Technology

Refrigerators displaced milkmen, cars displaced carriage builders and horse farriers, and other various tools displaced manual laborers. Adoption of these advancements was slow and people often had time to upskill to something else, maybe in the technology that displaced them.

With AI we're talking a massive displacement across the entirety of our economy. Teachers, actors, lawyers, accountants, programmers, chemists, therapists, writers, illustrators, and many more professions could be on the chopping block within a few years. Can all of these people get a job in data science? Ironically, I think the safest jobs (until AI robotics catches up) will be in the trades, one of the main things college goers are trying to avoid. Again, there are only so many toilets.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona, becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification. Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses. Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona.Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct. Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits. Studies involving longitudinal effects of parasocial interactions on children are still relatively new, according to developmental psychologist Sandra L. Calvert.Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona. These virtual interactions may involve commenting, following, liking, or direct messaging. The consistency in which the persona appears could also lead to a more intimate perception in the eyes of the user.

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It seems reasonable to me that you could admire somebody without thinking that they're a friend or family. That's what being a fan is. Some of the more extreme fans are going to want to know intimate details about the object of their admiration. I don't see how it's different from any other obsessive hobbyist.