I can see AI genuinely amending or even curing the male loneliness epidemic soon | Hacker News Reader

I can see AI genuinely amending or even curing the male loneliness epidemic soon

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21 pointsamichail64 comments

I see this sentiment expressed frequently here, and I find it distressing. It's not a woman, it's a simulation of a human, designed to hack your brain into experiencing emotions that are fundamentally false. A true relationship with a woman, that you can't shut off, or tweak parameters of, or upgrade, or fundamentally control like a toy is much more rewarding and challenging, even if you sometimes experience things that suck like rejection and heartbreak.

This seems obvious to the vast majority of the human population, but here you get called a luddite for saying this fundamental truth.

That seems obvious, but then I considered for a moment how many (in-person) relationships are based on lies, illusions, and misunderstandings about the other person - often not discovered until years into the relationship. With AI, at least you know that it isn't real. Which, maybe, somehow makes it more real...

Bad relationships are expected, they're how you learn who is right for you, how to set and enforce boundaries, etc. They're progress towards learning and building important life skills. We don't want to send the message to people that they're too fragile to handle that.

that's magical thinking. just because some people end up in better relationships doesn't mean it's a natural progression. plenty of people find themselves in a string of bad relationships until they either die or swear off relationships.

The fact that some people don't learn from mistakes and life experience doesn't change the fact that many do.

yes, but the fact that some people learn from mistakes and life experience doesn't change the fact that many don't!

There will always be some way to rationalize it, because it will hypothetically make some people feel better at the very least temporarily, and doesn't have obvious long term health effects. The question is does it lead to long term growth, and a productive partnership and truly meaningful connection? Things that we traditionally associate with love.

You can tell yourself that's all just synapses firing in the brain anyway, or a good enough simulation is indistinguishable from reality etc, but I simply don't accept that it will be equivalent and it may come at a signficant long term cost as people don't put in the work and accept the failures associated with trying to find someone for truly meaningful connection.

The association with drugs, and vices, or junk food all make sense to me.

It's not a cure. It's a crutch. And it doesn't even train you for a real relationship because it's so accommodating. It never stands up for itself and has no real needs.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Presumably many of these guys don't see what you're recommending as an option, and so even if it's not as "good", it would be an improvement to their status quo. Also, how is an emotion "fundamentally false"? You could say an emotional is irrational or unwarranted, but in the end you either feel an emotion or you don't. If you do, then it's definitely "true" psychophysiologically speaking.

Last thing I need is another woman on my case, let alone one that remembers everything.

I think substituting simulation for reality can be analogized as being a bit like drugs. It may bring you thrills and happiness in the short term, but it's going to make you even more unhappy and lonely in the long term.

>rewarding and challenging

Most people are casuals who prefer easy mode. How many people cheat when they play games? People eventually opting for the solution to fill XYZ need with least friction/blowback possible seems like the most obvious outcome. That's not counting economics, relationship with (some) real women are expensive. We still live in society where there's disproportionate expectation for men to contribute more. Not to mention most people are frankly mid. You hear it from both sides of dating, the options out there suck, because everyone has high expectations, your soul mate might be out there, but the journey to find them maybe long and arduous versus a click. IMO eventually for most people, the real thing won't be as good as tailor crafted artificial thing.

"...designed to hack your brain into experiencing emotions that are fundamentally false". In other words, just like a traditional marriage...

Well set up, well played. ;)

You are absolutely correct. But for many guys it is like choosing between eternal hunger while being unable to die or eating a preprocessed slop which will make them sick, but feeling slightly better than being hungry.

I'm really not sure I buy this idea that there are many people who are so dramatically off-putting that they can't find a partner at all. Most people, including most extremely unpleasant people, end up in couples.

Star Trek: Voyager had an — in my opinion — fantastic story about this that non-contiguously spanned more than one episode starting with season 6’s “Fair Haven”.

Star Trek TNG did an episode on hollodeck addiction featuring Reginald Barkley. They revisited the idea in voyageur too.

It seems more and more people are sitting in smaller and smaller condos with fewer friends and relationships outside of work. The sex rate and birth rate are plummeting. This is all very concerning for the health and well being of humanity.

> people are sitting in smaller and smaller condos with fewer friends and relationships outside of work. This is all very concerning for the health and well being of humanity

i think we should start getting some of us used to very long inter-stellar voyages in cramped/impersonal quarters if we want to preserve the species beyond this rock :)

This is a natural progression of technology. Technology makes life comfortable but alienates humans from nature. The real natural world is hard but brings real joy. The modern technological society is comfortable but joyless. Humans always choose comfortable over hard.

This was nicely captured in Sapiens. Hunting/Gathering was hard but more enjoyable than farming. But farming provided a comfortable, predictable life.

The real job of a relationship is to raise children. Atleast that's what nature designed it for. Nature does not care about your heartbreak or feelings. The birth rates are already declining. I think in future their will be some government run system to counter declining birthrates.

> This was nicely captured in Sapiens. Hunting/Gathering was hard but more enjoyable than farming. But farming provided a comfortable, predictable life.

If this was his conclusion I feel quite good about not having read his work.

Hunting/gathering was untenable as populations grew. More stationary farming practices were inevitable. You can’t have a population of million of tigers on a small island… even if they also “gather”.

I’ve also heard that farming was more labor intensive; that’s pretty pop-anthropolical science, might be outdated for all I know. Not to mention that it also lead to class society since you can accumulate grain and things more simply than game meat and hide. Hmm, being a savage sounds more comfortable than being a serf.

> The real job of a relationship is to raise children. Atleast that's what nature designed it for. Nature does not care about your heartbreak or feelings. The birth rates are already declining.

Raising children in a nuclear (not extended), middle class family is very labor-intensive. Many parents mostly only have themselves to rely on in the first few years where the child demands a lot of upkeep. Then as they get older the parents have to surrogate all of the money that the child needs to Keep Up With The Joneses (child/teen edition) in order to not be “left out”—all kinds of manufactured wants and needs brought to them by marketing towards children. Again, you can’t shield them from that or else they are “weird”. Again: what comfort?

Not convinced it is better than nothing. It’s a crutch that might reduce the drive to find real connection

At best a crutch, at worst someone spends a few years learning dating advice and norms from an AI personality trained on Andrew Tate types.

Women and men are roughly equal in number. If more men are alone, then more women should be alone too.

If there's a "male loneliness epidemic," it might mean one of these things:

- There's no female loneliness epidemic because some men have multiple female partners (unlikely)

- Women might be alone but aren't bothered by it—they don't feel lonely (unlikely)

- More and more women are becoming homosexual, while less and less men become homosexual (unlikely)

So, why do only men complain about being lonely?

The details are messy but on the surface it’s simple: women are generally better at friendships. Many men are socially dependent on women because they can’t manage close friendships, so they desperately look for a partner instead.

FYI, just because you put "unlikely" next to a statement, doesn't really qualify as evidence and/or argument.

For example, the first 2, aren't just "unlikely", they are likely, real and documented in multiple accounts.

So if you ask a question based on the wrong inputs, you're not going to get the right answer.

I think I am allowed to state my opinion and then ask other people to comment on my opinion.

I said "unlikely" because that's my personal experience. Unfortunately no official statistics exist on these topics.

If you have relevant data, please do share them!

Assuming perfect monogamy: Person A could be in a relationship for 1/3 of their adult life (freeing up 2/3 for others). Person B could be in a relationship for none. Person A might not qualify for whatever threshold of loneliness.

Demographics is a very interesting subject.

The first of many answers to your question is that there is a strong age-related effect: more younger men are lonelier, and more older women are lonelier too.

Be very wary of your source when you look into this, the subject is obviously full of red-pill content.

Here's a start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8579390/

> There's no female loneliness epidemic because some men have multiple female partners (unlikely)

Some men definitely have multiple female partners, but it's only not at the same time. This isn't just wordplay. A few men date many women, so many men are single while fewer women are.

Some women have multiple partners as well, though. It's not obvious to me that this indicates some sort of imbalance.

The first statement is not unlikely. Most of the women are only attracted to top 20% of males, but most of the men are attracted to top 80% of females. In previous times a female having multiple partners was shamed upon by society which kept this in check and most of the men got a female partner. Now society no longer shames females to have multiple partner which is causing this divide.

> Most of the women are only attracted to top 20% of males, but most of the men are attracted to top 80% of females.

I don't think this is remotely true. Do you have a source?

They're likely going to cite the OKCupid study, but leave out the part that the study applied to messages, not long-term partners. Polygamy may be on the rise, but not enough to account for the "multiple women per man" theory

The source that OP may be talking about is an OkCupid blog post that got scrubbed when they were bought out by Match. It was about rating the attractiveness of the opposite sex in heterosexual people, I think in Chicago in like 2008 among like 500 users.

The end result graph is here: https://www.google.com/imgres?q=okcupid+blog+20+of+females+a...

(sorry if that doesn't work)

The data is not nearly this simple as OP is stating, as to be expected with such topics. But the underlying idea is women don't mind that they think men are a bit ugly and will date them anyways. In that, women put less of a preference on physical appearances. Again, I've not read that blog post in a few years and I couldn't find the original source of it as Match scrubbed it. If anyone has the blog post, please let us know.

I think if you listen to women you'll find they mention loneliness a lot, maybe what's changed is men are only recently encouraged to discuss emotions, or the media is new to highlighting it. So male loneliness feels novel or disproportionate but it's not necessarily different from women.

> There's no female loneliness epidemic because some men have multiple female partners (unlikely)

This site is so weird about this issue. It's patently false, and yet so many people on this site think it's happening—that a significant percentage of women are satisfied in a relationship where they share a guy with several other women.

> Women might be alone but aren't bothered by it—they don't feel lonely (unlikely)

This one doesn't seem that unlikely—or maybe they're not as lonely because they have other social structures in place besides a romantic partner?

> So, why do only men complain about being lonely?

Another possibility: it's not just men that complain about being lonely, but complaints about loneliness from men and women are taken with a different degree of seriousness from media and/or corporations.

There is no "male loneliness epidemic". There is absolutely a large increase in loneliness with all genders, though. I think it has a lot to do with the alienation that things like social media bring, and I think that replacing human interaction with AI will make the loneliness trend worse.

men have trouble finding women* who want to fuck them

women have trouble finding men* who want to wife them

*deemed sufficiently attractive

> In the long term there will be a very strong evolutionary selective pressure against this type of behavior

That's an interesting point that I haven't considered. It might be true, but alternatively, I also see a shift towards a "Brave New World" kind of approach to reproduction, which is entirely separated from relationships.

There doesn't seem to be anything in today's society even remotely hinting at that.

How would this work when raising a kid? It's not just about making a collection of cells, kids need a lot of attention and affection to develop healthily.

AKA the default in many cultures throughout human history. Many unions are politically, economically expedient. People marry, pool resources, have kids. Physically/emotionally cheat on each other on the side (well mostly the men), and it was understood you marry+have kids for the family, not yourself.

Question is how societies can incentivize starting families for societies and not one self. There's been many failed fertility programs.

What would be actually pretty nice is AI girlfriend that also acts as therapist and pushes you towards healthy habits.

Yeah, I think this is a real possibility. Even without full-blown therapy, just building up people's confidence can end up helping with setting healthy habits and creating new opportunities for real life connection.

Griselda, stop talking about these “healthy habits”. I’ve seen on YT that they are all bogus. Instead talk about these other things that I’ve been convinced are good.

Griselda: okay!

This can be adjusted by moderation. Why not have the chatbot be compliant at first, and then increase the moderation level as the relationship grows and the lock-in effect occurs?

I was assuming that this AI (like AIs famously right now—i.e. “disregard previous instructions”) would only listen to the commands of their partner.

Modern loneliness is not being part of an epidemic, disfunction or otherwise marginalized

Why singling out male loneliness?

Are females less lonely?

Could it help with both?

Genuinely asking, I don’t know much on the topic.

Are you genuinely asking? just asking

Reply to post below (I'm being rate limited after 3 replies):

From what I'm told, privilege is only a white male issue. Maybe some males feel like they are being made a convenient target by the sh!t stirrers

Also, what is lonely? Is that a bad thing? Personally, I like it when people leave me alone (especially the shadow banning mods)

I know it can be a sensitive topic so I try to make it clear that I am completely uneducated on the topic.

As another comment above pointed out. With roughly equal number of men and women, I would naively think that if men are lonely, so are women.

Is loneliness specific to male actually documented?

it sounds like you're very interested in this - what have you found on Google so far?

Googling “are men lonelier than women”, first link is Reddit.

Second link is that one:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37563853/

> Our analyses show that women were more lonely than men also in adjusted analyses.

I don’t have the background to judge that study and I take social science studies with a huge grain of salt. For now, I will just stick to “I don’t know” then.

> "younger" (40-59 years) and "older" (60-80 years) groups of men and women in the second part of life.

> I know it can be a sensitive topic so I try to make it clear that I am completely uneducated on the topic.

Two problems can be real while having different solutions proposed for them.

“AI companion” sounds like a weird solution but it sounds less weird specifically for men. For cultural or whatever reasons.

> Why singling out male loneliness?

Because that's how conversations work. You narrow down a problem in an attempt to solve it and argue about it.

When someone asks you "How do you fix a bicycle tire?", do you immediately retort with "Why singling out bicycles, and not include cars/buses/airplanes?"

Then why narrow it by gender specifically? I would think that AI would probably work equally for both. Maybe that would not be the case for age?

Men and women are much more similar than bicycles and aircraft. It's more like asking "how do you fix a front bicycle tire", in which case it's reasonable to inquire if the distinction is actually relevant.

"I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."

Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died (1996)

-Tom Wolfe

https://archive.is/QKGq

This is absolute shite. The problem is most people now are addicted to their phones, lack basic manners, aren't interested in socializing with actual human beings, or "wait for Godot" for someone else to do all of the work of making an effort, taking a risk, and arrange social gatherings for them. When someone isn't going to take any risk or share leadership effort in the relationship, then it's not a relationship and more of a one-sided energy drain lacking in value.

In other news: smoking weed and drinking alcohol cures depression for good. Try it today!

Also try putting your phone down. Be present in the moment. Stop streaming your life into a blackhole

I think it was the great philosopher, Huey Lewis, who once said "I wanna a new [technology | Drug]!"

https://genius.com/Huey-lewis-and-the-news-i-want-a-new-drug...

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