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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.
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?
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.
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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