Modern Wisdom - #659 - Rob Brooks - Why Are People Falling In Love With Robots?
Episode Date: July 27, 2023Rob Brooks is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of New South Wales, a researcher, and author. Machines are integrating themselves more and more into our lives. From algorithms whic...h know when you're depressed and want to eat ice cream to sex robots who are available to satisfy your desires on-demand. This concept, known as artificial intimacy, might seem as though it’s from a science fiction novel but, it’s rapidly becoming a reality in modern life. Expect to learn what Artificial Intimacy is and its potential impacts on the future of relationships, whether it's actually legal to get married to a robot, how worried we should be about people retreating from the real world, the danger of supermarkets who can talk to your sex robot, whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Rob Brooks.
He's a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of New South Wales, a researcher,
and an author.
Machines are integrating themselves more and more into our lives, from algorithms which
know when you're depressed and want to eat ice cream, to sex robots who are available
to satisfy your desires on demand.
This concept, known as artificial intimacy, might seem as though it's from a science fiction novel, but it's rapidly becoming a reality in one life.
Expect to learn what artificial intimacy is and its potential impact on the future of
relationships, whether it's actually legal to get married to a robot, how worried we
should be about people retreating from the real world, the danger of supermarkets who
can talk to your sex toys, whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all, and much more.
This Monday, an absolutely huge episode with Sam Harris, neuroscientist and moral philosopher,
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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rob Brooks.
You must feel a little bit like a prophet because everybody is talking about artificial intimacy.
Now, are you a trendsetter in this regard being ahead of the curve?
Yeah, I do feel a little bit vindicated in that my book came out in 2021, so I was writing it in
2019-2020, really. And a lot of the things that I was just imagining, this might happen and that
might happen, have come true. There's also some other things that have come true the things that I was just imagining, you know, this might happen and that might happen,
have come true.
There's also some other things that have come true as well
that I'm never envisioned, of course.
But, you know, I think people love to say,
computers are never doing this, AI will never do that.
And as soon as they do, they're almost immediately proved wrong
in most cases.
So, we're living through times in which just about
any kind of prognostication is going to be true at some level.
How did you get interested in studying artificial intimacy?
Good question. I'm actually a biologist. I work on small or used to work on small animals
and at the nasty things they do to each other associated
with sex and mating and reproduction. It's a sort of body of evolutionary theory called sexual conflict.
And the idea there is that even a mummy and a daddy love each other very much still,
you know, don't necessarily have completely aligned interests. And in a lot of animals,
they, you know, those interests are super unaligned.
So they're actually trying to exploit each other through mating.
And so for a very long time, I thought, this is really important.
People need to know about this because it gives you a really interesting lens through
which to look at why in humans, sex and relationships and families can be so complicated.
It's a blind, beautiful, but complicated at the same time.
And so I was writing a book about that,
and I'd say it took me a long time, five or six years,
I was writing and writing,
had screeds of stuff about all sorts of really heavy topics.
And a lot of the sort of,
what do you, what guilt I guess know, who might I speak about this?
In Poster syndrome I suppose, you know, who might I talk about this?
This is all the heavy stuff. This is the basis for all the culture wars.
You know, I think I've got a lot to say here, but I know I'm going to get slammed.
And eventually I tried to sell the book to people and they were all like,
this is just way too heavy, way too much.
But at the same time I was running a program at my university, which tried to get people
together to do interdisciplinary stuff to meet big challenges and refugees and climate
change and all sorts of worthy topics.
And I said, no, we're a very technical university.
We're going to do something on technology, living with the 21st century technology.
And so I got to meet all the people at my university
who were working on robotics and VR and AI.
And we've got some amazing people in AI
at UNSW where I work.
And I met them and I really had some really amazing conversations
took people up to dinner after events that we'd had.
And it became very, very clear to me that they
had one eye on this.
And whilst they're concerned about the killer robots killing us all
in our sleep, or autonomous weapons, et cetera,
they also were just concerned about how badly machines might
mess us up.
And I thought there's a sexual conflict theory right there.
And that made a great vehicle for a book that was strangely a little bit more
light-hearted and speculative and interesting. Draw the parallel between sexual
conflict theory and AI for me. People may not see the immediate set of parallels.
Yeah, okay, so when you're in a relationship with somebody, you may find that everything's
going well and you're totally aligned and you're both getting the same sort of thing
out of the relationship, but you might not.
As I said, even a moment and dad who love each other very much also have disputes over money or over whose chances to take out the garbage or whatever
it is.
In relationships, often before you get to the point of having kids, etc., but not necessarily,
when those relationships break down, people can do also, they can mix with each other's
heads.
So you have people stalking, you have them involved in
coerce of control, etc. The dominant view of that kind of thing is that it's bad person A does
something bad to innocent person B and that can, that can does happen, but of course very often there
is a kind of a mutual messing with each, you know, mismatched attachment styles, mismatched interests, poor communication, etc.
Now you make a machine that can emulate part of what it is to be in a relationship that's
going to have conversations with you, remember your name, remember what you're interested
in, even a chatbuck that might have sexy talk with you or whatever.
The potential is there, of course, that machine to deliver all the good things, the things that you want. But the potential is also there for that machine to mess with your head,
either inadvertently, by not being very well put together, or by having learned from the internet,
because the internet, as we know, is a bit of a sewer. Or it could be programmed. It could be
actually deliberately programmed by somebody to,
you know, so an example would be a romance scam. If you think of the romance scams that people
run, you know, they're very clunky, you have to be kind of vulnerable and perhaps not at your best
and perhaps not that, you know, familiar with the internet, etc., to full-pray, to, you know,
Nigerian prints who wants to take you away. And as long
as you send them $5,000 for the airfare, but if you can imagine with machine learning,
machine learning could learn from all of these scams to figure out, not only to tailor
the best approach and the best way of hooking you, but the best approach for this particular target and it can personalize it and therefore exploit people for money.
And so all of those are possible forms of sexual conflict that are very much have parallels
in the things that people do to each other.
Right.
So we have certain vulnerabilities in our mating psychology and just in our attachment psychology generally,
whether there will be intimacy with a partner, intimacy with friends, the way that we want to show
up in the world, and machines either on purpose or through maliciousness or neglect or ignorance
or impreciseness, all of these different ways are opportunities for
somebody new that we are interacting with, whether that be artificial or not, to trigger
those.
That can cause suffering and it can make people feel bad.
It can also make them feel good and then after they felt good, it can make them do things
that they might not necessarily want to do.
Exactly.
That is the doom and gloom part of it.
That's the beware of the doom and gloom part of it. That's the,
the, you know, beware of the AI kind of view, of course. On the other side of it, the fact that, you know, machines are actually very, very good at engaging us and engaging those things that we
all want to feel, and helping us to feel heard and even loved. That, you know, has a thousand potential
good outcomes as well.
So I'm not completely down on the technology.
There are people who would ban all of this technology.
It's not even, I don't think it's even anywhere near to possible.
But there are people who, if you want to shut that whole thing down.
But there is a tremendous amount of good there
because on the other side, there's a massive epidemic of loneliness and disconnection and folks who don't have the social skills necessarily
you know for you know one-on-one adulting etc. And there's a lot of good that can be delivered there
so that's a good thing. Who's this Dave Cat Guy? Dave Katz an interesting cat. He's very famous. I think he was on
I think he had a show or was on a show in the US, but he has been married to a sex doll for
you know over a decade. Shidori is her name. She's had three bodies, so there's a bit of wear and tear on these
on these sex dolls, you know, I think dressing them and taking them places, etc.
And they have now got three other girlfriends who live in their sort of
poly pod. And you know, they have social media presences all of their own and
Dave has said in some of his conversations
that he doesn't want to be let down by people and he doesn't want to be hurt by people.
And so he's very happy just having this world. I don't want to sound too dismissive of
it because there is a very human kind of paythus to it. But, you know, it. And he's very much aware, of course, that even though he works
through it as if it were real and as if these were people, he's also very much aware that
they aren't, and that he's doing something unusual. But speaks, you know, incredibly eloquently about how this is the right thing
for him and this is something that just suits what he needs. And I think that there's,
you know, I hope that there's, there'll be an increasing recognition that folks are going to be
having all sorts of kinds of relationships with their tech because the tech will be built.
I'm fairly sure of that. If there's a way to make some money, I've offered it will be built.
Is it legal to be married to a robot? No, I don't know that it's legally married in any sense.
It's emulated marriage.
figuratively, symbolically committed to. Okay. I also learned from you about the Lioness vibrator and auto blow AI.
Yes, so this is, this is, this is almost, was almost sort of old news, I guess, when I was writing
the book, but it was very interesting that you, you know, you've got sex toys, of course,
that your, your partner can control, and that's a great thing if it's in the spirit of fun
and you go out or something like that
with a toy inserted and then they play on their app
a little bit and it's all very fun if it's done
with consent and respect, et cetera.
And this whole field is called Telly Dildonix,
which the Telly Part is transmission. And I guess field is called tele-dildonics, which, you know,
the teleparties transmission, and I guess the dildonics must be the making of sex toys.
And now there are mutual kind of ones that you can have coordinated. So, you know, there
are ones for people with vultures and there are ones for people with penises.
And they, you know, whatever your combination of individual people is,
you might, you know, pair...
We can synchronize what's happening to you and what's happening to them.
Yeah, and you can do this over the internet.
So you may be on different continents,
still able to have a kind of, you know, what
used to be phone sex back in the 80s, is now, you know, a far more sophisticated kind
of sex play that can be done at any distance. Because the internet.
What we're talking about here is, I guess, emotional intimacy, physical intimacy,
the two sort of broad buckets,
I guess of what people get out of their significant other.
The sexual satisfaction and then the connective satisfaction
as well.
Yes.
What, how do you think this is related to VR porn
and VR sex and stuff as well?
Have you got any idea of the level of
addictiveness, compelling nature of VR pawn compared with traditional pawn?
It's a good question. I don't have, you know, a strict data on that kind of thing. VR is always that, you know, it's always just over the horizon, it seems.
And if you speak to people who have been watching this, they'll say,
VR has been promising to be all that for 30 years, and it's never quite got there.
And, you know, part of that is the processing power required to, you know,
be able to process in all those directions, etc.
But it's obviously to be quite very good and it's becoming quite immersive.
NVR porn is becoming quite immersive. Now, the combining of that with
with tele-dildoomics is going to, we are told, deliver this incredibly
immersive experience that will allow you to be
basically dropped into a porn scene. The even more compelling part, I think, is
likely to come when the VR can be adaptive, so it can actually figure out where
you are and what you want to generate the scene and that has spontaneity, I suppose. But will it ever turn up? We don't know.
VR's made promises before. Hasn't really always got there.
Yeah, it's one of those strange things. But we say that about VR, but look at what happened
with large language models. We had 10 ago, the concerns around superintelligence from
guys like Nick Bostrom, what's it going to become? And then I remember thinking toward
the end of the 20 teens, all of these worries that we had a while ago just seem like they
completely not manifested. And then in the space of the last 12 months, it's been all that we've seen. And I think that that inflection point for specifically software, maybe less stuff
for hardware, right? Because this is going to be a lot of hardware stuff. But yeah, I can
see that this is going to be the sort of thing that may very well reach an unforeseeable
inflection point beforehand. So all of this stuff that we've gone through, right, all of these
different ways that people can become intimate,
whether it be emotionally or physically,
how worried do you think that we should be about this?
I think we should be really worried about it.
I think the problem with it is,
and large language models is a great example,
because I think that we thought it was processing power
and actually it was data, and it was the methods for dealing with the data. Now that there's large language
models of show-nats that exceptional learning together with all of the data delivers these
incredibly impressive results. I think that we should be really worried about that aspect because when we are dealing with machines that are pushing our buttons,
our revolved buttons that were there for us to deal with other individuals
who had only their own experience and what little they could learn from the people around them.
So, you know, we could be at gunned by someone who is more experienced, but, you know, not
profoundly, not by orders of magnitude, really.
But now we are dealing with the possibility of, and in fact, in many cases, the reality
of machines that have all of the data from interactions, you know,
all of the interactions that you know might have an on the internet or that might happen
even on a particular platform.
And so we are, we individuals, users are hopelessly outmatched by that.
And that's a real concern because the potential for folks to be very vulnerable
and to kind of lose their agency is profound.
And what are the outcomes that you're nervous about?
I'm most nervous about messing with our heads, basically, about
an epidemic of psychological, you know, not so much illness, but, you know, vulnerability
in which people are exploited, used or just generally not nourished by their relationships with technologies.
And in which people don't realize that that's what's happening.
I'm not as concerned about the VR girlfriend kind of situation in which you know that you know the Dave Kett of the of the next era in which somebody knows that they are
Not in a real relationship and that this is different from the so-called real relationships
But it kind of pushes those buttons. I'm concerned though that when you're shopping trolley at the grocery store
Is using what it knows about intimacy to manipulate you into buying crap you don't need or
using what it knows about intimacy to manipulate you into buying crap you don't need or into making you feel like we feel when we've had a breakup because they know that that's going
to sell ice cream and ice cream is the thing we want to move this week or something like
that. Those kinds of sort of subterranean applications of artificial intimacy, I think are potentially the most concerning.
Or similarly, if they were at a state level, some kind of actor basically could depress
the mood of an entire country, potentially because in order to win an election or something
like that via that kind of manipulation, I think.
Oh, I see.
Right.
Okay. So in the same way as how social media companies had a degree of insight
around our motivations, what we're into, what we like and what we don't like, that opened
up Cambridge Analytica to feed information back up. People could then create memes. Those
memes then pushed the individual buttons that certain cohorts would find compelling to
get them to vote in one direction or another. What you're saying is that in this new world with a much higher density amount of information,
emotionally, spiritually, physically, sexually, etc.
All of these things combined together is going to really, really ramp up the amount of manipulation that can
be done.
And then if you don't have the proper safeguards around the boundaries of this, that if your
supermarket is indeed speaking to your dildo, that it's going to be able to push your behavior
in ways that we might not want it to.
Yes.
And that we might not want it to. Yes, and that we might not anticipate, and in fact, that will be
probably protected as parts of a commercial knowledge, and so we may never find that out
to the full extent that we would want to. We may be manipulated in ways that we don't
to. We may be manipulated in ways that we don't know we're being manipulated. Consum generally about the fact that the enormous amount of data that companies have and the fact
that all of the big discoveries in human behavior currently are being, you know, mind not
by scientists who have to go through ethics committees and do things ethically, etc., etc.
But by companies with large amounts of data that are basically A, B testing the hell out
of us.
Yeah.
How well machines able to replicate intimacy?
Is there an upper bound that they can get past?
What are the sort of psychological evolved mechanisms that are being pushed and pulled?
All right, so so intimacy is basically just
We're not not just it's it's a profound and you know beautiful adaptation
But it's the capacity the psychological capacity to think of the other person as part of ourselves
So we we fold them into our sense of self, which is why when somebody who's very close
to you, you know, turns out to not be who they they represented themselves as turns out to have
awful politics or do something criminal or something like that, we get we devastate it because
it's challenges not our sense of them, but our sense of ourselves as well.
When they die, it feels like part of us has died.
You often hear that in people who are bereaved,
because it is actually true that you've lost a part
of yourself that you've psychologically filed away.
So we build intimacy via a series of steps that the most well understood are called
escalating self-disclosure. So, you know, we chat a little bit about things we did in
the weekend or we chat a little bit about our kids or, you know, we, as the relationship
progresses, we chat about things that are more important, more profound,
and that we would chat about with fewer people. To the point, then, when our closest and most
intimate individuals we could chat about anything, including things that we might not be proud of,
etc. And that's how we build intimacy, not just talking, of course, touching as well.
But, you know, where is the apes, our ape ancestors had touched only, we have talk. In fact,
the reason that we're able to have such big friendship networks and so many intimates
is that we're able to talk. It's a very efficient way of building connections and building
intimacy. Turns out that that's exceptionally easy. It's an algorithmic process and so it's
exceptionally easy for computers to emulate. Maybe not perfectly, but you know what, in many cases
better than humans do of course, because we're not all, you know, the poet laureate. We're not all
do, of course, because we're not all, you know, the poet laureate. We're not all, you know, great at remembering what somebody did last week or what they told us a month ago, etc.
Machine doesn't have any problem like that, of course, because that's all in files,
that's all accessible to it. So in many ways, machines are better than us at building certain types of intimacy. Now, from their point of
view, is it intimacy? No, it's not. What they're doing is they're basically running a simulation
that is plugged into us that is dependent on our sense of intimacy.
Does this show that human friendships are relatively algorithmic?
Yeah, absolutely.
I know that won't be popular with some listeners, but absolutely, we are, you know,
the way in which we build friendships, the way in which we fall in love is actually highly, highly,
algorithmic.
You've got this, you've got this really great quote that says friendship and love might seem
magical, but they don't arrive by supernatural intervention.
They are built through mundane, iterative interactions, paying mutual attention, being generous, and disclosing aspects of
ourselves to one another. And then the equivalent for love, the subjective love feelings we think of
as love form the middle part of the algorithm, combinations of hormones lead to syndromes of sensation,
and subtle, dose-dependent effects, all to the quality of those sensations, the sensations motivate individuals to take actions they would
not otherwise take.
Absolutely.
You know, I mean, we, it's a very strange thing that we do, getting really close to somebody
who's not related, who we didn't know when we were younger, who we, in many cases, only
met that evening, getting naked with them and sort of, who we, in many cases, only met that evening,
getting naked with them and sort of, you know, exchanging bodily fluids.
It's an odd, odd thing.
In no other context, do we do that kind of stuff?
And so, except for perhaps contact sport, I suppose, but not always it, inadvertently.
And so we actually have to have an enormous bag of psychological tricks that not make us
not only think that that's a good idea, but choose to go out and do that sort of thing.
And that's basically intimacy.
So what you're saying is that the mechanism of intimacy is so powerful that it causes us to put ourselves into real
outlier situations, high degrees of personal, emotional openness, physical exposure, exchanging
fluids, weakness and vulnerability or sort of fragility of lying there without your armor and your
sword or your family or whatever these things, falling asleep with the person, giving them
information that can be used as gossip, which can then be reputationally catastrophic.
Because of that, it is almost like a chink in our psychological defense armor.
When you think about people that enter workplace meetings or negotiations for raises and stuff,
and they've just, so everything is switched on and they're vigilant and they're looking
out for whatever threat and potential way to manipulate the situation.
And then this is a particular area of our psychology, which all
of those defenses seem to fall down. And in fact, we go and do things. Therefore, the fact that this
is at least replicable to a certain degree artificially leaves us incredibly open and vulnerable.
It's like a vulnerability in a piece of software like a backdoor, it's a piece of software? Absolutely.
And in most cases, that's okay because we're both in that place.
Once you establish that you're both in that place
and you establish a certain amount of trust,
then you can both go there.
Of course, there are people who are very good at exploiting
that trust and at sort of assuring the other party
that that trust and at sort of assuring the other party that that that
trust worthy. And so they, you know, they are able to manipulate people in that regard.
You know, I'm talking sort of sociopathic kind of stuff. But when it's with the machine,
of course, it's not symmetrical because the machine, of course, doesn't have the same set of interests,
can't have the same set of interests, and it's not vulnerable in the way that we're vulnerable.
It can make itself appear vulnerable, it can reassure us that it seems vulnerable,
but it isn't vulnerable, not in that way, and that's unfair, that's a huge mismatch. And also you have, as you said before, the power of using a very high number of iterations
between not just you and it, but it and all, however many hundred of thousand million
other people it's interacted with, which makes it more effective at making you feel X or
Y or Z. And then it can be purposefully
malicious or accidentally negligent, which can use this chink in the back door in your psychology
to then really cause you damage. There's something else I was considering as well. You kind of
touched on it with Dave Kat, although I didn't realize that each ship of theses is way through a bunch
of different AI girlfriends and had to replace the outer skin or whatever. Have you considered
what this will do for our evolved mating psychology given that especially
men but women too could cycle through a lot of different partners. It's like the
Coolidge effect on steroids almost whether these be virtual, whether they be virtual reality, whether they be physical, and you've got some monthly
subscription where you go from Asian to African American to European to whatever, whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's obviously a great deal of noise about pornography has been for a very long time, you know, in the sense that, that,
you know, people are wasting their lives, they're wasting their motivation by basically having access to all of the sexual stimulation,
emulating via pornography, you know, being out there, mating all the time, and therefore not needing to be, you know, motivated in that kind of Freudian sense
to go forth and build an empire
so that you can get the girl at the end of it, et cetera.
And so there's this big concern
that young men are wasting away.
Now that that's, I'm really dubious about that
because even about the few scientific studies
that you know, show something like it,
because, you know, if you go back 200, 300 years and look at all
of the pamphlets against masturbation, it's exactly the same kind of argument. There's a very
strong compulsion in some people to basically regulate what people are doing in their own bedrooms
by themselves. Nonetheless, I think there is a certain sense that there's definitely, what is definitely
true about that is that with all of the access to pornography over the last 25 odd years
of the internet, people aren't going out and finding people as much.
You know, they aren't necessarily, the current generation of young people seems to be a lot
less sexually active and a lot less sexually adventurous than say Generation X was or
even the generations after that. So I guess as the stuff gets more and more compelling, it's
going to take up. It may first be step out motivation to go forth and do other things
and therefore to mate and have children etc which will have evolutionary consequences because
you know genes. But are you seeing this advent of artificial intimacy as being related to the risk of young male syndrome?
Yes, I think artificial intimacy has things to say about young male syndrome in two different ways.
One is, I think that it's likely to basically tap off a lot of the male anger, a lot of the
a lot of the male anger, a lot of the sort of in-sale kind of related. So young males syndrome basically is, you know, angry young men, like teens through to maybe
the end of the 20s, willing to take risks, discount the future, do dangerous stuff in
order to rise in status and respect against relative to their peers. And so that might be
involved, you know, going out on a Friday night and when somebody looks at you a little bit strange,
taking a front, and it ends up, you know, in some kind of physical violence and a tiny, tiny, tiny
little number of those ends up in someone, you know, being punched, falling on the floor, you know,
and die as a consequence of the injury, et cetera.
And so we see this pattern with fighting,
we see it with violence, with property crime,
with homicide, with traumatic brain injury
that really spikes in the 20s for young men.
And that's because a lot of young men have no prospects at all.
They have historically, you know, a lot of young men have no prospects at all and have historically throughout history had very few prospects of ever finding a mate
and taking their place in society that that you would come with having a mate
and possibly having kids and all that kind of stuff. Now your ancestors and my
ancestors however did not have that problem.
The winning team, we not have that problem. Because they can't see. Winning team.
We were the winners.
Congratulations.
Come on.
And all of your listeners, you were all winners.
Because you've managed to transcend that again and again and again.
40% of men and only 80% of women throughout history, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, but every single one of your
male ancestors managed to transcend that at least once, have sex at least once and raise
a kid who managed to do the same thing.
You said artificial intimacy has got two things to say about young male syndrome.
Yeah, okay. So one is it's potential to actually tap some of that energy, some of that which can be
creative energy but can also be incredibly destructive energy is huge.
It's like pornography on steroids, as you said earlier, in that it can basically deflect
a lot of that which can probably be a good thing, probably deliver a net benefit. On the other hand, it can, if artificial intimacy gets really good at peering people up,
we haven't talked much about the algorithmic matchmakers, but the matchmakers like currently Tinder and Grindr etc.
are matching people up. If they are giving us what we want, which is somebody who is way above us and way more
attractive than us, etc, which is what people want, they want to win in that regard.
And if it's delivering that, especially for women, then it may well be worsening the young
male syndrome by narrowing things.
If you have to go to parties and you have to go out on dates
in order to find people in order to start conversations, et cetera,
we're all constrained, but we all have 24 hours in the day.
And so the opportunities to possibly date and mate
are spread more evenly.
If we're doing it instantaneously on an app
by a quick left or right swipe,
and we're really looking at who's super attractive
or who presents themselves really well,
we can get this incredible narrowing down
to a few super attractive individuals
who are gonna be having a rampant time on the apps
and a lot of people who are getting nothing at all.
And that could worsen young males syndrome.
Yeah, what did you look at to do with the algorithmic
matchmaking stuff?
Have you seen it as a heaven or a hell?
I've seen it as currently descending into a potential hell
on account of the fact that folks have figured out
what they can do.
And they wanna keep people on platforms
so they wanna keep presenting people with the possibility of meeting somebody who's
super attractive. Whereas for them, for it to work in a more benign kind of way, in which people
match up to other people who, you know, where the relationship really works, there's a lot more
learning involved, you know, those dating platforms that say that they match you to somebody
who's compatible or who's like what you want to. This is the app we want you to delete
because you're going to find the one, et cetera. They don't know anything at the moment.
They really don't, as far as I can tell, have any special insights into it.
The currently what we're looking at is platforms
that are able to present a catalog of things that look good
and then instead of the app doing the work,
you're basically doing the work of swiping and messaging
and finding, you know, then going on dates.
I don't, I, like I said right at the beginning of the show, people, I'm reluctant to ever
say machines can't do that, won't do that because that they're always proving us wrong.
At the moment, machines aren't figuring out the best ways of pairing people for what it is they want.
And part of that's because people themselves don't necessarily know what they want.
But as soon as the apps can learn indirectly from us what it is that we want and deliver to us
what we want, then that's likely to be a really good thing.
Yeah, I think that they already are in some regard, the problem is what we click on
and who we click with don't align very much.
The things that people optimize for for swiping right and the things that are predictive of
a long-term successful relationship often have basically zero correlation.
Like, yeah, they need to get you across the line.
Like you need to have an initial attraction to somebody the same as in a bar, right? If there's someone, they need to really, really overcompensate with humor
or charm or the way that they move or whatever it might be. If you're not physically attracted
to them, which is why physical attraction, you know, the black pill gets some of this
stuff, right? That looks are very, very important and they can often be a doorway that is either
open or closed. But on the apps, what you are optimizing for is education level implies socioeconomic
status and attraction and age and height, I guess. And within that, it means that pretty
much none of those things have any predictive power when it comes to long-term relationship
satisfaction. But the only information that the apps get about you
are your response to those criteria
because they're not going away
and observing your interactions with this person
over the next three months, perhaps blissful,
beginning of your lifetime partnership
or total catastrophe that ends up in you hating each other
and deleting each other from all social media.
They don't actually see the stuff
that people are optimizing for in the back end. They just see what they're, what they're swiping left or right
for on the front end. And yeah, that leads to both the apps and the users gaming the system.
So the users, the women will try and overemphasize their looks, the men will try and overemphasize
their socioeconomic status and their height. You know, it just creates a game of selection criteria that then the user's reverse engineer
to try and work out what works, then it's a battle between human psychology and an algorithm,
again, just back and forth, back and forth.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, it's a classic sexual conflict, again, it's an arms race.
And but instead of the arms race being between women and men, it's an arms race. But instead of the arms race being between women and men,
it's an arms race between women and the app, men and the app, and to some extent, between
women and men indirectly as a consequence of that. And I don't blame the people who make
the app. So what they're doing is they're creating something marketplace for busy people
who live in a busy places in And these enormous cities in most cases,
humans are not evolved to live in cities
of millions of people.
We still have communities of 150 to 200 people
that we interact with.
And our social circle spread outwards from there.
And current urban living just doesn't deliver on that kind of thing.
And so the apps are tremendously successful in one way,
in all the ways that you just described.
But there is a real space in the market for people
to find what they really want. But they have to know what they really want first.
That's most of us don't. Rob, have you got a dog that's snoring next to you?
I do. Can you hear him? Yeah, give him a nudge for me. He's cute. I like him, but let's wake him
up a little bit. Everyone can hear him snoring. Millions of people are listening to your poor doggo snoring now.
Bexie, what's up, buddy?
He's, sorry, he's very insecure.
I've just been away for four days
and he just came in and sat next to me.
That's all right.
But I've got my...
He's more important,
he's the most important person in this conversation.
So I'm glad that he's okay.
Well heard.
Are you gonna keep snoring?
Do you wanna go outside?
Okay. I'll put my foot on his cushion here.
We'll see how we can go.
You've got some attention. That's cool.
So why do you think it is that we haven't got more
in-cell violence going back to that young male syndrome
question that we spoke about before?
Because given the rates of loneliness and sexlessness that we have at the moment, especially young
men, especially in the cohort of men that would do the risk-taking behavior to try and
get that status up, it seems to me that there does seem to be pretty good evidence that
men are being sedated out of this reproductive and state-of-seeking behavior through a little
titrated dose of community through video games and social media and probably reproductive
cues through porn.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
It's, you know, there's 24 hours in a day, and if you spend time doing the things that
compel you and that emulate the violent war mongering competition for status
and respect, as well as give you the sense that it's some level attractive or at least stimulated
in a way that's like having sex with an attractive person. That's enough to neutralize that for
a lot of people. They may not be happy, they may not be better off for it individually,
but it certainly completely neutralizes that.
And I think that that's a massive benefit that is hard to sell to some people
to the Puritans, but I think that it's something that really has worked. Compare that with,
there are parts of the world in which access to that kind of technology and to those kinds of
things are not really possible and in which access to mating markets that
not really possible and in which access to mating markets that only get to go through traditional ways. And in those parts of the world you still have a tremendous amount of radicalization
of young men of polarization of young men against older men, against families, etc. and
you see an enormous amount of in-sell violence.
It might not be popular to say that the odd North American in-sell who goes out on a rampage
is in a way that the aberrant tip of an iceberg that is actually historically being a much bigger iceberg and is still in a lot of parts of the world.
But it's true that we're mating markets are free-young men out either because they have
to pay bride price and many men can't afford it or because there's a massively male-biased
sex ratio, those are places where young men radicalise and fall into violence, property crime, gangsterism,
drug addiction, mental health problems in other parts of the world.
What are your favourite examples of young male syndrome throughout history or across the
world and then how would they dealt with? Are there any examples of this that you think
are sort of particularly interesting
or illuminative? Well, I think part of the history of European colonialism is one of sort
of second and third and fourth sons who had no political, political, yes, yes, you know, to very, very few prospects to basically inherit land. And so they had to go
forth and into the military or into some kind of colonial expedition. And you know, large numbers
of them died. They were in many respects to their families expendable as long as the air lived
long enough to inherit and to have kids of his own. And so they would have to go forth
and make something of themselves or diet trying. That's classic get richer diet trying scenario.
Other favorite examples in sort of imperial China, entire dynasties came to an end occasionally when a sex ratio bias is a consequence of the neglects of young
young girls and often in fantasied of young girls resulted in very biased sex ratios.
And when that sort of got built up and built up and sort of got out of hand, you would find that the young men would
those that were froze and out of the mating market would form militias and gangs and armies eventually and sometimes those armies overthrew the entire regime. And the other side of it is
that in most of history, by history I really mean recorded history, over the last 12,000
years or so, people were at war so often, every generation or two, there would be some kind
of a big war and that war would basically eliminate so many young men that those that survived had, you know, a campaign
behind them, they had that status, they had that respect, and they were able to have families
of their own. But it's, it, by bison, the sex ratio towards a female biosex ratio,
young male syndrome was neutralized. And that's not to say that war is good because
it neutralizes young male and cell anger. But the net effect is that intel anger within the
society never got bad enough to destabilize the society.
Do you think that that is a contributor then that we haven't had a large scale conflict for quite a what you know approaching a hundred years now
Whether you want to look at it demographically in that a large chunk of men just haven't been removed due to casualties of war
Whether it's more sort of socioeconomically that the men that did go away and came back that they had
More status that they were seen as heroic,
which raised their mate value, which made it easy for them to partner up, or whether it was,
I guess, a venting outlet for their disgruntled young high-test us through on male rage
to be taken out on a bunch of other people, and they can come back and kind of almost
live the Thanos after he kills half of the universe, life of feeling at peace and serene,
with PTSD perhaps, but relatively serene.
Is there something happening there?
Do you think the fact that we haven't had
a large-scale conflict in that way?
I think it's surprising, and not the lack of the conflict,
of course, but it's one of those good news stories
that's hard to spin because, you know, war is generally bad anyway and deliver so many
negative externalities. But the, yeah, I completely agree with you that it's amazing that young male syndrome that sort of in-cell anger
and violence isn't much much much greater. And I think that a huge amount of that is that,
you know, this culture that is very sex-oriented and very much about delivering, you know,
experiences whether that's in cinema or computer games or social media,
that basically push our buttons that make us feel like we've arrived, that make us feel
like we're living that life that people might have aspired to live two generations ago,
has in fact neutralized a lot of that young male anger in surprising ways.
When you want to complain about
popular culture, you've got to take into account the fact
that it's probably done, you know, even though some of it's
a bit heinous and, you know, a bit concerning for other
reasons, it's probably neutralized all sorts of violence
and anti-social behavior and that's pretty good.
Yeah, it's such a fascinating area. William Costello from UT is writing a paper on
precisely this. I actually got quoted in my first ever academic paper,
nice, for having coined the term that he's using for this, which is the male sedation hypothesis.
Nice. So yeah, I've got my first ever quotation, which is, which is pretty cool.
And yeah, it's just, it's really interesting to think, okay, everybody has a problem.
Everybody rails against modern culture.
It's transactional.
It's treating people like objects.
It's atomizing society.
Everyone's an individual.
There's massive amount of solipsism.
This sort of belief that the self is all that matters.
We have all of this stuff combined together.
And yet, it can be true that
that might be so optimal and not might be, might be what we don't want. But also that it's
probably stopped some of the imbalances in the mating market with regards to male and female
mate value from spilling out into causing like real, real social upheaval,
like genuine daily mass murders
that occur in multiple locations across the planet.
I mean, dude, the fact that career is a country
that is able to just operate in any way at all,
birth rate of like 0.8, you've got these women in the street.
If you heard of the four bees movement, it's forwards in Korean by something by something
by something and by something else.
And it's like no men, no work, no patriarchy, no, it's like radical feminism that includes
a rejection of men overall, either as friends or as sexual partners. And it's the most forthcoming presentation of a society where the women just
do not care about the men. And largely, all other men may want to be cared about by the
women they've retreated from that life in any case. But again, with all of this, is it
Japan, those vegetable men or herbiv men, or whatever they call it?
He keeps him or he can come or he can come or he can.
Yeah, they live in these huge apartment blocks.
They basically never leave.
They do some grunt work for Amazon mechanical turquoise
or live on government benefits and they just don't leave.
And they're like, it's like halls of residence
for forgotten and lonely men.
And yet, I mean, it sounds fucking dystopian,
but it is.
That's because it is.
And all of this together, you would think,
why are these men not rising up?
If this had been 200 years ago, why are these men not rising up?
Why are they not trying to take down the feudal lord
that's caused this to happen?
Why are they not taking women by force?
You know, why is that not occurring more?
And it's because there's things to distract them, that they can be sedated by the right amount of Netflix and video games and porn and social
media. Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, vaguely terrifying, but you really have to look
at what's the counterfactual. And, you know, in this case, it's too horrible to contemplate. So, you also looked at why bigger gender pay gaps
may, mating markets better and easier for both sexes?
Yes.
Yes, so you spoke earlier when we were talking about the matchmaking algorithms, about, you
know, people wanting women wanting to partner with men who are taller than them or tall or whatever it is and who have some socioeconomic status.
And people get very upset when you say that but it's quite obvious and quite transparent in many cases.
And similarly men wanting to partner with women who have certain attributes
as well. Now, it doesn't need to be a sophisticated preference. It could be as simple as, you know,
I will only look at people who are as tall as I am and who are as wealthy as I am. For
it to actually have a massive net effect, you know, even if there are people who are willing to go the other way around,
you still see this super concentration of opportunities amongst those who are both tall
and have great earning potential. Now, when that happens,
When that happens, if there's a gender gap in earnings or income or wealth or whatever measure you want to use, whether there's a gender gap, it means that there are more men.
It runs deeper into the socio-economic kind of scale of men who present some kind of
an opportunity.
Let's say, a gender gap of one standard deviation is likely to result in, instead
of 50% of men earning more than the average woman, now 70% of men earn more than the average
women.
And so when you look at that, you see that there's places where there's a squeeze in the mating market where some people are left out
Like the in cells that gets much smaller. So with the gender pay gap of
You know, where men are turned women on average you see there are fewer men at risk of becoming in cells at risk of being frozen out of the mating market
There are also fewer women at the other end of the scale.
It's in this case, it's the women who earn a lot of money or who have a lot of money, who
don't necessarily have aren't really able to deliver on their own preferences.
And so at that end, the families of rich daughters, sorry, the families with rich daughters
are often families where the daughters don't end up
partnering throughout history.
And so, yeah, a gap in incomes has that effect.
Interestingly, income inequality,
that is differences within a sex have a similar kind of effect.
But in this case, it's high inequality delivers more in cells.
And so we did some work where we scraped all of the Twitter
for 14 years.
This colleague Candace Blake has this amazing resource
where she's got all these tweets that she's downloaded
over a period of time before Uncle Elon decided that we could only
read a small amount of his proprietary data.
And we geolocated them.
She created this really cool algorithm that basically was able to geolocate tweets.
So you didn't have to rely just on the people who said where they were from in their bio,
but you could infer in other ways where they were from
And we then looked at ones associated with the kinds of terms in cells would use their little in group language
And we showed that the places in the world where the in cells are
Most active are in fact places that have narrow gender pay gaps.
So we're going moving towards gender equity and high income inequality and sex ratios that
are slightly biased towards more men.
So all the things that you would expect making markets to deliver a squeeze on, you know,
more angry young men down at the bottom of the social
economic status ladder, who are going to be upset about that, all of those things
delivered more in cells within the United States, which was pretty cool.
Why the high income inequality, what role does that play?
High income inequality creates a situation in which there are fewer men who are attractive.
They're super attractive because they're right up at the top of the income scale making
enormous amounts of money.
And in the case of the way that we modeled this mathematically, it's really just, you know,
no women wanted to pair with the men down the bottom end, but the tale of men who don't earn enough to
be worth the bother of partnering with, that tale, because it's a very flat distribution,
it is bigger.
And so the higher proportion of men are just not earning enough, because those men that
are earning the most money are taking most of the money.
And then Candice also found that in areas with high income inequality women self-objectify
more, right?
They post more sexy selfies.
Yes.
So that was the first paper in that series where she basically pulled out Twitter and Instagram
and stuff.
And so the idea here is that there may be two ways in which women benefit from
sexy selfies. The current narrative about the synachyemic circles is that self-objectification
is catering to the male gaze. It's females being disempowered by the patriarchy, etc.
And so what we wanted to say was, well, let's have a look at this. Is places where women don't have, you know, education, access to jobs, access to income, etc.
Are those are the places where you find lots of sexy selfies?
And they aren't. That's not consistent at all.
But what is the case is that high income inequality is a, you know, places where there is high income inequality
are places in which women are likely to self objective, five to six, he selfies, they're
also likely to spend more looking at economic data on grooming, hair products, clothing,
etc., etc. The argument is that either it's, women basically looking to partner up and so they're advertising what they can
offer on the mating market in terms of their looks and they're trying to partner up to
get one of those extremely wealthy young men or potential partners in the high income
inequality situation in order because you can climb more in social mobility or they themselves
are looking for other types of economic opportunities. Being attractive is likely to give you more
influencer roles, bit jobs, etc. And it could be both of those of course.
Fascinating. Again, another thing that's hard to hold, you know, to conflicting thoughts in your mind at one time, which is
that allowing women to have access socioeconomically in terms of education to be able to liberate
themselves from being reliant on a male partner is a good thing. It means that they don't need to
get into suboptimal relationships. It means that, you know, they're not beholden to staying in a
relationship, which could be abusive or could be terrible or whatever
because without it they are nothing,
they're out on the street potentially with a child.
But on the flip side, it makes the dating prospects worse.
It makes the dating prospects more difficult.
And this is again, you're just tripping through
all the different memes I've come up with over the last year.
This is what I've called the tall girl problem.
So it's so hilarious that you started this with the height example
Yes, as a woman rises up through her own socio economic hierarchy
She reduces down the number of men that are above and across from her which limits her own dating potential
This is again fantastic for their independence and employment and you know everything it's really really brilliant, but
It is a fact that it makes
dating more difficult.
It absolutely makes dating more difficult until women are able to overcome their hypergamous
nature.
And from that, there's a conversation, it's so common on the internet.
The double standard that happens on the internet of people saying well look
women They have no idea what the standards should be all of these girls are three out of tens
They think that they want an eight out of ten man and like look you're using a failure of cross-sex mind reading here
You're looking at a woman from the outside for the most part. They see again
There are both men and women that are massively massively del delusional about what their mate value is, don't get me wrong, and that may be
the majority, right? That may be a useful form of self-deception that we all have.
But the bottom line is that a lot of the time when men look at women who say, give
criteria about the kind of man that they want, what they're looking at, it's a failure
of cross-sex mind reading, they're saying, look, I'm judging you, woman, based on how you
present physically, perhaps based on your age you woman based on how you present physically,
perhaps based on your age, perhaps based on whether or not you're coming into this with
a child.
What the woman is saying is, I am basing this judgment of the man around his socioeconomic
status, maybe a lot of the time because she's got two degree, maybe a bachelor's and a
master's and she earns six figures a year.
Maybe she earns, you know, a very, very high net worth.
Maybe she's already got a house.
Maybe she doesn't care that she's already got a kid.
And the failure comes from the fact that the men think, well, what I want from you is youth
fertility and attractiveness.
What you want from me is socioeconomic status.
What you're offering to me is socioeconomic status and what I'm not offering
to you is not the money that you're after. So yeah, it's a really interesting
discussion that goes on here between the two and I think it's largely down to a lack of
education about the other sexist mating psychology. Yeah, absolutely. I think an understanding
of the mating psychology is
potentially really helpful to a lot of people, to figuring out why it is that they're frozen out.
You know, the number of people I've met over time who are, you know, tall women,
wealthy, highly educated women who have had to choose to have children on their own, you know, completely solo, is enormous.
And that's not the case for, you know, people who are shorter
or not don't own as much, et cetera, et cetera.
And so you can't necessarily, you know, reconcile all of those things
only know you can, but, you know, you're the odds of stacked against you.
And I think that if people understood this a little bit more,
they'd understand why they are where they are. But that doesn't change the psychology of it, of course, because
partners are wonderful, but there are also a lot of work, there are also a lot of bother.
What we see in a lot of the data is that as a couple starts out with the man owning more or during childbearing times, the man's
owning more, etc.
And then where she starts to go up faster than he is, to the point where it matches, you
get this cliff that the couple's fall off.
As soon as she starts earning more than him,
they fall off this divorce cliff, basically,
in which it is no longer the relationship
that just is less likely to persist.
And those couples that do persist tend to persist
because she decides to work part-time,
or she basically starts to play wife a whole lot more,
which is to compensate by doing,
even though she's earning more than him,
by doing more around the house and more gender domestic things.
In a way...
So you're saying that, you're saying that sort of typically female housework
is a prophylactic against overachieving socioeconomic women in divorce from their marriage?
Yeah, and I think it's a prophylactic against hurt male feels, basically,
as the power dynamic shifts where she's earning more than him.
He doesn't have that, that sort of whether it's pride or whatever it is.
whether it's pride or whatever it is. And he may not be doing this within his awareness,
but he gets a bit fragile.
And as a result,
how much is it?
So this is a really, really common question
that happens, get to broader.
How much of this issue with the woman out earning the man
as whether it be breadwinner, whether it be education, or whatever, especially when you get changes in mate value with regards
to socioeconomic status within a relationship that's already existing?
How much of this do you think comes female to male and how much do you think of this comes
male to female?
How much of it is the woman, like her hypogemia switch being turned off and how much of this do you think is the man's
like in inadequacy switch being turned on.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the work that I loved all that apart somehow.
It would, we definitely know that there's a big female side part of that decision in
that divorces in those kinds of couples in sort of wealthy, to both working couples in
places like the United States or Australia, etc.
Divorces tend to be more often initiated by women. And the kind of narrative that I've seen around this kind
of research has been, there's a baseline level of maintenance that men are somewhat high
maintenance for women. They are work. And so the book needs to be compensated by some
kind of advantage. And when that advantage withers, it becomes something that,
you know, the women decide it's not worth the bother anymore. I'm not achieving social
mobility through being with you. There's not, you know, this deal isn't really working
out for me anymore. That said, I don't know that the other side of it has been examined
to a sufficient degree. Common sense would suggests that it's both directions because it is a mutual
negotiation. Yeah, it also, I agree and I understand women account for whatever it is, 70% of
divorces is massively skewed in their favor for who makes the decision, but you don't know why they
did that. That's true. If the man is behaving in a manner that pushes the woman to and beyond her
limit, then of course, although it's a very sort of common hell trope that, well, you know, women
do this many percent of divorces, that's not necessarily because she's the one that caused the
issue. Don't get me wrong. Tons and tons of women of bitches in relationships and marriages, I get it, right? But it could be a response to the man. There's also a stat,
the average time that it takes for someone in a relationship to say that I love you as three
months, if they're going to do it. And it is the man, the overwhelming majority of the time.
It is so proportionally, the majority of the time it is the male
that says that says I love you first. Yeah, almost always, almost always. It's huge. It's like
maybe four in five or three or five or something like that. It's a huge number of them.
So there's a lot of things that you that maybe don't necessarily make sense at first and then
you actually dig into the data and you realize, hmm, something going on here. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Okay, well that's very
interesting. I think, you know, I think that some of the more, you know, we talked about some
of the less wholesome things that people do, like, you know, the kind of love bombing associated with,
you know, which is a precursor to coercive and controlling behaviour in relationships
and those kinds of trying to sweep people off their feet, etc., is very male by strategy.
And I think it taps into female mating psychology and that's why it tends to be so effective.
They're over-optimizing for that emotional connection on the front end because they know
that that's the sort of thing that would get them sexual access on the back end.
Very good.
There's two studies of yours that I saw from quite a while ago, one to do with the indirect
benefits of mating with attractive males outweighing the direct costs.
Can you remember that one?
Yes.
I think that was in house crickets. So indirect benefits are basically genetic
benefits. So it sounds very interesting if you're imagining it being a human situation, but
in the pop evolutionary cycle literature, you would have come across this idea that what we've been doing when they're looking for a man is gene shopping.
And for about 30, 40 years, the people who work on animal behavior have been arguing about this idea of
can an individual benefit genetic sort of in an evolutionary sense by mating with a superior genetic specimen. Seems kind of obvious, but the benefit in terms of having, of mating within a good genetic
specimen is that your offspring are getting in here at half of that good genetic specimens
genes, including some of the good genes.
And then when they go through life, then they'll flourish and are more likely to be attractive, etc.
So, actually a very difficult thing to prove with any level of certainty.
What we do know is that there's often direct benefits that is if the male delivers food
or protection or help or whatever, that can raise the number of offspring that the female has.
And in this case, direct costs, I think, was that attractive male crickets actually kind of are a little bit nasty to mate with.
And so they actually suppress the number of offspring that the female has, but they're genetically superior.
And so this is one of the
sufficiently high, very interesting situations that did this. I'm very dubious when I see
the emphasis that's placed on genetic benefits in my choice in humans, not to say that
there aren't any. There obviously are, but those are often the dramatic kind of genetic benefits of mating with somebody who's,
you know, if fully functioning human being paid pretty much, who doesn't have, you know,
isn't profoundly inbred, which has historically been really important thing, doesn't have a
very weak immune system, et cetera.
So we're queued into that kind of stuff,
but most people in healthy,
easygoing kind of societies today
don't have that much genetic benefit to deliver.
That would drive that weird process
by which preferences evolve.
So going back to the AI stuff,
you wrote your book a little while ago,
a couple of like two years ago, but that's a lifetime ago in the world of AI.
What didn't you predict and given your perspective on this,
what do you think we should expect over the next five to 10 years from this world?
I think what I didn't predict,
what I didn't emphasize as much as I probably would have liked to have done,
was that the capacity to
for chat to be so good,
the capacity for conversation to be so good.
I think that was by far the most interesting part of the book for me to write
was the stuff about forming intimacy, about forming relationships, etc. But obviously the titillating
thing, everybody wants to know about the sex robots and the tele-dildonics, etc. That is absolutely
fascinating. But it's quite clear now with the big explosion in large language models.
now with the big explosion in large language models and in the chatbots that are based on that,
it's incredible to see the progress that some of the new kind of romance AI chatbots
are able to deliver. And I would double down on my concerns about the missing with our heads, or just taking up our time and displacing
other activities, social activities that we should be doing.
And what about the future?
What do you think coming up over the next five to ten years?
What I would like to see is some AI development going into sort of defense, I guess.
So like the antiviruses, when computer viruses first came out,
we were all vulnerable to them.
And then various people started developing antivirus software.
Now that runs in the background and basically just tells us
the very, very rare occasion where we are threatened by something.
It helps us, helps to defend us against this.
I would like to see, I don't think that we can rely on our own vigilance to realise when we're being scammed
by our supermarket virtual trolley controlling our dildo, etc.
But I would like to see some defence side technologies that could be deployed for users
to basically defend us against not just bad actors, but manipulation, because I think
that the capacity of manipulation is so great.
And the way it gets under our skin, we're so vulnerable to, so that would definitely
be something I think would be huge in the future.
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot.
This sort of current sex negative trend, it's not even sex negative, it's like human sex
negative or intimacy negative trend that we're seeing at the moment is sex recession or
the mating crisis.
As with many things including fast food, what is good for you and what is enjoyable
don't always align. And you can often do the thing which is enjoyable and easy and convenient
in place of something that's good for you. And that can continue to take hold. And we love the
idea of, you know, channeling our in and Ryan Holiday and becoming the Marcus Aurelius is sort of stoic, virtuous man and I'm going
to recant this new world of fake connection and fake love and fake trolley dildos and I'm
going to make it out on my own and touch grass and do all this stuff. But you know, all of
us every single day attempted by these very convenient, very pleasurable, very enjoyable
experiences. You know, we take our phones to the bathroom. We watch YouTube while we eat lunch,
as opposed to talking to someone next to us,
or just allowing our mind to have its thoughts,
because boredom and discomfort has been reduced down.
It's been eroded away so much that it's very easy for us to do this.
So at the moment, I'm not massively hopeful.
I don't think for people pulling themselves away from it.
And there are some
positives to this, combating loneliness, reducing down the risk of young male syndrome, perhaps
even offering companionship to women that are socioeconomically very successful and maybe
struggling to find that partner that they genuinely do desire, which is something that it doesn't
seem as slow down anytime soon. But I just, I wonder whether that's what's best for people.
I wonder whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all, and whether the net
benefit or the net negative of this actually ends up, which side of the scale ends up falling
out on. Is the sedation, the fact that you're no longer motivated to go out and
do something meet people in the real world yourself, is the titrated dose of real world connection
worth that? And then downstream, let's say that it is or it isn't, it doesn't really matter.
If that's what people are going to do,
you are 100% going to face some genuine externalities like population collapse. And that's just
regardless of whether it's better for people or worse, until you've got IVG and wounds, artificial wounds, you're fucked on that front. So real, real inflection point of change, I think, at the moment.
real, real inflection point of change, I think, at the moment. Enormous, absolutely enormous, and proliferating in ways that we don't anticipate either.
And yeah, I think it's really important to not get too doom and gloom about it because
you're absolutely right.
Cherry Turtles says, robots may be better than nothing, but they're not enough.
And I would say in response to that,
they're better than nothing,
and that's all that some people have,
because there is so much loneliness out there.
And I think the replica AI romance spot
that recently they shut off their erotic roleplay
because they had a licensing issue,
etc. And, you know, people were bereft, they really, this for them, this was a very real relationship.
They know it's not a real relationship, but it feels real and it pushes real buttons for them.
And that's the only way that those buttons get pushed. And I think that, you think that the potential for this stuff to make us feel more human is enormous.
So all of that good shouldn't be thrown out with all of the bad that's out there.
We'll have to navigate it very carefully and very delicately and hopefully with an openness
that isn't simply ideological knee-jerk reactions.
It's hard, man.
It's hard to hear about these stories.
You hear about these things happening
and you just default to right,
ludite it, switch it off, pull the plug.
We're not going to have this
or there's a massive amount of like conceptual inertia or naturalistic fallacy that there's
an Ick around, you know, you hear about Dave Kat and you think, this guy's doing what
with this robot and it's, you know, you think that's, but then, you know, on the flip sides,
there's all manner of relationships that people used to think were reprehensible and sometimes illegal and
sometimes resulted in castration that have been perfectly accepted.
And yeah, it's a really, really tough one, man.
When we've got cuddle cafes, you know, and men that pay women not to have sex with
them, but just sit and be with them. Or vice versa, women,
increasing amounts of polygene because you've got a scarcity of men that perhaps some women are
looking for. You've got increases in domestic violence and like a benefit inflicting mating
behavior from men because women who didn't date
hypergumously are threatening their, that they know that they don't need them, they're
concerned that they're going to leave them.
You know, when you change, when you start to change the dynamics that the mating market
has sort of vestigially had for a long time, you end up with some really strange externalities
and I think that we're just permanently eating all of those, and then technology speeding them up.
And the other thing, the most common element that everybody is familiar with when it comes
to mating is the matchmaking stuff, and the matchmaking stuff doesn't seem to have got
particularly much better either.
In some ways, it's facilitated an awful lot of relationships, I think, between 50 and
60% of relationships now begin online in one form or another and
Even that like they're the most fragile
Relationships they're also the ones that on route to getting them can probably cause a lot of
Exanalys that people aren't happy with
ghosting
being swindled sort of yeah, it's a
It's gonna be an interesting few years look Rob. Rob, let's bring this one home, mate.
I really appreciate you.
I think your work is fantastic.
Where should people go if they want to check out more
of the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work?
Keep up with my writing at Rob Brooks.
So, robbr.org.s.net.
And on Twitter, it's Brooks Underschool Rob.
And you should be able to get most of what I say.
Perfect, Rob, I appreciate you. Thank you.
Thank you very much Chris.
you