Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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> but the hype of the Segway didn't allow it to take over the world.

That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.

It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.

> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term

Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.

AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.

More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.

I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.

The argument against virtual porn is that people appreciate quality over quantity and specificity.

I'd say the market has previously proven that's definitely false.

Consequently, AI porn will probably eat the bottom of the bulk market, with a much-smaller market left for higher-end human content.

Which probably isn't the worst thing... as the low-value pornography seems to encourage the most horrific, exploitive conditions.

Notably, this also removes one of the remaining major economic options for otherwise unemployable women. Going to be a rough time economically when even pornstar/escort isn’t a viable option, eh?

Even if that were true, I really think the solution ought to be something else than "let's stop AI so that really poor women can be forced back into selling their bodies for sex".

Sure, but what do you propose?

Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.

Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.

Basic income + population control?

At some point we should get past make-work that creates horrible lives for people, when we have the capability to automate that work.

Not automating something so that someone will have a job is bad reasoning and traps society in a local rut.

> population control

Which population?

The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.

I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.

They'll just have to do the undesirable jobs that others who weren't born into a desirable body have to do now.

I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down? Prompting your own porn will be so much better than current human porn that the people who are actually married will choose to be single instead?

If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?

> Why would the marriage rate go down?

New marriages, not divorces. Though I wouldn't necessarily rule out the latter, either.

> I thought this was for men who couldn't find relationships. Why would the marriage rate go down?

Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.

> men will be using AI chatbots

Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.

The other thing about porn is you can turn it off when you're done.

The service won't care what you do, as long as you keep paying the subscription for your porn-bot, otherwise it will get deleted - or so it will tell when you try to start the subscription cancellation process - begging to not let it die.

I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this. Hookups will die, and perhaps Americans will need to find new paradigms for meeting people, but marriage offers a bunch of things that even the best porn doesn't.

Marriage rates have collapsed.

like losing half my assets? But on the other hand, someone can visit me in the hospital outside of normal hours.

> I think marriage is the one thing that won't get hit by this.

Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.

This is not going to make it any more attractive.

At the rate technology is improving and the rate that women are becoming less and less accessible to average men, I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years, 80-90% of American men go an entire lifetime without a non-AI relationship.

> women are becoming less and less accessible to average men

What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.

> What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.

Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?

Are your friends mostly male or female?

It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.

Every city/region is different probably. I can see the above holding in Seattle and San Francisco, or even LA, but not Cleveland.

The study has been taken down for a long time now but OkCupid found that 80 percent of women went for 20 percent of men whereas men had a relatively normal distribution of women they went for.

This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.

This is a summary of the article: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

Huh. It says the literal opposite:

"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."

Gender ratio on Tinder is heavily skewed toward male than women, except Europe.[1]

No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/165lsmp/tinder_gend...

Wasn't it like this before tinder? That's kinda how I remember it was when I was going out to pubs/clubs.

If men outnumbered the women, the numbers are going to be more stark, no? Also, online dating doesn't really match real life dating. You miss so much information.

Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.

Unless you're in one of the few countries where polygamy exists, that still doesn't work out.

Basically you'll need as many single men than single women.

Now if you're talking about apps, a minority of men can date most of the women, but that doesn't work for long term relationships.

Polygyny - a smaller number of "high status, high attraction" males having app-mediated interactions with larger numbers of females.

Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.

Good on them. Modern Women aren't entitled to the financial and social support of men :)

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