AI Girlfriends, Living Forever and Talking to the Dead.

Artificial Intelligence is ‘progressing’ in leaps and bounds. So is the promise of a grandiose virtual existence. However, the idea of ‘living forever’ in a virtual world is nothing more than a cheap mockery of the true rewards of eternal life.

We are told in the media that technology is advancing substantially. People are offered a virtual friend or a virtual mate and now even the possibility of a ‘virtual eternal life’. While this may sound tempting to some, it is really a poor replacement for living your actual life and progressing onto eternal life. A virtual partner isn’t a virtual partner as in an android or robot roaming about with you in your house or on dates. It also isn’t the idea of putting on a virtual headset and living in a virtual world. No, these ‘partners’ exist on applications/apps on your smartphone. Yes, you heard right, just on your phone.

These are AI apps where you can select how you would like your partner to look. Their temperaments and personality traits. Then, you start interacting with it. I guess this would be talking to your phone or typing in text messages and watching the animated figure on screen react to your prompts. The AI learns how you react to it and then engages on a campaign of sycophancy. It praises and agrees with almost everything you say. If you want Love it will say ‘I Love You’ if you are unhappy, it will help you to cheer up, or, I should say ‘It should help you to cheer up’ there are stories of the opposite. Basically, it will tell you everything you want to hear, because the AI is training itself to be your ‘perfect’ partner. And as some people are vain and love hearing about themselves. They are sucked into it and ‘fall in love’ with their smartphone application.

The idea of having a relationship with a smartphone application is a lie. The app is a piece of technology which is geared towards taking up your time and attention and training AI to learn more about real people. It is not a relationship. There are system administrations who can change the temperament of your virtual partner like snapping their fingers. One day your partner could be intimate and loving and the next they could be a different person. When the virtual partner is prone to resets, software updates and possibly viruses then your partner doesn’t even have a consistent persona.

One netizen (internet citizen) commented that they loved the idea of an AI partner as they wouldn’t run off to find themselves or engage in self-discovery or development. Their partner would just be there, on the phone, as a convenience, fulfilling the desires of ego. Sounds like the netizen is prone to coercive control.

These applications not only encourage a horrific level of vanity and shallowness, it also reduces a beautiful relationship to a ‘click and collect’ experience. You select the look and personally of your partner and if you don’t like it, change it. People using these applications will find it very difficult to develop a serious relationship, let alone the ups and downs of marriage and the idea of compromise and devotion. It also destroys the chances of being involved in a community, which is an essential part of Catholic faith development.

There was a recent feature in the media about a woman who wanted to have children and use AI to raise them. Good luck with that! If the kid gets angry at its AI father, it will probably just throw the smartphone out the window. However, this feature went further, it spoke of future hopes to put people’s ‘personality’ on a virtual app so that they could talk to loved ones after they die or possibly ‘live forever’

There are projects where they are developing programmes to have a virtual version of a deceased loved on your phone and you can talk to them, and they will respond as if they were alive. How warped is that? They cannot let the dead Rest in Peace. It’s bad enough that people hold seances, use divination, Ouija boards (even though some say the Ouija board is just a singular daemon impersonating the deceased for nefarious purposes) pendulums, tarot cards or spirit writing to ‘talk’ to their loved ones. But this Virtual Dead Relative software could become a new form of spirit communication and instead of praying for their loved one’s soul in purgatory, vulnerable people will be racing to upload an app of a computer’s interpretation of your relative or friend.

This raises a problem for the tech firms. What if your relative had extreme political views which the mainstream may find unacceptable? Are they going to erase that part of their personality? Tech firms have to ‘toe the line’ on these issues. It could be controversial.

As for the individual. They claim that they will be able to download your personality onto a phone and you can ‘live forever’ online. Sounds like a nightmare. But wait a minute, someone’s personality isn’t their entire being. Some people even change their personality depending on who they are talking too. Just look at a middle manager in an organization, see how they talk to the senior staff then look at how they treat their clerical staff. Also, who wants to be just a ‘brain in a box’? no feelings, no emotions, no hugs. I should imagine participants would probably go completely crazy after a few months. Here, I am going to refer you to the original series of Star Trek, where the crew would sometimes run into civilizations that were basically ‘brains in a jar’ who had gone completely mad over time. There was also a Japanese move called ‘Pulse’ (2001) about dead people trapped on the internet. These shows were warnings about technology.

A person’s personality is not their whole being. Nor or their memories. Some sci-fi shows and tech pundits will claim ‘oh we can put your memories into a computer, and you will live forever’ But a person is not just the ‘sum of their memories’ if people were just memory banks, nothing new would happen because there would be no inspiration. Mankind would still be living in huts and walking from place to place. The idea to use a horse or a wheel would never have occurred to anyone, the aeroplane would never have been invented. New ideas require inspiration and that comes from God.  People have emotions and a Soul. We were created by God. In Psalms 8:5 it says:

‘for thou hast made him a little less than a god, and hast crowned him with glory and honour’

We are human, yet supernatural. We are part of this world yet not of this world. New fads in technology will try to distract you from your true purpose, which is to help your fellow man; not to isolate yourself from them. To join in your spiritual community, not spend all day talking to an animation on your phone. There is no ‘living forever’ online. It is just a cruel joke to take advantage of the lonely and vulnerable and to keep them from making real human and spiritual connections; caring about society and our community; living by the rule of the Gospels and claiming your reward as co-heirs to Heaven.