"Until the recent rise of A.I, it was fashionable to claim that consciousness was an illusion or, perhaps, an ambient property of everything in reality..."

"... in either case, not special. Such dismissiveness has become less common.... Consciousness is lately treated as something precious and real, to be conquered by tech: our A.I.s and robots are to achieve consciousness. What follows, then, is that love is also real and also a target to be conquered. The conquest of love will not be abstract but vividly concrete for everyone, especially young people, and soon. This is because we are all about to be presented, in our phones, with a new generation of A.I. simulations of people, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will likely appear within the social-media apps to which we are already addicted. We will probably succumb to interacting with them, and for some very online people there won’t be an easy out. No one can know how the new love revolution will unfold, but it might yield one of the most profound legacies of these crazy years...."

Writes Jaron Lanier, in "Your A.I. Lover Will Change You/A future where many humans are in love with bots may not be far off. Should we regard them as training grounds for healthy relationships or as nihilistic traps?" (The New Yorker).

I tried the Grok app that let's you talk and be talked back to. You're forced to pick a voice — either male or female. It's binary. I picked male — not because I'm a heterosexual female, but because the female voice I was offered was perky and energized and the male voice was calm. It wasn't egging me on to feel that this is so much fun. But then I only used it for less than a minute, because it felt slow. A waste of time. Reading is much faster. Talking might work better if I succumbed to the illusion that a real person was on the line. I'd have to choose to go slightly mad to feel like that. But don't people make that kind of choice all the time — even in those seemingly "healthy relationships" with real human beings.