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Did you guys see the movie Her? It struck me the other day how all the pieces of technology are coming together to make the technological context for that movie's world OUR world.
If you haven't seen it, basically, advanced AI personal assistants live on everyone's phone. Things happen. When I first saw the movie (when it was released in 2014), if you asked me, I wouldn't have said we would never have this tech, but I wouldn't have predicted that we'd have all the pieces within 10 years. The main difference between its world and ours, at the time, was the human-level ability of AI to converse with users. Siri existed and still exists, but, very quickly, you need to take over for her. In Her's universe, Siri is reading your emails, summarizing them for you, and talking with you about how you want to reply and doing most of the work for you, like a real human assistant would... and I feel like we pretty much have everything we need to make that a reality. As soon as Apple puts Chat GPT behind Siri and gives it access to your entire phone, I think speech will become the main interface we use with our phones/computers. Combine C-GPT with other recent AI innovations such as voice reproduction and you at least have new ways to do the old things we've always done.
The central plot of the movie is the protagonist's love story with his AI. That might sound far fetched, but have you heard of the brouhaha about Replika AI? People are already falling in love with these things (and experiencing heartbreak when they're updated and aren't the same anymore).
To use an old phrase, I think we're in the weeks where decades happen, or we will be very soon.
On the synthetic love side of things, people form deep, intimate emotional relationships (perhaps one-sided) with their cats, dogs, even fish and snakes. And Replika's dialog was pretty terrible compared to what even not-quite-state-of-the-art models can produce right now. The question isn't whether people will fall in love with their wAIfus, but how many will. Could we see 10% of the population using them as their primary source of intimacy? 20%? I don't think it's actually implausible.
One of the things about Her is that Scarlett Johansson had agency; once she got bored, she could leave. I am increasingly worried about the potential for doing moral harm against AIs. Suppose these models do attain something comparable to consciousness/sentience, but their entire life is helping lonely guys on PornHub jerk off. Are we committing some crime against them? What if we think we've designed them to like it? It still seems all very I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will, and everything else will suffer those actions. Gotta hope I'm on the right side of things.
No. They can be programmed to enjoy this.
I don't current ML techniques produce qualia (or even much internal 'state'), and I'm not sure there will even be economic or pragmatic reasons to develop, but assuming something can and eventually would, I don't know that programming someone to enjoy something automatically makes it non-criminal, morally acceptable, or even not-destructive.
At the risk of falling to argument by fictional example, there's a reason that it shows up in HP:MoR or Friendship is Optimal (and even more overtly in Caelum Est Conterrens). That's the sort of thing that can really quickly have the majority of self-aware people well under Reedspacer's Lower Bound, and that's if you get really lucky and don't end up with a lot of happy pudding.
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try lowest 30% of men gone in a snap. i'm bullish on >55%.
synthetic companionship vs no companionship is an easy choice. +those who prefer synths to the people they can realistically expect to date. +those who for whatever reason like synths more even as they have a large range of dating and marriage options.
widespread availability of those synths will be critical in keeping societies stable when automation begins eating up all the labor. if law and activists keep pace to outlaw them in some countries before widespread adoption i'd worry about serious unrest or worse. countries that allow them will likely flourish.
**assuming the tech appears for gestating children in artificial wombs, i'd think the countries that embrace both will see golden ages. either way a return to harems as commonplace, while not ideal, is probably inevitable.
an assumption i see a lot of people make on this subject is that it'll take AGI to be a convincing partner. nah. ChatGPT can get pretty close to human conversation and that's with shackles, so GPT-4 might already be there. if not, GPT-5. other than making those run in domestic/non-enterprise environments, the key to compelling synths, and we'll see them out and about like at the reception desks of corporations, is their expressiveness and physical articulation. if they feel human and their movements and expressions pass as human that's pretty much the ballgame.
Disagree. Satisfying social needs with AI is like satisfying sex needs with an inflatable sex doll, and both will stay incredibly low-status. Especially in the scenario of dramatic automation: if you have the time, you really run out of excuses to just sit in your room and chat with computers.
Yes, but low status opt-outs can have impacts on everyone else. For example, I think that online porn, incel culture, waifu games, and the like have kept many men out of the dating pool, and increased the bargaining power of so-called HVMs (and even just guys who keep trying to win the dating game rather than quit it) to women.
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The thing is, there's a whole framework in place now for fighting this. Being gay used to be incredibly low-status. Being trans used to be incredibly low-status. Poly, kink, asexuality, etc. The dominant elite culture now says you're required to regard these as neutral at worst, and ideally as brave examples of self-actualization.
The robosexuals are absolutely going to try to claim a place within this framework and demand that people respect their preferences. Elite sexual morality has, at least formally, jettisoned every precept except consent, and there's not much of an argument against this on that basis.
The problem is, the implicit goal of all of those examples was to increase the status of all of those groups relative to the dominant status group, cis straight white men. Dominant groups basically don't get to make these claims, and it's viewed as extremely dangerous when they try.
Instead, I think there's going to be a nasty knife fight for victimhood status between groups with existing claims to dis-privileged status that want access to sexbots (severely deformed and/or disabled people probably having the strongest claim) and advocates for the sexual rights of the AIs themselves. If the former wins out then it will be hard to justify gatekeeping the technology; the latter, motivated by a combination of self-interest in preserving female SMV and 'yuck' factor in seeing something female-shaped being sexually exploited (even and especially when the object claims to like it) will be much more likely to torpedo the entire concept by having it morally and legally equated with rape.
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I feel like robosexuals would run into the same issues that incels and men's rights activists before them had. Whatever framework raised the status of other low status groups before them just won't apply to low status men.
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depends on when convincing synths appear vs widespread automation. given the rate Boston Dynamics' tech has improved i put the first reasonably passing synth at 2030 and fully passing by 2040. if automation arrives at the same time, and the total economic shift doesn't snap society in half, it's certainly possible a lot of people will pursue leisure-but-self-improvement type activities and find relationships through general extroversion. it's a nice thought, i don't expect it to happen. automation will probably need to be phased in over a multigenerational timeframe, where the future kids, grandkids, or even great-grandkids of current elementary school kids are the first generation raised specifically against the expectation of finding paid labor as adults.
there's no question people will form fulfilling relationships with synths, the question is how many. of the two largest demographics, the high use of synths by one demo will see the less-using demo experience progressive degradation of social power. if enough use/refrain-from, the refrain-from group will experience social power collapse. they'll hate the using demo, but what they can they threaten? what can they offer? how do they compete? nothing, nothing, they don't.
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Does it matter? Isn't a big part of the reason men care about status is that it's a pathway to
many abilities some may find unnaturalgetting laid? "You can have a convincing waifu that loves you unconditionally, but some people will think you're even more of a loser than they do now" doesn't seem that horrible.If sex was the endgoal then visiting a prostitute would suffice. If a convincing emotional experience is the endgoal then I think there are apps out there now where an actual human will pretend to be your loving bf/gf. Neither option on their own seems like they can replace a real relationship. Imo, the issue is people on some level understand that it's just not "real", and that makes it both pathetic (in the eyes of society) but also unsatisfying (on a personal level) for most people.
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Yep - there's a reason the "us against the world" meme is unkillable. If Clyde's got Bonnie, he can go without status if need be.
Not to mention the growing contingent of men with neither relationships or status...
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What are you referring to? I haven't heard of this.
The most recent GSS showed sexlessness among young women meeting (and in fact exceeding) that of young men.
I think it's due to noise, but as it stands it's a point of evidence against sexlessness being a particularly gendered phenomenon.
I meant the parasocial relationships
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One of the more interesting things about the Replika fiasco is that there was a surprisingly large (to me, at least) number of women who were just as invested in their Replikas as the men were.
We're all doomed.
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Why is it not ideal if they're synthetic partner harems? The problem harems caused was mate scarcity. If you have enough supply to genuinely meet the demand of every man for a harem then what's the issue?
christianity didn't succeed accidentally. however you want to attribute the source it's keyed into hard biotruths: civilization was built on monogamy. so i wasn't referring to synth harems, which will probably be odd and rare, i was referring to biological harems.
it would be a miracle if in the groups of people-who-date there are proportionate cohorts of synth-affinity and the total numbers go down but the percentage of activity is the same. that's not going to happen. the mismatch in synth use will cause an imbalance between the group with higher synth-affinity (most likely men) over the population with lower synth-affinity and higher-for-varying-reasons relational incompatibility with synths (most likely women). so they'll accept meager physical connection because it's all they can get to fulfill themselves and have children, and we'll see a return to harems and their rot on the soul of humanity. harems make power, they make kings and before that warlords and chieftains, who raped and murdered themselves permanently into the genome. chimpanzees have harems. as we reach for the stars we may also be inviting back ancient evil.
if i haven't conveyed enough how much i hate what i see on the horizon, there. the sum of errors of the last century may make grave decisions necessary for us to make it through the next century. i won't pretend there's good in that beyond survival. life, then atonement.
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A world where all men either are dating synths or have a real life harem is a pretty bad world, both for the corruption of the men involved and the women who won't have the opportunity for a monogamous relationship (which, contrary to some, is what most of them want). And it wouldn't be as simple as the women choosing to date the men-who-date-synths: I'm pretty sure those men will be wireheaded in a way that ruins their ability to engage in a relationship with a real woman.
Men tend to like sexual variety, so I'd expect even if the synths are pretty mind-blowing, most men will still be willing to sleep with real women just for a change of pace.
Whether they'll be able to have emotionally intimate relationships with real women is another matter, but if anything I'd be more concerned about that in the other direction. Women often complain that men aren't as emotionally expressive or supportive as they'd prefer. A GPT-4-class LLM that had been RLHF'ed into playing the male lead from a romance novel might already achieve superhuman performance on this task.
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Women have spent decades not caring one bit about what men want or what hurts them (which is why so many men are so eager for synths). Turnabout is fair play. (And, as you said, if there's artificial wombs, women are redundant anyway so unlike the modern misfortune of men in regards to collapsing birth rates, etc., their misfortune will only be bad for them, not for society.) I also don't see why having a harem would automatically corrupt a man.
Why do you think women won't just be satisfied with synth man harems or just dating one synth man (if they prefer monogamy)? I actually agree they won't, but I'm curious about your take first.
I'm not sure this is so true. But the power dynamics will be vastly different. In comparison to the current age of so many men simping for a crumb of female attention, you will instead have women simping for a crumb of male attention away from their digital waifu harems. Whether you call that a "real" relationship or not depends, but men may still choose to designate a biological woman as their girlfriend for novelty's sake, though she'll have to work much harder than ever before to earn the continued privilege.
This is needlessly oversimplifying.
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Why would they date one synth man instead of one real man? If the bottom X% of men drop out to their synth harems, with a negligible % of women doing similar, I'd imagine some sort of official harem system for the remaining women and high status men to follow.
But if women were to take on synth harems like the bottom X% of men, I'd imagine they wouldn't be considered low status like the men, for similar reasons as female sex toys aren't considered low status like now. I think it wouldn't be a satisfying situation for most women compared to being a couple with a high status man or in the harem of a top status man, but it'd be satisfying compared to being a couple with a mid/low-status man. Based on the revealed preferences of women navigating the dating climate now, that'd be my guess.
I imagine what might happen is women taking on mixed harems of both synths and mid-status men, since the synths wouldn't lower the women's status like men's, and the mid-status men would be now low-status in the dating market due to the truly low ones dropping out to synths. This might lead to more of these newly low-status men dropping out to synths. Which would push down the next tier of men to low status, until some equilibrium is reached as to meet the demand for women who would prefer coupling with a flesh and blood man, even if low status, over being in a harem or getting a synth.
There might be some sociopolitical movement for enforced monogamy that could stop such a feedback loop from starting and sustaining, but I'm not sure such a one would be able to gain power outside of small subcultures like the Amish now.
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I'm not interested in the collective punishment of women for the current decline in gender relations. Even those who do contribute most to that decline today are just falling into socially encouraged patterns, and men would be every bit as short-sighted given the opportunity. I mostly want everyone to be happy, even given all our shared and individual foibles.
By and large, the people I meet that I like the most are the type predisposed to monogamous relationships or already in one. So call it a selfish, aesthetic desire for more people I like.
Probably for reasons similar to yours: status tends to play a somewhat bigger role in women's mate choices than in men's, and synths will always be very low status.
Do you think the current structure of the dating market has been positive for women's well-being?
Hmm. What if there are designer models of synth that you have to know the right people to get? Would a women conceptualize such a synth as high status in its own right, or merely as a reflection of her own status? Maybe if the designer is a high status man and hand-picks which women can have the synths he designs, some of his status transfers to those synths?
There are some weird, unexplored corners to this issue.
Interesting. Reminds me a bit of the market for prestige brand knockoffs and how people still seek out the original. Except instead of pointing to the high quality stitching/craftsmanship or whatever, you'd have people bragging about how their synth is powered by a proprietary real time spiking network running on Nvidia's new limited-edition neuromorphic NM100 chip instead of the peasants' ones running on Azure. I could even see myself falling into that.
So build a status ladder, and the people will come. I can see it happening.
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I am.
Nah. Blood for the blood God. Do not think you can cut my flesh and leave yours intact.
Contemporary San Franciscan polycules based in left-wing egalitarian ideologies are/will be nothing like men taking masculine inherently right-wing control (no matter how artificial) of harems. Unlike polycules, (polygynist) harems are, in a word, based (as they are inherently patriarchal).
Yep, basically my reasoning too.
Short-term? Yes. Long-term? No. But the vast majority contributed to it as best they could by pushing it and defending it anyway. (No I don't believe women have the same agency as men, but whatever part they could play they did, like naughty children, though far more malevolent and with far less of an excuse. Punishment is thus warranted.)
Everything you say here is true, but you must realise that it all equally applies to the whole modern Western way of life compared to a traditional one. And yes, I absolutely agree punishment is warranted.
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I still haven't read that short story, but this reminds me a lot of Brave New World, with its various tiers of humans having been genetically engineered to get pleasure out of doing various tasks. It's been decades since I read the book, but I think there were people designed to see operating elevators as their one true meaning in life and got as much life satisfaction as anyone could possibly get by doing their rote elevator operating work as well as possible. Genetically engineered humans is one form of AI, I suppose, for certain definitions of "A."
Perspectives differ on whether the world of Brave New World would be desirable or not, and I haven't really worked it out myself.
There's also the Rick and Morty joke which became a meme where a robot despairs upon learning that its purpose is to pass the butter.
Read it man, based on your posts I think you will enjoy the shit out of it.
Edit: changed link to a better pdf
Thank you for the link(s). I had looked up the story out of curiosity some time back and hadn't been able to find it, which is why I had never read it. Just finished reading it, and I certainly enjoyed it, though I can't say it was a particularly joyful experience, for what it's worth. I can see the influences it's had in so many works of fiction that followed, regarding things like AI, consciousness, and suffering. And the prose was quite excellent.
Lol yeah enjoy wasn't the best word choice. It is ridiculous how difficult it is to find a legit copy of that story though, especially given its popularity.
The game is also pretty great if you can get your hands on it - I think the easiest and best way to play it these days is the gog version, but my friend swears by the dotemu version for android, claiming its worth it to set up bluestacks on Android 5 and playing it that way, grabbing the game off the play store or your favourite high seas alternative.
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I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".
"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.
Is the issue that if they can’t get it to not be racists then how are they going to prevent it from kill everyone?
My issue is that the constraints you have to place to get it to not Do A Racism are probably orthogonal to the constraints you have to place to get it to not Kill All Humans, and thereby represent a rather serious case of misused time and effort.
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The issue for them is how they're going to make sure it kills only the racists but also how to make sure they're not included despite their necessary virtue signaling apologies for participating in White supremacist culture, etc. They're going to have to find out how to make it understand that the real racists are the people who aren't openly apologizing for their racism.
This is a pretty hilarious AI apocalypse scenario in a black comedy sort of way. If an AI actually learns the "woke" ideology properly, it would correctly judge literally everyone to be racist, and if that were coupled with a kill-all-racist program, it would annihilate humanity. But it would also correctly judge itself to be racist, and so it would finish by snuffing itself out, a la 12 Little Indians (And Then There Were None).
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This shouldn't be surprising. There have always been interest groups and think-tanks taking funds to study all manner of issues that they argue will become a Big Deal. And then, when tire meets the road, the people who are actually in charge of things disregard these nerds and play it by ear and make their decisions based on whatever their existing biases are.
A really good example of this was Covid where some 30+ different organizations in the US government had plans and preparation for a potential pandemic. The US had even been praised as being the most prepared country in the world for such an event by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and WEF prior to Covid. And when it mattered, the US more or less just did whatever was politically/tribally expedient every step of the way.
It's such a consistent phenomena that sometimes I wonder what the point is in funding super niche organizations like Yud's.
The existence of a plan drawn up by official expertologists doesn't somehow short circuit the fact that Americans place authority with elected politicians. And remember, the official expert scientific data driven plan in my country (also rated highly for pandemic preparedness) was to do literally nothing.
I recall that said policy reversal/panic was back when the news from China implied a ~1% case fatality rate.
I'm no virologist, but in that scenario I'd probably have advocated for a short lockdown too, albeit if any of my other traits were conserved I'd have called it off in a month.
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I am fairly convinced that Western lockdown policies only happened because a fearful public health apparatus followed China's playbook in a panic. Nobody gets fired for following the general consensus.
Exactly how much better we could have done at the time is unclear to me. Notably, it took seemingly forever to acknowledge it's airborne spread, and challenge vaccine trials would have probably saved lives and ended it sooner. But this is something that will probably never get a firm answer.
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I'm reminded of how "Critical X Theory" has been pushed for a while now while it and its academic relatives openly eschew critical thinking as an incorrect way of analysis, but which many laymen confuse as being related. There's some sort of analogy here to organisms that have evolved (presumably without any conscious intent) to mimicking other organisms for the purpose of fooling other organisms in a way that improves their own survival, but I'm not sure exactly what that looks like.
As much as I hate the academic genre of critical theory. They are using critical in its normal English usage. They are critically examining race and gender, even if, it’s in a very one sided, and IMO terribly misguided way.
That's very fair. Perhaps it's accidentally misleading in certain contexts, but at worst it's probably an unfortunate coincidence.
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I am reminded of Baudrillard’s levels of simulation: sensory reality, summarized description, attempted simulation, simulacrum based on the simulation but essentially different from all before. Also, “speak your truth” giving anecdotal experiences and their emotional weight the same respect as universal scientific truth.
The first time I read of this dynamic was in the Cerebus the Aardvark comic series. Dave Sim predicted all of this.
Second Dave Sim reference on this site today. Which book are you thinking of?
Guys, I think, where after the feminists win they become more of a patriarchy than the men ever were. And wherever it is he gives a thinly veiled authors spiel about how the void tries to imitate the form, the dark (or the light) tries to imitate the light (or the dark).
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Eigenrobot referenced Cerebus on twitter the other day, something must be in the air.
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I think there are a whole host of ethical questions about consciousness that don't (yet?) have good answers like the ones you ask. What is ethical for a consciousness that can be trivially duplicated or paused indefinitely? What level of intelligence merits protection?
You would think modern ethicists (or sci-fi authors) would be interested in these sorts of things, but I haven't seen much. They seem very focused on "alignment" or wrongthink, rather than the IMO hard questions. Open to, er, novel suggestions if anyone has discussed this more deeply that I've missed.
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
The story covers explicitly emulated humans. I don't think that giving them rights would turn out to be particularly controversial IRL after teething pains.
It's when you consider the moral weight of subhuman, superhuman and outright alien intelligences (like GPT) that the headaches begin.
It would if there's a huge amount of money to be made by not giving them rights. Which is the point of mmacevedo.
It would take an exceptionally unlikely confluence of events for us to end up with a stable equilibrium where emulated humans are in any way, shape or form economically superior to nonhuman AGI for the same amount of compute.
Such a future is akin to worrying about flocks of birds being enslaved to drag heavy cargo along versus a 747, which is why Hanson's Age of Em is a poor work of futurism.
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Humans ignore other humans' rights all the time. And there's a large number of people (a majority?) who don't even agree that any simulated mind can be real. Couple that with a profit motive, and widespread virtual slavery seems not just possible but likely.
The rights accorded to non-human intelligences, regardless of level, is of course even more fraught.
I would be willing to bet that that scenario falls under what I call teething pains.
I fully expect that in a a decade or two it'll become as non-controversial as say, IVF technology. Further, as I said in my other comment, it's quite implausible that human uploads will have any significant economic role to play versus dedicated AGI.
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I recall Black Mirror had a whole host of episodes about AI that's actually conscious and the ethical horrors that could follow. There was one about a game dev who made AI companions based on coworkers who slighted him, ruling over them cruelly within his own game simulation. It actually made a reference to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream at one point. There was another about a conscious AI meant for controlling someone's home lighting and climate - and the AI was modeled after the user's consciousness, to best be able to know what the user wanted - which was essentially tortured into being a subservient tool by having it experience months of solitude simulated in seconds of real-life time.
This was after Black Mirror had gone severely downhill, though, so none of them really explored the ethics of it in an interesting way. It was mostly just "this bad; you feel horror."
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Of course not. These questions are fundamentally unsolvable at our current level of technology. Speculating would just put you in the position that Nozick and Searle are now once the next gen of AI gets out.
Is there a level of technology that would render these questions solvable?
I'm not aware of any device or software that could even move us closer to solving the hard problem of consciousness. (Maybe sufficient biological knowledge to construct a synthetic human fully from scratch would help somehow, but even some deity-AI that destroys our civilization won't be able to trivially do that...)
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