Before soft drinks were mass marketed, no one drank one every day and certainly didn’t drink more than one. The six and a half ounce original size was enough for everyone involved.
The photo below is what is considered small today, and there is no end in sight.
A lot of advertising goes into selling soft drinks, and anyone who wants to make a lot of money will have ads on social media. And here we go. Two activities drive social media use. The first is the need to interact with other people on more manageable terms. The second is habit.
The size of soft drinks went up and up because the companies selling the product made large sizes cheaper per ounce so people naturally spend more to get more. Getting a sixteen ounce cheaper than a twelve, and a twenty ounce cheaper than a sixteen ounce drove sizes larger.
Social Media is the same. But instead of money, it is the time you spend on social media that determines how much dopamine you get.
Oh, look, the rabbit hole, it got deeper.
AI, other than being responsible for some truly wretched writing, has slipped into the first part of the equation. People who are trying to manage their ability or lack of ability on social media, can now get an AI “companion” to hang out with or to talk dirty to, instead of finding a human. Those ads that target my demographic think I want a companions with great dental work, implants, and who wear as little as possible and still be shown on social media. Some of them look perfectly human, but humans are not prefect but that’s another subject.
AI is not a singularity but rather a collective. Irrespective of intent, AI delivers what the instructions ask for.
Just like the people who began drinking soft drinks because of marketing, the size of the product in AI companions will grow bigger. Not in bottle size, like soft drinks did, but in time, the currency of social media.
Don’t believe me? How many times a day do you pick up your phone?
Let’s step back to the AI companion for a moment. These programs are designed to keep the person behind the keyboard behind the keyboard, in a word, time. The more time the human spends with the AI companion the more normal it becomes. The small coke was 6.5 ounces and now you can get a 32 ounce, designed to be one serving, at any convenience store.
Soft drinks have both sugar and salt, and humans have gotten accustomed to have a lot of both in their diets. It’s taken a while, but now people realize it’s not a good thing, and so subspecies of soft drinks have arisen with less of either, but we don’t know what chemicals replaced the addictive ones.
Subtly, soft drinks went from being a rare treat to a multi-billion dollar industry. The effects of this much mental and emotional junk food being released on a population has never been fully understood or measured.
We do not know, and cannot know, how AI companions will shape how multiple generations of companion users will manage interactions with humans.
Take Care,
Mike
AI and social media drive human propensity for envy which festers until it becomes resentment. Then along comes a megalomaniac to harness that resentment, then he stirs the resentment into anger, then violence.
And here we are, getting our dopamine fix without understanding (or refusing to recognize) that the “dopamine” isn’t always a “happy drug.”
Excellent, Beverly!
Alcohol is a happy drug until it isn’t, and the need for it grows. The contents of soft drinks are the same way.