Hey hey safe injecting rooms have real harm minimisation impacts. Not convinced you can say the same for chatbot boyfriends.

That's exactly right, and that's fine. Our society is unwilling to take the steps necessary to end the root cause of drug abuse epidemics (privatization of healthcare industry, lack of social safety net, war on drugs), so localities have to do harm reduction in immediately actionable ways.

So too is our society unable to do what's necessary to reduce the startling alienation happening (halt suburban hyperspread, reduce working hours to give more leisure time, give workers ownership of the means of production so as to eliminate alienation from labor), so, ai girlfriends and boyfriends for the lonely NEETs. Bonus, maybe it'll reduce school shootings.

Given that those tend to have positive effects for the societies that practice this is that what you wanted to say?

> Even "the dating scene is terrible" is human interaction.

For some subset of people, this isn't true. Some people don't end up going on a single date or get a single match. And even for those who get a non-zero number there, that number might still be hovering around 1-2 matches a year and no actual dates.

Swiping on thousands of people without getting a single date is not human interaction and that's the reality for some people.

I still don't think an AI partner is a good solution, but you are seriously underestimating how bad the status quo is.

We do see - from 'crazy cat lady' to 'incel', from 'where have all the good men gone' to the rapid decline of the numbers of 25-year-olds who have had sexual experiences, not to mention from the 'loneliness epidemic' that has several governments, especially in Europe, alarmed enough to make it an agenda pointt: No, they would not. Not all of them. Not even a majority.

AI in these cases is just a better 'litter of 50 cats', a better, less-destructive, less-suffering-creating fantasy.

Not all human interaction is a net positive in the end.

In this framing “any” human interaction is good interaction.

This is true if the alternative to “any interaction” is “no interaction”. Bots alter this, and provide “good interaction”.

In this light, the case for relationship bots is quite strong.