Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality and augmented reality risk creating a ‘very significant redesign of love and relationships,’ according to one former Google exec.
‘Let’s just say this is a very significant redesign of society,’ said Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer at Google’s secretive R&D wing, Google X.
The convergence of these technologies, as Gawdat explained on a recent podcast interview, may lead to sex dolls that seem ‘alive’ or dating apps filled with AI ‘avatars.’
‘If we think a few years further and think of Neuralink and other ways of connecting directly to your nervous system,’ Gawdat speculated, ‘why would you need another being in the first place?’
He spoke after DailyMail.com exclusively revealed the world’s first ‘autobiography’ written by AI technology – and its depressing contents.
Speaking on the YouTube channel for the show Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Gawdat pointed out that technologists, policymakers and society at large often focus too tightly on philosophical questions that big business interests will not.
‘We get lost in those conversations of ‘Are they alive? Are they sentient?” Gawdat said. ‘Doesn’t matter: If my brain believes they are, they are.’
‘Just think about all of the illusions that we’re now unable to decipher,’ he noted.
‘Does it really matter if the Morgan Freeman talking to you on the screen is actually Morgan Freeman or an AI generated avatar, if you’re convinced that it is Morgan Freeman?’
Gawdat unpacked for Bilyeu and his listeners the biochemistry of how sex registers inside the human brain, suggesting that the physical side of human sexual intimacy would be easy to simulate with today’s technology.
Some people might only need Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta’s Quest 3 virtual reality headset to experience satisfying sex.
‘If we can convince you that this sex robot is alive, or that sex experience in a virtual reality headset or an augmented reality headset is alive,’ Gawdat argued, ‘it’s real. Then, there you go.’
‘It’s all signals in your brain that you enjoy companionship, and sexuality,’ he added, ‘and if you really want to take the magic out of it, it can be simulated.’
‘Just like we can now simulate very, very easily how to move muscles. There are so many ways where you can copy the brain signals that would move your hand in a certain way and just give it back to your hand and it will move the same way.’
Envisioning the future of the dating app business under these circumstances, Gawdat drew comparisons to the AI chatbot app Replika, which learns its users’ texting styles to further mimic and bond with them.
‘There are more than two million people on Replika,’ Gawdat noted.
