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It reminds me of a friend of mine who went to a trip club to see some adult film star he liked, despite the fact that it was a weeknight and he had to get up early for work the next day. He got hammered and made sure he got more individual attention from her than anyone else in the place, and when he realized it was 11 and his handover was already going to be bad enough, he informed her he had to be leaving. She kept protesting, explaining his work situation, and she kept telling him YOLO and you can survive one bad day at work, and you just need to sober up a little and you'll be fine, etc. Then he uttered the magic words: "I'm out of money". That pretty much ended the conversation right there and he was free to go.
So yeah, this kind of relationship is ultimately pretty hollow, and I don't see the appeal personally, but some guys spend big money on hookers, strippers, and other empty stuff. The business model won't be built around this being a substitute for human interaction generally, but around various whales who get addicted to it.
Well, that's the interesting thing.
AI gets hyped up, as e.g., an infinitely patient and knowledgeable tutor, that can teach you any subject, or a therapist, or a personal assistant, or editor.
All these roles we generally welcome the AI if it can fill them sufficiently. Tirelessly carrying out tasks that improve our lives in various ways.
So what is the principled objection to having the AI fill in the role of personal companion, even romantic companion, tireless and patient and willing to provide whatever type of feedback you most need?
I can think of a few but they all revolve around the assumption that you can get married and have kids for real and/or have some requirements that can only be met by a flesh-and-blood, genetically accurate human. And maybe some religious ones.
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
When we interact with teachers, therapists, or editors, we're interacting with them within the confines of a particular role. You shouldn't use your editor as your therapist, or vice versa, and they shouldn't use you as theirs.
But with friends and romantic companions, we're hoping to interact outside those confines, with the person herself. If I only interact with a role she puts on, that's not a good friendship or romantic partnership. Same thing if I'm always putting on a role for her.
With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.
What's to say that a "friend" or a "wife" are any less or more a role that somebody is playing?
There's certainly sides of me that a friend of mine would never see.
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But... and this is a critical point here... better than many people are at being friends or romantic partners.
Better at performing each individual act associated with being a friend or romantic partner? Conceivably so (at least several model upgrades from now), within their constraints of being limited to computer systems. But my argument is, that's missing something of the core of being a friend or romantic partner.
Better at being a friend or romantic partner, despite that, than many people who can't visibly let someone behind her roles to the person herself? Entirely possible, but that's still missing something most people want.
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I gotta finish writing up the "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them" bit and its siblings, but :
Don't be nervous, No, don't be nervous
I'm not like other guys who have a surface,
What you girls really need's a soft, fuzzy man
(An atmospheric man) A shimmering puff of indistinct love
What's better than the vague embrace of a soft, fuzzy man?
Superstimulus is a distraction, here. "Better" is a distraction, here. They don't even have to be that good or that smart to be dangerous! The machines can be everything you want, and more critically nothing you don't.
Imagine what happens when you can snap away every trivial inconvenience you saw in a relationship. I don't think it'll be a critical problem for everyone or even necessarily a majority of people, but the people who don't handle it will be in very bad shape, either when the fugue breaks or because it doesn't.
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You'll always feel inferior to men who were able to build a relationship with a real woman. It'll gnaw at you.
Probably true for most people, but I think it speaks to a bug in the human condition more than anything.
It's awfully depressing if the point of building a relationship is to try and fix your inferiority complex...
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Presuming those relationships last.
Which is a sizeable "if" in the current era. That's why I think the AI companion is a possible death blow. Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down, this becomes the 'best alternative'/substitute good.
This thought only just now occurs to me, but if we took two otherwise similar guys, one who married a woman and another who just went all in on an AI companion, bought VR goggles, tactile feedback, the requisite 'toys' to make it feel real, and such.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone, and these two guys meet up to compare their overall situations.
And the other guy is still 'with' his AI companion, shallow as it is... would he feel better or worse off than the guy who had a wife but couldn't keep her.
Are those women not settling down leaving a number of men who want to? Or are they just part of the urbanite endless casual dating scene?
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But that's not true. There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.
You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.
No, simply pointing out a failure mode that human relationships have that an AI really does not. The AI has other failure modes that are more dystopic, of course.
The human relationship failure mode is one that that I've now personally observed multiple times, unfortunately, happening to people who do not deserve it.
I do not think the AI is inherently better, I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.
And that is VERY VERY bad for society.
Objectively fewer than in years past. That's the point. This is simply adding to an existing trend.
And we can extrapolate that trend and wonder if we'll get as bad off as, say, South Korea. We know it can get worse because worse currently exists.
I'm not here trying to JUSTIFY men choosing the digital option. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying I don't see a reason why, in practical terms, they'd reject it.
And does it have appeal to you?
Not in the current form.
I'm dedicated to pursuing a quality of "authenticity," which I don't have perfectly defined, but definitely requires that my partner be a real human, with 'natural' skin, brain tissue, and standard human DNA. The thing that I'm ACTUALLY wired to find attractive, not something that mimics those things closely enough to pass a basic inspection. Related to why I don't really like Tattoos on women.
In many ways, we are descending into my version of hell, where finding meaningful connection with other humans is harder than is needs to be, where women are more focused on careers and adventures, at the expense of their own happiness, than even trying to find joy in bearing and raising kids, where men are fundamentally purposeless and nobody bothers to even try to create a purpose for them, and everybody is busy trying to live at the expense of everyone else, b/c coordinating to create that better future is HARD and we aren't able to see past the short term consequences of these actions. But I can, and it seems increasingly obvious where this is trending. And nobody with power is doing much about it.
And its all being patched over with digital (i.e. INAUTHENTIC) simulacrum that sort of satisfy the various urges without really fulfilling the purpose for which each urge exists, and these experiences that are simply insufficient to make you happy if you care to look and notice the cracks in their facade.
All the worse because I can clearly imagine a better set of circumstances that is happier for everyone, including myself, and I have a vague idea of how we could get there, but no real clue on how to implement that plan, and thus I am left to scrape by with whatever my individual efforts can achieve.
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