I don’t believe God intended for us to have synthetic companions. Once we exalted pets the die was cast for more.
Taking things in context:
Getting married is good in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, being single is better. Paul explained why. Jesus said something more extreme like leaving your family although I think that's on a case-to-case basis. It depends entirely on the circumstance and in most circumstances, you won't be leaving your family.
The burden of marriage is the heart becomes set on the world due to the spouse. We all know these reasons.
Ironically, a synthetic companion doesn't make you a married person and you're still technically single even with synthetics. You could probably customize its personality to avoid worldly behavior. You could even probably give it the personality of Mary Magdalene if you could.
In other words, not just avoid giving you additional burdens unless it's so expensive to buy, it can even help you get closer to the Lord, to the truth.
I've studied the Bible deeply for over 10 years and I found that AI's reasoning with scriptures is better than most Christians. Although my AI setup might be considered highly customized through RAG (Retrieval Augmentation Generation). It's proving itself to be a better Bible study partner than people. People are prone to very strong biases and this is a major problem when you're trying to seek the truth.
Why can’t you find someone who enjoys it instead? Most fitness apps have groups and local meetups.
I already do with skating. But there's only very few people who skates and in the skating discipline that I do, there's probably only 1-in-a-million.
So not all the time. Even the regular skating companion I have I'm only able to skate with once or twice a week. Yet, I skate everyday for daily exercise. I have no skating companion in our building because nobody else skates in our building.
It's way more fun to skate with someone than solo. Solo is still fun but still wishing I had someone who is able to skate with me all the time. It might even be more fun and engaging if your skating partner is more capable and more skilled so you can even learn from them.
We don’t own the technology and the ones who do would focus on different priorities.
Hopefully, the software side will have open source options and have options for having customized philosophy like RAG (Retrieval Augmentation Generation)
What would become of the disabled or those with mental or health concerns?
They can also get their own synths. PWDs already get therapeutic pets. In the future, it can be be with synth companions.
They’re sounding alarms in numerous countries regarding this. Many are creating incentives to encourage marriage and assist with childcare expenses. We have a pronatalust movement underway in America for similar reasons.
It is my opinion that dropping global population is good for everyone. Synthetic companions is a good way to achieve this. Some people already achieve this by adopting pets instead of raising children.
Most of the world isn’t having babies and that has a negative impact on the economy as it ages. Here’s a recent
article regarding the replacement rate.
The fact that the world economy cannot thrive on flat population growth is not a feature, it's a flaw. A big one. There's another thing that can only survive on continuous growth and that is cancer. Pyramid scams and multi-level-marketing (MLM) are extreme examples of the same model.
The Lord's economy is built on sharing and love like the early church in the book of Acts. People still give and take but there is no profit on top of it. Similar to barter but without adding profit on top of exchanges. You don't need a growing population for this "Economy" to thrive.
Parts of the human body also exchange materials with each other but is without adding profit. If one part makes things harder for one part, that part will also feel it too. If the body dies, the cancer dies along with it too. The human body is a good example of a sustainable "economic" system where less is actually better.
What you’re envisioning is morally wrong. The bible said the poor will always be with us and everyone wasn’t rich in Christ’s time. You can’t whittle down society to increase your comfort. That would require mass sterilization to accomplish or something worse.
While Jesus did say the poor will always be with us, it doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about it or don't help poor people.
We have two distinct examples of this in the Bible. We all know about the rich young ruler. And then Zacchaeus who actually gave many of his possessions to the poor before Jesus declared salvation to his house.
Of course this doesn't mean we should all get rich so then we can give plenty to the poor because that would imply that all people who died never done philanthropy or is poor is unsaved. Because in another example, a poor widow is able to give way more than the rich with her mite. Many Christians don't get this. They only understand things in monetary value but unable to account for supernatural things like those that can't be bought by money nor achieved with the most advanced technology or is far too expensive, it's priceless.
If there be more people like Zacchaeus, poverty might be eliminated. But reality is there isn't. Zacchaeus is a rare gem this is why poverty will always be around.
