fix on the historical location of the smartphone vis a vis obsessive, anxious use, but my reading of folks like Johann Hari and Tristan Harris puts it around 2013/15, which tallies with my observations in London.

> Sure. What I'm really talking about is the modern ensemble of smartphone, social networks and app-centric economy. In 2007 they were still mainly "just phones".

That was already there in 2010. There was a Cambrian explosion of apps in 2008/2009, and Apple ran the “there’s an app for that” campaign in 2009/2010. Facebook was there on day one and there were multiple Twitter clients. Instagram launched as a picture-focused, iPhone-only social network in late 2010.

While the smartphone was "born" in 2007, it definitely took many years for them to be devices which are powerful enough to be really useful.

The Nexus 4 was the first Android device which was generally usable, it came out in 2012. Everything before it was a heavy compromise. And while the iPhone was usable before that time, the price of it didn't really make it accessible.

No way man, the iPhone was insanely addicting before 2012, maybe you just had poor friends.

This feels really revisionist, or perhaps you have some uncommon requirements for "generally usable". My first non-Blackberry smartphone was a Motorola Atrix in 2011. By this point most of my friends and coworkers were already carrying an iPhone or Android device, I was late to the party. None seemed to be saying their phones weren't generally usable.

> or perhaps you have some uncommon requirements for "generally usable"

Not GP, but my personal requirements for "generally usable" include the device being able to make calls and connect to Wi-Fi without freezing for two minutes. My first smart phone was a mid-range device bought around 2011, and enduring it for 2+ years successfully convinced me to never again buy any smartphone but the most recent flagship. I don't know how people can stand living with phones that are barely powerful enough to lift their own OS. This must be bad for one's mental health.

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