The Age of Sirens

Distraction has evolved. Discipline must too.

With technological and economic progress, more and more products call out to us and urge us to spend our lives consuming them.

AI appears to accelerate this trend.

Last week, Elon Musk’s X launched a version of Grok called companions.

The app lets you chat with flirty and raunchy AI characters.

Right now, the experience with characters is clunky and awkward. But perhaps it won’t be long before these beings become completely entrancing. The creators are not stupid and will certainly make these characters appeal to our animal instincts.

In Greek myth, the sirens lured sailors to their doom with their song. Today, AI characters won’t lure us to such an extreme end, just to a sedentary and simulated life. By doing so they follow the pattern of other distractions – TV, internet, and mob entertainment.

AI friends are not real friends. They may have their uses, but they are no substitutes for companionship. The simulation of life is not life at all.

AI companions are not that new, but they are becoming more engaging, seductive, and socially accepted by the day. Their call will only be amplified over the next few years.

We should stay clear of them while we can, strategically stigmatize the worst of them now, and steel our nerves for an even more distracting future.

Perhaps we can’t do better than to heed Seneca’s words:

These are voices which you ought to shun just as Ulysses did; he would not sail past them until he was lashed to the mast. They are no less potent; they lure men from country, parents, friends, and virtuous ways; and by a hope that, if not base, is ill-starred, they wreck them upon a life of baseness. How much better to follow a straight course and attain a goal where the words “pleasant” and “honourable” have the same meaning!

Moral Letters 123