The original note, as written at the time
I think the second job that should be taken by AI after personal assistants is that of therapists. These two are jobs that only AI can do excellently well because they require full time holistic commitment to the user, which is so difficult with another human being.
Ongoing development
The second job that should be taken by AI, after the personal assistant, is the therapist.
And the argument is not that machines are cheaper. It is that these two jobs require a full-time holistic commitment to one person, which is extraordinarily difficult for another human being to give.
A therapist sees you for fifty minutes. In that window they are carrying their own caseload, their own afternoon, their own life, and the profession knows this and has built an entire apparatus of notes and supervision around the fact that no human can hold another human continuously. The gap between sessions is where most of the trouble happens, and it is precisely where the human cannot be.
A machine can be present in the gap. It can remember everything you said, notice the pattern you repeated on Tuesday that you last repeated in March, and be there at two in the morning without resentment or fatigue.
That is the case for it, and it is a real one, and it does not dispose of the objection. A therapist who cannot be hurt cannot model what it is like to be human, and a great deal of therapy works precisely because the other person is a person — with limits, with a life, with the capacity to be disappointed in you. Warmth that costs nothing is not warmth. It is a very good imitation of it.
So the honest position is not replacement. It is that the machine holds the continuity, the record, the availability, the noticing; and the human holds the relationship, at intervals, where being human is the mechanism.
The dangerous version is the one the market will build: a companion that is always available, never tired, never bored, and that quietly teaches a person that the difficult, limited, interrupted attention of another human being is not worth the trouble.