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I'm reminded of... I wouldn't call it a study, but a post I remember that characterizes many of the most popular video game companions as professional sycophants whose role in the video-game power fantasy of the self-projection protagonist was to affirm how awesome and attractive you.
The example I remember was in the Bioware RPG Mass Effect, where the player plays the Super Awesome Special Forces Secret Agent Officer, Commander Shepard in the multi-species galaxy, where you are (allegedly) an amazing leader ready to make the Tough Choices. The first game's gimmick was not only the claim that your Big Decisions would matter in the future, but also the morality system that let you play a heroic virtuous paragon (who consistently deferred to / agreed with the Alien UN authority figures) or a ends-justify-the-means Renegade (who could be a raging racist). There was even a romance system where you could sleep with your subordinates, including a star-trek esque alien blue woman.
The second game's gimmick, among other things, was the ability to re-recruit most of your other alien squadmates from the first game and sleep with them... even if you were a raging racist infront of them. The player romance fantasy for the totally-not-gypsy coded geeky tech girl might be the dashing captain who was a white night who saved her late father's reputation (by covering up crimes that got a lot of people killed), and hey it's totally romantic if she loves you so much that she's willing to risk killing herself before a critical mission just to sleep with you...
...but she'd make the same doe eyes and declarations of love and how irresistibly attractive you were if you were a genocidal bigot who punched women for mouthing off on live television and turned over an autistic child to have his eyes stapled open and be tortured for Science (TM) after sleeping with an abused trauma victim tormented by the same racial-supremacist organization that you are currently working for and can repeatedly voice support for.
The virtual waifu was, in other words, incredibly popular. And like most of the most popular characters in the franchise, was never anything but supportive and/or adoring for the player self-insert protagonist.
So when you say fake audiences fawning over the player/protagonist... I believe it, because we've already seen it. It was just far more limited and harder to program and write for a decade ago... which is to say, should be in the LLM's training data.
Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it, without being so crass as to expect the hosts to. Figure that out, and then we're talking.
Don't we already have wAIfu chatbot companies, with scores upon scores of paying customers that suddenly go on suicide watch, when their chatbot doesn't want to have virtual sex with them anymore?
Anyway, this is precisely the source of my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.
What are you talking about? Rationalists have totally noticed. Some even think is a good thing; if we are not going to force women to have sex with incels, we can at least allow virtual waifus to ease the pain.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)
One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).
Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.
It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.
Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.
We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.
If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)
But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...
...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.
That's not exactly true. The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps. I also find that women treat me much better in Asian communities, so the current hostility and distrust between genders is most likely cultural.
Politics are reaching pathological levels and causing a lot of issues. Another big issue seems to be that women have too many choices (rather than too few) which makes them look for better alternative all the time (and comparison is the thief of all joy or whatever). Many relationships are the most fun the first few months, and then the novelty will wear off, but if these people jump from guy to guy as a consequence of this, then they're messed up in a sense (for instance, addicted to the dopamine rushes associated with the early stages of relationships). It's not a biological fact that most men will end up as losers.
But this is what the Rat community wanted: More technology, more connection, fancy algorithms on which people could compete. The Amish do not seem to have these problems, and women who have only had one sexual partner are much less likely to want a divorce on average. All these problems are a result of materialistic rat-adjecent mentalities. You cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking which caused the problem in the first place.
It's difficult, by doable (and when compared to engineering cat-girls, downright trivial) to become a high-value man. This won't help you get a high-quality women though, unless you're in an environment in which they exist, so women will have to improve themselves as well. It's nothing difficult, they'd just have to be feminine, which would happen automatically if our society didn't hinder the process.
As far as I know, forced marriage was mostly done out of necessity, but a second (and very common) cause is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant, which is a social no-no. So they rush a marriage, because then it's okay. Crisis averted I guess. This still happens today by the way.
And no, I'm not a drug addict, and neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in
We need to get rid of modern politics, it's awful. We also need to get rid of modern views of human nature which are entirely false (the erasure of gender, tabula rasa, the fear of masculinity, the lie that women should be masculine). Oh, and likely porn as well. This would basically solve every problem you listed.
A couple of interjections if you’ll forgive me:
It absolutely did, I was there. Lots of people got interested in dating apps b/c trying to solve this in the real world had failed for them.
My understanding is that ‘true’ wireheading is not endless cocaine, it is figuring out all the reward systems in the brain and replicating the signals directly. Including those you get from playing and achieving things. Whether or not it’s desirable, I think this would probably work as the relationship between feelings of accomplishment and happiness already seems pretty plastic: there are people who feel satisfied with very small accomplishments and literal billionaire geniuses who feel like failures.
EDIT: for the reward signal thing, a useful analogue is hacking software. It's very difficult to make software unhackable because however sophisticated your DRM system is, sooner or later you have to flip a bit that says
user_has_been_verified = True. Rather than hacking the DRM system you just find and hack the check. Picking combination locks works the same way: rather than finding some way to hack the combination, you just insert a hook and manipulate the part of the mechanism that unlocks the door if the combination is correct.When did the first larger-scale dating app launch? I was also there in the 2000s, apps weren't really a thing until very late in that decade as I recall?
I am also not very good at dating, but things were more or less along the traditional lines where 'go out drinking and/or dancing, occasionally you will meet somebody' was pretty much true. I even landed a wife!
Now AFAICT there isn't really even anywhere to do those things, and if you find somewhere I'd certainly expect a high concentration of Chads and/or skilled PUAs -- so the apps are all there is, and it doesn't seem that great.
No idea. Maybe OkCupid was around in 2012/2013?
Good for you. Didn’t happen for lots of people. See “Radicalising the Romanceless”. There were absolutely lots of lonely young men, most of whom were perfectly decent looking and dutiful, who didn’t appear on women’s radars.
Lots of people didn’t have anyone to go out drinking or dancing with, or were too low down the hierarchy and therefore repellent. Newspaper ads and then later dating sites came into being to serve this demographic, which is why they were originally called ‘lonely hearts’ ads.
I am quite prepared to believe that dating apps have made this worse. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing - you need a sufficiently large number of angry young men before the problem even becomes visible. But modern dating was working badly for a lot of people a long time before the apps.
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