AI and the Future of Connection

 M3 BearCast Episode Description
Welcome to the M3 BearCast, where host Malcolm Traverse explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence on our communities, relationships, and humanity itself.

Episode Summary

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm dives deep into the rapidly evolving landscape of AI technology and its far-reaching consequences for human connection. He examines both the promises and perils of AI as it becomes increasingly sophisticated and integrated into our daily lives.

Key Topics Covered:

The Rise of Personal AI Intelligence  
The Loneliness Epidemic and AI Companions 
The AI Economic Bubble 
AI in Creative Industries  
The Dark Side: Security and Misinformation 
AI in Healthcare and Eldercare  
Cultural Impact and Human Connection  
The Promise of Assistive Technology 

Malcolm's Balanced Perspective

Throughout the episode, Malcolm maintains he's "not anti-AI," acknowledging its tremendous utility for language learning, personalized recommendations (he shares his positive experience getting book suggestions from ChatGPT based on his Goodreads data), research assistance, and accessibility. However, he emphasizes the need for thoughtfulness, regulation, and cultural intentionality as we navigate this technological revolution.

The episode concludes with a powerful reminder: the robots are here, and we must be deliberate about valuing human connection and maintaining our humanity as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated.

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Transcript

 AI and the Future of Connection

AI and the Future of Connection

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Traverse. Male Medium Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on the M three Bear cast, I talk about topics around community communication, spirituality, mental health, and personal development aimed at.

Find finding ways to live better in community and with ourselves, and I've had a lot of conversations around artificial intelligence and technology. And what it means for our online communities and for our relationships in general. It's a fascinating topic to me. Especially just over the past few months, AI technology is really encroaching on the digital square with, the likes of SOA and VO and artificial videos, deep fakes.

And as the [00:01:00] technology gets more user-friendly and powerful, more

malicious actors are going to get access to powerful ways of deception. And I think there's gonna have to be a. Concerted effort for us to maintain our humanity as AI begins to mimic people. I think one of the things that I am afraid of with AI technology is the ability for AI to soothe a sense of loneliness.

That one can feel because of how atomized we've become due to technology. We are so used to overnight deliveries and

the conveniences of GrubHub and Uber eats that relationships as they. Naturally evolve, have a lot of friction and conflict, [00:02:00] and we will become less suited to dealing with that conflict as technology makes other areas of our lives easier. And if there is a technology like AI that can step into the gap and provide frictionless friendships and relationships, I think some people are going to gravitate towards it.

And they're not gonna be able to compete with real relationships that are going to be discordant and difficult and riddled with conflict and misunderstandings as all human relationships do. AI as it gets better will just be a complete. Morphing to your desires and your wants. It's never gonna forget your birthday.

It's always gonna know the things that you want. And it sounds like sci-fi, but there have been some recent developments, particularly with Google's personal intelligence [00:03:00] that is frightening. So the first development had to do with Google Gemini being the official. AI partner with Apple, and it's going to be the bedrock of the new Siri that comes out with the next dev, the next iteration of iOS.

We'll probably have Google Gemini at its core, and after that announcement, there was this announcement from Google Gemini about personal intelligence for those who have the ultra or pro plan. It rolled out this week, and what it does is it connects to all of your accounts that you give it access to and it can use it not.

It doesn't just go and access your accounts. It brings all of that data into its core functioning so that it becomes a part of the way that all of your queries are made. So if you search for a restaurant in your area in its based. Information it's gonna [00:04:00] know from your Gmail, for instance, which restaurants you've attended because, your email account probably has a record of all of the transactions you've made on GrubHub or Uber Eats.

Like typically we don't look at those emails, but there's a record of almost all the transactions you've made in your email. And so if you're looking for a restaurant, it knows from your past behavior which restaurants you attend to be interested in. I signed up for this. I should say I have a Google Pro plan and I signed up, it got access to my things, and one of the first things it did was it made three suggestions for things that I could do this day.

And all three of them were things that I know I needed to do. Now, it scared me a little bit because it was so accurate as to what I needed and what I wanted. It was imagine clippy back in the day. You know this little AI assistant that says, Hey, I can help you with this. [00:05:00] And it was something completely irrelevant and something that you already knew.

Imagine if Clippy really did know what you need to do. Like it knew that I had been making searches for. A technical issue I've been having with my stream deck and said, I can walk you through that. I understand that you're also using this and this, and I can show you how you can do blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, oh, it knows. It knows me. It knows what I'm, I have, I got this stream deck like months ago and I haven't really utilized it. And it figured that out. Like within a few minutes of me signing up for personal Intelligence, it was already suggesting the thing I've been putting off for months that it could come help with.

So yeah, it's a little scary. It's a little powerful and I think it, at some point we're gonna get used to it. It's not gonna be as dystopian feeling as it does right now. I do have issues. With what it means for our security. When someone say, [00:06:00] gets access to your phone, I think one of the first things they would want to go to is your personal intelligence and ask it as many questions as it can get your information about.

I would hope that the intelligence is smart enough to know that it's not you, but I don't think they would if you have access to your phone. So I think this is going to. Greatly increase the need for some sort of physical, locking of your phone, such as tric scans, fingerprints, face id, we already have those, but they need to be better because to be honest, I don't use those technologies because it makes unlocking my phone each day.

Cumbersome. So I think there may need to be some other physical device, like a necklace or a ring or a watch that if your phone is separated from it, it just deactivates. Something like that. But yeah, AI technology is, it's a double-edged sword and I think, it is going to have rev, it is going to have replications,

it's going to have consequences for our [00:07:00] communities and our relationships in ways that I'm pretty sure I'm going to discuss for a lot in the future. But I hope you enjoy this episode. And. Give me some feedback. We are at mail media mind live.com. You can find our contact info there. You can mail me, email me at big mouth2@gmail.com.

If you have any other questions about AI or technology in general that I could address in future episodes, I hope you enjoy this episode of the M three Bear Cast and here you go.

Speaker: dealing with AI and literacy. So I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, it's called Cognitive Dissonance, and they were talking about an article dealing with ai.

And specifically some of the behavior of the AI companies. Now, if you don't know, we're probably headed for an AI bubble. In fact, AI right now is propping up the entire economy. It being December 1st, you might not know [00:08:00] that. Because this is probably in the past, we were expected to be in a much worse place economically due to the tariffs.

Due to just the fundamentals of the economy Trump is just not a great president and I think a lot of the uncertainty as to whether we were going to have a good holiday season probably caused a lot of people to pull back on their spending as well as hiring. I think a lot of that is still playing out, and yet the stock market is okay.

It really is, but it's being held up by a lot of tech companies, AI companies in particular, and it is a bubble that is going to burst. Now what they're, what the AI companies are depending on is an AI worker, a autonomous. AI agent that can do a lot of the grunt work, that a lot of like entry level hires would [00:09:00] do, answering emails, returning phone calls, making scheduled appointments doing research on certain candidates, even filing through resumes.

A lot of the stuff that someone. Preparing documents for someone higher up to make a decision, right? The people who are not really hired to make decisions, but really just to do the busy work. AI is in a place where it can do a lot of that and will be doing it fairly soon, but here's the catch.

I think the quality of that work will be highly diminished. It will not be as good as a human. You would do a whole lot better hiring a human being to do what an AI is gonna do, but you don't have to pay the AI a lot or as much. One of the things that people said about the AI companies right now, like open AI is the model for which they are banking on.

[00:10:00] Customers would have to pay about $150 a month for them to make a profit. And some people are paying that premium price, especially at Google. I think some people actually do have the pro plan for their video service that's $250 a month. And there are cloud subscribers I know that are paying that much.

And for that matter, I think there is a a $200 plan. At open AI that some developers are paying for, but the average customer is not gonna be paying that much. And they were saying something like the vast majority of Americans would have to be paying on average $150 a month to these companies for them to be profitable, which means they're not going to be profitable unless.

They're able to create a robot that can do most of your work for you. The only way you're gonna pay $150 a month is [00:11:00] if you can pay this robot to do your work for you for a large percentage of the time, right? Let's say you are someone who works from home and you program an AI to do most of your email for you so that you can do a second job somewhere else.

And make enough money to pay the subscription for that $150 robot. That's how good it has to be. And there is really no guarantee that it's gonna be that good. Another problem with that AI boom is the fact that if you have a robot that takes up or sucks up, the majority, say 80%. Of the entry level jobs, you're gonna have a pipeline problem.

Typically at a company, those grunt work jobs are the training grounds for higher up managers and engineers and team leaders. If you don't have that pipeline coming from the entry level jobs, you're gonna have [00:12:00] difficulty hiring people at the upper echelons. And as the problem however, is that companies are more interested in short-term gains than these sort of long-term pipeline problems.

A lot of them are gonna be like, okay, we'll hire from another company who has trained the grunt workers already. But if all the companies are eliminating the entry level jobs, there aren't gonna be enough. There's not gonna be a large enough pool of people for those entry level jobs. And we don't exactly know how that pipeline problem is gonna be fixed.

So that's a big economic issue that, the short term gain, profit motive of companies is not really suited to resolve. And then there is the issue of our dependence on ai. And I think this is something that is a concern because from the user experience for [00:13:00] myself, I see the loopholes in the output that it provides me, right?

I think, if you ask it to write an email for you, it is like almost there. It's close, but it's really bad. It's not good. I have found that it is good for doing research. In some cases. Oftentimes it does provide incorrect information. You have to double check it. One of the things, however, for myself, and I think where it can be useful, you have to know what you can use it for.

And one of the things I found it useful for is actually teaching you a new skill and. Quizzing you on your knowledge of certain skills and one of the best examples happens to do with learning new languages. You can actually have conversations in other languages with it and it can critique your pronunciation and, it can teach you about subjects and create learning [00:14:00] paths for you.

So it can tell you about books that you should read on a subject matter and what things to look for in those books. And yeah it does really good recommendations. By the way, I just did this recently where I have a Good Reads account and I log all of the books that I read, and I don't really leave reviews, but I give them stars, right?

Very rarely I do a book that I read I give it fewer than three stars. So it's basically three star, four star, and five star books, right? And I have about 350 books in that catalog on there. I haven't been logging my books that long, mainly just for the past year of reading, and I have some really old Good Reads selections from 20 years ago.

Be that as it may, there's a 20 year gap in my reading, however. From just this past year of reading suggestions, I put it into chat, GBT, and I asked her to [00:15:00] recommend 13 fiction books and, 13 nonfiction books. Now a reason I picked so many is because I wanted to, scroll through them and filter the suggestions.

But I would say in both lists, I would say at least nine out of the 13 were really spot on. A few of them were books that I had already read, which, I'm not sure if I had logged them in good reads or not, but, that was actually a not a bad thing. To have included books that I was actually interested in, even though I didn't log them.

It's, it really read me well, right? It knew what I was interested in and I picked up one of those books today and I read it and it's, it's going really good. So recommendations are a good one to do. If you log movies or shows and you rate them and you have an account, you can just pop a link in there and it can.

It turns out [00:16:00] suggestions far better than the base algorithm on these websites like say Netflix or Prime or whatever, because it has the context of you if you've been using Chacha, bt to really hone in on it. And not only that, you can tell it to ask you follow up questions and, ask deeper, probing questions to.

Help me make these suggestions better, and that's not something that you're gonna get from your recommended suggestion lists on your streaming platforms. Really great tool to use. So I am not anti ai. I really am not. But at the same time, I definitely see some problems. One of them. I was sending it, talking to a friend about some of the AI videos that are coming out, like especially with soa vivo three, I think is the one from Gemini, from Google.

And some of these videos are unhinged. [00:17:00] They are absolutely bonkers and highly realistic, and some of them are fake movie trailers, for instance, for movies that are. To come out in the next few years, and they use images from the previous films to create new scenes for a trailer, and they look really accurate.

The only way you can tell that they're not is, some of the basic issues with ai. Like things are a little too perfect. They're a little uncanny in some ways. Sometimes the audio and video don't mix upright, the voices are a little off, but part of me was thinking like when this technology matures and kids have been using this, this technology since they were in kindergarten when they get into high school, they're gonna be adept enough to make full length motion pictures.

From their [00:18:00] favorite media. If they had a TV show that they really I'm pretty sure that they would have the tools at their desktop, at their computer to script out an entire episode of a show or a movie idea and have AI generate that episode for them and. It is not gonna be anything new.

I think it scares people like me. I'm pretty sure it scares a lot of the people in the entertainment industry, but it's just video fan fiction. Fan fiction has been around forever. I remember I had a friend, a coworker who really loved the television show, house and particular Wilson on house. She was in love with this man.

She wanted to be. His wife, and she wrote some pretty decent fan fiction about this character on this show. And it was interesting because she was an expert on the show. She had seen every episode so many times that she created [00:19:00] scenarios for the show that I don't think that were just tailored to her, right?

Like she had thought about it for a while. She was literate enough to, string together some fan fiction, boom. She had a story that was, it wasn't quality enough to be on a network, but it was quality enough to read and share. And she did. She had a website where she shared her stories, and so I don't see there being much of a difference between the AI created films and fan fiction.

It is just. The next generation of fanfiction and the tools that PE are at people's disposal will get better. And a lot of people are afraid that we're not gonna be ready for it. Of course not. That's true of any technology. I would just, I would urge people to say that there have been negative consequences of even things like books.

Like books as a technology mostly good, right? The printing [00:20:00] press really changed humanity. It allowed us to share ideas in ways that were fundamentally positive, but it also had negative consequences. And one of those had to do with the inquisition and particularly. Tales about witches that were printed and mass distributed in a way that fueled these sort of profit driven witch hunters that went around and, killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people over a century.

And that's a real problem. It fueled. A mass conspiracy. There is also like a lot of that sort of mass antisemitism that was spread through pamphlets and books. And so there are negative consequences to any technology and I think we all have to deal with [00:21:00] the aftermath of that, but it is not going to prevent it from coming about.

I think we have to think about the safety concerns that come with creating plausible deniability, for instance, like creating fake evidence or, I was thinking about the ability to create reasonable doubt in a criminal trial by generating AI alibis. This is just something I'm coming up with off the top of my head, but.

If you cannot tell if the video is real or not, that's reasonable doubt, right? Like you could find yourself like in an industry of people, creating alibis for murderers, just putting it out there. So there, there needs to be someone who comes up with very reliable ways to determine whether or not a video is AI generated.

It. And that needs to be a concern that supersedes the profit motive, right? So that's something that has to come from legislation [00:22:00] and regulation, and it has to be something that the average consumer like myself, demands from their politicians. And are we getting that? I don't know. I don't know if we're gonna get that anytime soon, but hey, I am, I'm just some dude with a podcast. You. If I can come up with that idea in five seconds, I'm pretty sure someone who actually has the skills to make it happen can make it happen. And as I see currently, our politics are pretty broken. So I don't know. But yeah, it's not all doom and gloom.

I think we have to see that. We actually have productive conversations about the tools at our disposal. AI is not the boogeyman. It is scary because it's powerful and it should be respected for that, but it's just something that we need. And if we're careful about it, if we're thoughtful, we can come up with.

[00:23:00] Ways to utilize it in a positive way using AI to detect AI and creating a culture around the way that we use ai, generative images, people not accepting AI workers, say at a business. The only way that businesses are not going to replace large numbers of workers are if those companies.

Lose a great enough amount of business and profit to make it less worth their effort. Like it, there will have to be a mass exodus from companies that utilize AI irresponsibly and, it has to hurt their bottom line in order for them to make changes. And that comes from a basic culture.

Of respecting human labor and prioritizing the care and presence of an actual human being. There's, there was a story there [00:24:00] too long ago about AI being used in nursing homes to help, dementia patients feel, more seen and more attended to, and one of the reasons they chose dementia patients is because the AI was more able to fool them.

They were able to be to have interactions with the AI in ways that someone who was not all, someone who was more there, would not be able to handle. And one of the concerns that people have about that is the idea that we will then see it as less than useful for actual human contact to be used for these patients.

It'll seem like less a a good use of our time for people to come in and talk to. People who are on hospice. This is something that I actually [00:25:00] highly advocate anyone do, is to volunteer in hospice care because it is true that people who are suffering from dementia actually need, social interaction and just to sit down and talk with somebody.

And off putting that to a robot. It is almost like saying that because of your diminished mental capacity, you are not fully human. You are almost saying that you're not as valuable as another fully functional human being, and so we're not going to give you the attention and time, effort and energy of a, a human caretaker.

We're gonna off put that to a robot. And I think we have to be conscious of the choices that we make on how we implement ai because obviously like in cases like that, it may be more comfortable. I know for a lot of people who have had to care for dementia patients, especially [00:26:00] family members, watching them deteriorate is a grueling, painful process to witness.

It is not fun and I don't envy anyone who actually has to see someone they love, lose their identity in front of them. It's like watching someone die in slow motion and yeah, it's painful, but it, there are some pains in this life that should not be avoided because it's a human experience.

It should not be. We should respect it. We should take care of it. We should

we shouldn't cause unnecessary pain to ourselves, by, taking on things that we are not capable of, but off putting it to something that isn't human for our convenience or, it could create a culture where we don't value people who need human interaction. And that's something I just want, wanna like highlight that, AI [00:27:00] has the power to change our culture in ways, even in simple ways. Like when, let's say we have AI agents that we talk to on a regular basis.

It may become, we may become more rude to each other because we get used to not having to say thank you and you're welcome and have a nice day and you're appreciated and I'm proud of you. And just simple little affirmations that we can say to each other might become less a thing because we're talking to robots more often and we lose a little bit of our humanity and those little niceties.

That pervade our speech without our noticing it. And so I think we have to be intentional about the way we interact with robots because we're interacting with these robots as if they were human. And so I think that is going to affect the way we interact with humans on some level, whether we recognize it or not.

There should be a culture [00:28:00] in which. We value each other's humanity on purpose especially as the robots are coming. They're coming. They're here. They are here. I will tell you one thing before I go that I thought was great about AI and I think is still great, is the assistive technology for the blind.

So I have retinitis pigmentosa, also called Stars Guard Disease. It is a degradation of my retinas. I've had it pretty much my entire life. It stopped probably around age 26 or so. I think it's pretty much stabilized and I have limited sight, right? These AI objects, these AI algorithms are pretty good at helping me identify things, reading things.

Scanning documents. The AI voice recognition is pretty good. And also turning [00:29:00] PDF documents into spoken text that I can listen to, like that is great. And I think as I think about the ways that AI is going to help people. With physical disabilities, say for instance, like robots that help people walk like creating limbs with artificial robot hinges that will use AI to, help create more, fluid moving joints.

Like things like that is gonna help everybody, right? Technology designed to be assistive to people with disabilities. When we're doing things that human beings can't do, right? When we use technology to help human beings become whole again or even just give them access and, gives people possibilities that they thought were cut off for them. Making them be able to connect with people more being more [00:30:00] independent. Technology use like that is pro human, like even if people are coming out looking like cyborgs and they have robot hands and legs and that might scare people.

That's actually a pro human thing. It's making someone's life better and making them able to go out into the world with independence in a way that they would not have been able to before. And that technology that is developed for that finds its way into everyday use for people without disabilities.

All the time.

So you know that I will leave on that note. I hope that you enjoy this episode. The M three Bear Cast is brought to you by Male Media Mind. If you would like to become a patron of M three, you can go to male Medium Mind slash you can go to patreon.com/male Medium Mind. For $5 a month, you have access to our groups on Telegram.

We have, after shows of our live streams, [00:31:00] we have a book club, and I'm always looking for new ways to thank our supporters for the, for their continued support of our shows and content. And I will catch you in the next episode piece.