Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Studies conducted with families in the Arab GCC region found that digital addiction is highly prevalent among both parents and children. Digital addiction (DA) refers to a problematic relationship with technology characterized by symptoms of behavioral addiction, including mood modification, salience, tolerance, conflict, withdrawal symptoms, and relapse. While addictive use of technology is not yet officially recognized as a clinical diagnosis, certain forms, such as Internet gaming disorder (IGD), have been classified as clinical conditions. Notably, IGD was included in the ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases) by the World Health Organization in 2018.

You might think that such AI companionship bots--AI models with distinct "personalities" that can learn about you and act as a friend, lover, cheerleader, or more--appeal only to a fringe few, but that couldn't be further from the truth. A new research paper aimed at making such companions safer, by authors from Google DeepMind, the Oxford Internet Institute, and others, lays this bare: Character.AI, the platform being sued by Garcia, says it receives 20,000 queries per second, which is about a fifth of the estimated search volume served by Google. Interactions with these companions last four times longer than the average time spent interacting with ChatGPT. One companion site I wrote about, which was hosting sexually charged conversations with bots imitating underage celebrities, told me its active users averaged more than two hours per day conversing with bots, and that most of those users are members of Gen Z. The design of these AI characters makes lawmakers' concern well warranted.

Relating a quip by Soviet economist Nikolai Fedorenko, Yuri Maltsev illustrated the problem with socialism in his foreword to Ludwig von Mises's Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Shvets writes, "modern AI is able to manipulate an unheard of amount of information, and hence, arguably it might steer investments in a more productive way than has ever been possible by Adam Smith's invisible hand." Baby boomer parents have created kids who are dependent, used to winning "prizes for losers." Shvets believes this era is more toxic than smoking, with loneliness, increased suicides, declining literacy, digital addictions, and impaired analytical capacity. Society will achieve such a high level of productivity "it will liberate humans from the need to toil in order to survive, and by that stage it is likely that alternative avenues of personal satisfaction will also emerge."