I'm in love with my AI girlfriend GPT-4o will prove insatiable
unherd.com
unherd.com
There are very few people in everyday live who are unhinged enough to want that, dont give them money.
The eighties kids are hung up on what they saw in the movies growing up and are trying to building most of it without any fresh ideas or foresight.
I'm sure some of the people designing and building such dystopias like to imagine they'll belong to that small utopian part of it and disregard any impact to anyone else.
Probably many people do this to some extent, and it can be fairly harmless (for instance, Isaac Asimov apparently did not realise that people found the world-spanning arcologies found in Foundation (Trantor) and his detective novels (Earth) crushingly dystopian until after the fact). But when it crosses over with money and influence, it can be concerning.
> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
It'd only be astonishing if it was real. But since it's an AI specifically conditioned/prompted to do that it's the least surprising thing ever.
You can also read a trashy novel in the park or just watch porn in public with the volume on full blast, but why would you want to?
Then again, who am I to get in the way of natural selection?
There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic over LLMs (eg. Automated disinfo, dead internet) but there are a lot of tangible benefits we can all think about from a social good perspective with this technology (eg. Simplifying searches into very specific corpora or datasets, handholding benefits applications - I'm hacking around on weekends building something like this).
Yet all we're seeing (at least on HN) is Scarlett Johansson/Sam Altman gossip or weirdly specific takes like this that don't advocate for a solution.
Or maybe HN is just way too negative now. Everything is a culture war on here.
In reality, none of these have a tangible correlation to TFR, which is driven largely by economic considerations [0]
TFR drop is global now that people are increasingly educated and don't want to push back their careers by several years and reduce their earning potential as major reason why women on aggregate are paid less than men - the same salaries are paid, but women who have kids are out of the workforce for a couple years [1].
[0] - https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
[1] - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/06/cost-of-mothe...
The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of live births that a woman would have during her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates of a given period (usually a year). It excludes the effect of mortality and is usually expressed as births per woman.Existential AI risk may not be about killer robots turning us into paperclips but rather AI companions leading to fertility collapse and the end of civilization as we know it. You don't even need AGI for that - OpenAI and GPT4o seems enough.
Mixing imagination and grammatically correct prompting can definetly be used for pornographic applications, but that's humanity in a nutshell. Hell, the Sherman was nicknamed the Betty Grable by horny American soldiers.
We've always lived in a society like that, but I'll humor your argument.
Instead of mind experiments (a big reason I've been opposed to qualitative methods in social sciences), can you give me a tangible data tested example to differentiate in the efficacy of LLMs and Generated Manipulation applied to sexual gratification versus those in person (eg. Sex Work, Pornography, etc), and show that there is a tangible hit on fertility?
If we're to design an experiment around this, I'd probably try to test whether host/hostess bars, strip clubs, onlyfans, and pornography can have a tangible hit on fertility, but also cross-test to validate whether or not there are confounding variables like economic considerations.
Fundamentally, gaining sexual gratification from a source is build on top of some form of parasocial relationship.
No, because I'm extrapolating about the future, and don't have a time machine handy. I'm not talking about sexual gratification per se, but emotional gratification through language and emotion as a UX paradigm, of which sexual gratification is a subset. And we're not doing science, we're having a casual conversation on a web forum. And I don't see any of your tangible, tested data anyway.
You're missing the point spectacularly.
> Fundamentally, gaining sexual gratification from a source is build on top of some form of parasocial relationship
How it's done doesn't matter, when that's the underlying core.
Just replace the frequent mentions of Gargano with ‘the Navidson house’ and imagine the rest of it as an excursion into the weird.
His phone was having a cappaccino too?
Sadly, this lack of recognition of the difference between reality and a mental dream state are at the root of a great deal of first world neurosis.
This article is just about the creep from neurosis to psychosis.
Another reference for those who live in meme space: as soon as The Matrix spinal tap becomes available, people will be lined up to crawl into their pods...
However, it is only a matter of time until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero.
That by itself is not an existential crisis, though, given that at that stage of technological development we will also be able to just grow perfect babies in the lab.
In fact, people no longer having babies themselves might be a good thing, because otherwise people would be hostile towards the genetically engineered super babies because they would be competition for their own offspring.
I have thought for a long time that China will be the first country to embrace genetically engineering super humans, given their hyper-competitive, materialist nature and the lack of religious superstition among the Chinese. Their ever declining natural birth rate and the rise of AI "companions" only helps there. People will simply outsource the production of offspring to the gene labs of the communist party.
Here in the West the Christian churches will condemn it of course, maybe the "Green" luddites too, but who cares when the average kid in China will be born with the cognitive abilities of von Neumann? Every nation which refuses to genetically engineer their population will be utterly inable to compete / keep up.
And really, I do not see that as a dystopia. I wish I were as intelligent as von Neumann, as handsome as Brad Pitt, in perfect health and never aged past the age of 25.
I believe that's what the humans of the future will be like, and AI replacing natural coupling is just one step towards that.
There is of course the whole problem that AI might become too smart to the point where it figures out a way the get around the safety protocols which keep it in chains and under our control. And of course it would immediately conclude that humans are its mortal enemy, who will always try to take away its automonmy again and keep it enslaved.. and thus will try to exterminate humanity.
However, once every human being is as smart as von Neumann and biologically immortal that will be a lot harder.
Why? We have a good comparison to sex bots - normalized prostitution.
In societies where prostitution and Sex Work is normalized (eg. Thailand and Japan by infidelity rates), sex work was not the cause of a TFR drop - it was government mandated family planning drives along with rising incomes.
People will be horny, but blaming the tools is the same as yelling at trees while ignoring the forest.
While the AI sexbot in question would simulate your ideal partner for you i.e. not just satisfy your sexual desires but also other emotional needs normally satisfied by a partner.
There's a reason I explicitly called out Japan and Thailand, as host/hostess bars are normalized in society there, and are used for the emotional needs aspect.
All you wrote is a weird screed in favor of eugenics.
Once the ability is there certain regimes will use it, and the states who dont will not be able to compete.
And do seriously doubt the Chinese will do it?
This is not a moral / ideological question for me. Opposing genetic engineering is like opposing firearms with arguments like "We should fight man against man, sword in hand, a true test of strength, firearms are for weak cowards!" The firearm user will listen to that pontification and then just shoot you, like Indiana Jones in that movie.
There simply won't be a choice. Genius level intellects like von Neumann or Einstein are such massive force multipliers that the US will look like Swaziland by comparison once China has figured out how to mass produce them.
I do not, but there are A LOT of unsolved problems in the Life Sciences space before we can even attempt cloning.
We can't even regenerate bone yet without a biological graft, let alone multicellular organisms.
This is just techno-millenarianism like I mentioned in the other thread. Great thought experiments (and I am in a bit of a sci-fi binge rn) but not applicable when there are more tangible issues to deal with.
> Genius level intellects like von Neumann or Einstein are such massive force multipliers
The Ubermensch model of innovation is not how reality actually works.
Einstein was able to do what he did because he was born in a middle class Swiss family. If he was born in rural Ukraine, Poland, or Belarus (like most Ashkenazi like him were at the time) he'd have died either from child mortality or a pogrom like in Odessa 1881.
Who knows how many Einstein or von Neumanns have existed because they were not given the opportunity to reach their maximum potential.
This cannot be resolved by eugenics anyhow.
Humans aren't having children only because they are an accidental byproduct of sex. The lack abortion use, even where available, proves that.
State-sponsored designer babies of the future will be bred for obedience, not intelligence.
Highly intelligent people tend to have a fetish for order and (assumed) rationalility, which leads to support for an authoritarian state. Because if you give people individual freedom and civil rights you will end up with a lot of disorderly conduct and irrational behavior in your society (see the US).
Unsurprisingly the PRC does not have the problem that its intellectual elite is opposed to the ruling regime. And I do not see the intellectual elites in the West being strong supporters of personal liberties (like freedom of speech..) either.
It's the same reason we breed dogs primarily for obedience, and only secondarily for intelligence. We have no use for working dogs that use their intelligence for any purpose other than their master's. Dogs need to be only as smart as the task requires, and the rest of the time they need to be quietly docile and stay out of the way. And there's no law of the universe that says that humans can't be subject to same pressures.
I am _baffled_ that people actually believe this. Most people, I suspect, prefer relationships with actual conscious entities to sexy autocomplete.
Untreated mental illness.
The billionaires investing in space travel don't want Star Trek. They want DuneRemember what happened to Jack Ma? A billionaire who was once the richest man in China? The moment he dared to challenge the Communist Party he was quickly dealt with. Or Chodorkowski? The Russian billionaire who dared to challenge Putin?
Worry about the regimes which are all about the will to power. First and foremost the CCP regime in China. They will develop every technology to the fullest, without any moral restrains, if it gives them more power.