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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.
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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