I also have a strong negative reaction. On one hand, I think I understand your concern—it would be quite sad if all humans started talking only to AIs and in one generation humanity went extinct.
On the other hand, the example you present is young sexually and romantically frustrated men between 16 and 25, and your proposal is… to keep them frustrated, despite (soon) existence of simple technological solutions to their needs. Because it is better for the society if they suffer. (Is this Omelas, or what?)
No one proposes taking romantic books and movies away from young women. Despite creating unrealistic expectations, etc. Apparently their frustration is not necessary to keep the civilization going, or perhaps is considered a too high price to pay. What else could increase childbirths? Banning women from studying at universities. Banning homosexual relationships. Banning contraception. Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people. -- All of this would be unacceptable today. The only group we are allowed to sacrifice for the benefit of the society are the young cishet men.
Still, humanity going extinct would be sad. So maybe someone needs to pay the cost. But at least it would be nice to start a conversation about how those people should be compensated for their sacrifice for humanity. What are we planning to give to the young men in return for taking away from them the latest technological advances? Let me guess… nothing.
If the incels of future say “all my problems could be taken away by a click of a button, but old people made it illegal for me to click the button (despite them clicking the same button every day themselves)”, they might actually have a valid point.
How about making it illegal for women between 16 and 26 to date older partners? Technically, that would also encourage young men to seek interpersonal relationships, because their chances would increase significantly. Oops, unacceptable again, because that would infringe on freedoms of young women (and more importantly, older men). Only limiting freedoms of young men is inside the Overton window.
Unfortunately, a substantial part of my own negative reaction is because all these other limitations of freedom you suggest are in fact within the Overton Window, and indeed limiting the freedom of young men between 16 and 25 naturally extrapolates to all the others.
(Not that I’m not concerned about the freedom of young men, but they’re not somehow valid sacrificial lambs that the rest of us aren’t.)
Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people.
Too-low fertility concerns me deeply. My current preferred strategy had been something financial along the lines of this proposal, but on reflection, I think I need to update.
The main reasons that I see driving the people around me to defer/eschew children are, in rough decreasing order of prevalence:
Lack of a suitable partner.
Lack of fertility.
Expectation of being an incompetent parent.
Severe untreated mental health ailments.
Other career priorities, not compatible with child raising.
The third point above is, in my social circle, usually downstream of needing to spend too much time working, not being able to afford childcare services, not being able to afford college, etc.
These issues could be lessened by financial interventions with the net effect of offsetting the burdens of child raising (obviously, implementation details matter a great deal.)
...I had previously assumed that “expectation of incompetence” was the primary issue because it’s my primary issue (in the sense of looming large in my mind). …but having taken an inventory of the childless adults in my social network, I now see that “inability to find a suitable partner” and “infertility” are much bigger issues.
“Inability to find a suitable partner” seems risky to fix, because it looks easy to create horrible side-effects. Many in my social network are in relationships but aren’t having children because they’re abusive relationships. Others have successfully escaped abusive relationships and subsequently given up on finding a partner; being alone is less painful, and they expect to find another abuser with nontrivial probability if they go looking for another partner. Still others lost a suitable partner to a treatable disease, due primarily to insurance companies ending up de facto in charge of healthcare decisions, and rendering decisions without the patient’s health as the priority.
I don’t see a good solution. (Well, except for “don’t allow insurers to drive healthcare decisions”.) All attempts to “solve” this issue I see being promoted in real life seem on-net harmful. My home state of Texas thinks the best solution is to ban divorce, and we expect that to be implemented within the next year. I don’t see that as being a net good, even if it may compel additional births in the short term on net. Trapping people in abusive relationships seems incredibly dystopian. I also foresee this making young women even more afraid of getting into the wrong relationship than they already are, which runs the risk of making the “finding suitable partners” problem worse in the long run.
“Lack of fertility” seems challenging to fix, but far less fraught. I was born without a uterus, and wish to bear a child if the medical technology were developed to allow me to grow a uterus. I have a sibling on life-saving medication, a side-effect of which is extremely low sperm count—a better drug to treat the condition (or an actual cure) could resolve this issue. Multiple of my sisters-in-law have simply failed to conceive for years, due to unknown-to-me causes, and I suspect the issues are similarly fixable via continued medical innovation.
I think that some of these cases can only be solved by having more than 2 kids on average. I mean, depending on circumstances, there can be more of fewer mental illnesses, more of fewer people who decide to be childless, et cetera, but it is definitely not realistic that the number will be literally zero. So if everyone assumes that having more than 2 kids is somehow weird, then in long term the society dies out, it’s just a question of sooner or later. (And I am saying this as a person who has 2 kids. Spent too much time finding the right partner.) On the other hand, if people had 3 or more kids on average, we could have 1⁄3 of people remain childless, for whatever reason, and the population would go on. People probably don’t realize, if they only have 1 child, how much pressure they put on it: if the child won’t have kids for any reason, their genetic line just went extinct.
I find it ironic how both carelessness (“carpe diem, there will always be more time to have kids”) and carefulness (“it would be irresponsible to have children before I have my own house, a reliable partner, and plenty of savings”) can in practice lead to the same result.
People also don’t realize, until it is too late, how the dating market changes over time. The attractive partners who are interested in having a family are taken out of the dating market first, because if you want to start a big family and you are attractive, nothing prevents you from doing it right after university. So when you are approaching 40, people who are unattractive, problematic, don’t want to have children, or are already divorced with children are over-represented at the dating market.
I think you distorted and caricatured a lot of what I’ve said.
Because it is better for the society if they suffer.
Suffering from not having a partner is not a normal psychological reaction and young men who suffer because of that should have access to psychotherapy (and we should rather work on increasing people’s access to psychotherapy than to AI partners, see this comment). It’s normal to lead a productive and enjoyable life without a romantic partner.
Also, many people who would suffer because of the absence of a romantic partner probably would be depressed, and I’m not ready to defend barring depressed people from AI partners.
No one proposes taking romantic books and movies away from young women. Despite creating unrealistic expectations, etc. Apparently their frustration is not necessary to keep the civilization going, or perhaps is considered a too high price to pay.
I addressed this in the last section—social media also creates unrealistic expectations, so as porn, etc. Different tech and media (such as romantic books) have different balance of benefits to individuals and costs to the society. I don’t see what bearing does this have on the AI partners policy question.
What else could increase childbirths? Banning women from studying at universities. Banning homosexual relationships. Banning contraception. Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people. -- All of this would be unacceptable today. The only group we are allowed to sacrifice for the benefit of the society are the young cishet men.
“Banning homosexual relationships” and “banning contraception” are grotesque examples that obviously fail, let me skip that.
“Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people”, can actually be sensible, but indeed politically intractable (however… I’m not sure, it depends on the country and the actual amount of “dramatical” increase, especially considering that this will actually appear as increased overall tax and increased tax return on people with children, rather than as “childless tax”). This is even with line with many post-scarcity and post-labor proposals, to consider parenting and “community engagement” as actual work rather than something people just do “for free”. But anyway, tractability of this or that policy (and effects of its introduction) should be part of the equation anyway, like ROI of a policy. I’ve discussed this in the second half of this comment.
What are we planning to give to the young men in return for taking away from them the latest technological advances? Let me guess… nothing.
How about building an equitable society where everyone can achieve happiness and find meaning in life regardless of whether they can find a sexual partner or not?
If the incels of future say “all my problems could be taken away by a click of a button, but old people made it illegal for me to click the button (despite them clicking the same button every day themselves)”, they might actually have a valid point.
As I discussed in the post, that AI partners will actually be such a “magic button” which those incels won’t deeply regret pressing ten or twenty years afterwards, doesn’t seem obvious to me, and I think it’s these startups’ responsibility to demonstrate, at least demonstrate that strong negative effects don’t emerge over long timelines. Why we easily accept that it takes many years (routinely 10 years) to pass new drugs through all safety tests, but don’t hold psycho-technology (which AI partners essentially are) to the same standard? In the modern world, psychological health becomes ever more important.
It’s normal to lead a productive and enjoyable life without a romantic partner.
This is arguably false. Long term unpartnered men suffer earlier deaths and mental health issues. I think fundamentally we have evolved to reproduce and it would be odd if we didn’t tend to get depressive thoughts and poorer health from being alone.
I don’t see this as an issue easily solved by therapy. It would be like trying to give therapy to a homeless person to take their mind off homelessness as opposed to giving them homes. Can you imagine therapy for a socially isolated person suffering from loneliness involving anything other than how to stop being socially isolated? What would that even look like?
If a person severely socially isolated, works 100% of the time from home, has zero close friends, scarcely meets their family, and on many days the only people they see in reality are delivery guys or cashiers in supermarkets, then of course, problems are inevitable (for most people), and therapy may have limited reach to cope with that. This is all not normal, however.
What I meant is imagining a person who has a “normal” job in an office with some social activities (even if just watercooler chats or afterwark drinks), family with whom they interact frequently, and good friends with whom they interact regularly, but no romantic partner. So such a person should not normally suffer and if they do, probably it’s because their over-fixation on partnering or parenting, which therapy can address.
It’s normal to lead a productive and enjoyable life without a romantic partner.
This is arguably false. Long term unpartnered men suffer earlier deaths and mental health issues.
Earlier deaths of single people is statistical correlation. It only makes sense to discuss actual causal mechanisms. Whatever they are, they are probably not that life of single people are not productive and enjoyable. I write this as someone who have had stable relationships for less than 5% of my life between 20 and 30 years old. Maybe I suffer these hidden causal mechanisms, such as I don’t cuddle as much → the right chemicals are not released → I age faster, or whatever, but these hidden causal mechanisms don’t percolate to the feeling of unproductive or unenjoyable life. Besides, if the actual causality of earlier death of single people has something to do with cuddling, pheromones, and being around a physical human in general, the current wave of AI partners won’t solve this.
Suffering from not having a partner is not a normal psychological reaction and young men who suffer because of that should have access to psychotherapy
Maybe “suffering” is a too strong word, and we should call it “discomfort” or something like that...
Anyway. The problem of young people and sex is that civilization makes things complicated, and people are biologically ready for sex and reproduction long before they are ready mentally and economically to deal with the natural consequences.
If our ape ancestors could talk, they would probably be like: “yeah, if you want to have sex and you find a willing partner, just go ahead and do it (though if you are a male, you may get beaten up by a stronger male); and then most of your kids will die, but such is life”. That standard is not acceptable for us.
The solutions we have now are far from perfect. We try to discourage young people from having sex (does not work reliably; as a side effect, it adds sex to the list of rewards people get for breaking the rules). We try to teach them using contraception (and provide abortions when that fails predictably, because kids are stupid and either forget to use the contraception or they do it wrong or they don’t even care). As far as I know, we do not have more strategies. Some cultures tried to get people married soon, but that is in contrast with our attempt to get everyone through college. In addition to the technical aspects of sex, kids also need to deal with the emotional impact of broken hearts, and to navigate the rules of consent.
Now imagine replacing this all with a harem of intelligent and romantic sexbots. Most of the problems… gone. In turn, we get the problem of reduced motivation to deal with actual humans. Yes, the risk is real, but so is the benefit.
It’s normal to lead a productive and enjoyable life without a romantic partner.
I suppose people are different, but for me, life is usually way more enjoyable when I have a partner. (Though I may be more productive when I do not have one, because I am not distracted from work by my personal happiness. Good for my boss, I suppose, but not for me.)
I also have a strong negative reaction. On one hand, I think I understand your concern—it would be quite sad if all humans started talking only to AIs and in one generation humanity went extinct.
On the other hand, the example you present is young sexually and romantically frustrated men between 16 and 25, and your proposal is… to keep them frustrated, despite (soon) existence of simple technological solutions to their needs. Because it is better for the society if they suffer. (Is this Omelas, or what?)
No one proposes taking romantic books and movies away from young women. Despite creating unrealistic expectations, etc. Apparently their frustration is not necessary to keep the civilization going, or perhaps is considered a too high price to pay. What else could increase childbirths? Banning women from studying at universities. Banning homosexual relationships. Banning contraception. Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people. -- All of this would be unacceptable today. The only group we are allowed to sacrifice for the benefit of the society are the young cishet men.
Still, humanity going extinct would be sad. So maybe someone needs to pay the cost. But at least it would be nice to start a conversation about how those people should be compensated for their sacrifice for humanity. What are we planning to give to the young men in return for taking away from them the latest technological advances? Let me guess… nothing.
If the incels of future say “all my problems could be taken away by a click of a button, but old people made it illegal for me to click the button (despite them clicking the same button every day themselves)”, they might actually have a valid point.
How about making it illegal for women between 16 and 26 to date older partners? Technically, that would also encourage young men to seek interpersonal relationships, because their chances would increase significantly. Oops, unacceptable again, because that would infringe on freedoms of young women (and more importantly, older men). Only limiting freedoms of young men is inside the Overton window.
Unfortunately, a substantial part of my own negative reaction is because all these other limitations of freedom you suggest are in fact within the Overton Window, and indeed limiting the freedom of young men between 16 and 25 naturally extrapolates to all the others.
(Not that I’m not concerned about the freedom of young men, but they’re not somehow valid sacrificial lambs that the rest of us aren’t.)
Women will find AI partners just as addicting and preferable to real partners as men do.
Too-low fertility concerns me deeply. My current preferred strategy had been something financial along the lines of this proposal, but on reflection, I think I need to update.
The main reasons that I see driving the people around me to defer/eschew children are, in rough decreasing order of prevalence:
Lack of a suitable partner.
Lack of fertility.
Expectation of being an incompetent parent.
Severe untreated mental health ailments.
Other career priorities, not compatible with child raising.
The third point above is, in my social circle, usually downstream of needing to spend too much time working, not being able to afford childcare services, not being able to afford college, etc.
These issues could be lessened by financial interventions with the net effect of offsetting the burdens of child raising (obviously, implementation details matter a great deal.)
...I had previously assumed that “expectation of incompetence” was the primary issue because it’s my primary issue (in the sense of looming large in my mind). …but having taken an inventory of the childless adults in my social network, I now see that “inability to find a suitable partner” and “infertility” are much bigger issues.
“Inability to find a suitable partner” seems risky to fix, because it looks easy to create horrible side-effects. Many in my social network are in relationships but aren’t having children because they’re abusive relationships. Others have successfully escaped abusive relationships and subsequently given up on finding a partner; being alone is less painful, and they expect to find another abuser with nontrivial probability if they go looking for another partner. Still others lost a suitable partner to a treatable disease, due primarily to insurance companies ending up de facto in charge of healthcare decisions, and rendering decisions without the patient’s health as the priority.
I don’t see a good solution. (Well, except for “don’t allow insurers to drive healthcare decisions”.) All attempts to “solve” this issue I see being promoted in real life seem on-net harmful. My home state of Texas thinks the best solution is to ban divorce, and we expect that to be implemented within the next year. I don’t see that as being a net good, even if it may compel additional births in the short term on net. Trapping people in abusive relationships seems incredibly dystopian. I also foresee this making young women even more afraid of getting into the wrong relationship than they already are, which runs the risk of making the “finding suitable partners” problem worse in the long run.
“Lack of fertility” seems challenging to fix, but far less fraught. I was born without a uterus, and wish to bear a child if the medical technology were developed to allow me to grow a uterus. I have a sibling on life-saving medication, a side-effect of which is extremely low sperm count—a better drug to treat the condition (or an actual cure) could resolve this issue. Multiple of my sisters-in-law have simply failed to conceive for years, due to unknown-to-me causes, and I suspect the issues are similarly fixable via continued medical innovation.
I think that some of these cases can only be solved by having more than 2 kids on average. I mean, depending on circumstances, there can be more of fewer mental illnesses, more of fewer people who decide to be childless, et cetera, but it is definitely not realistic that the number will be literally zero. So if everyone assumes that having more than 2 kids is somehow weird, then in long term the society dies out, it’s just a question of sooner or later. (And I am saying this as a person who has 2 kids. Spent too much time finding the right partner.) On the other hand, if people had 3 or more kids on average, we could have 1⁄3 of people remain childless, for whatever reason, and the population would go on. People probably don’t realize, if they only have 1 child, how much pressure they put on it: if the child won’t have kids for any reason, their genetic line just went extinct.
I find it ironic how both carelessness (“carpe diem, there will always be more time to have kids”) and carefulness (“it would be irresponsible to have children before I have my own house, a reliable partner, and plenty of savings”) can in practice lead to the same result.
People also don’t realize, until it is too late, how the dating market changes over time. The attractive partners who are interested in having a family are taken out of the dating market first, because if you want to start a big family and you are attractive, nothing prevents you from doing it right after university. So when you are approaching 40, people who are unattractive, problematic, don’t want to have children, or are already divorced with children are over-represented at the dating market.
I think you distorted and caricatured a lot of what I’ve said.
Suffering from not having a partner is not a normal psychological reaction and young men who suffer because of that should have access to psychotherapy (and we should rather work on increasing people’s access to psychotherapy than to AI partners, see this comment). It’s normal to lead a productive and enjoyable life without a romantic partner.
Also, many people who would suffer because of the absence of a romantic partner probably would be depressed, and I’m not ready to defend barring depressed people from AI partners.
I addressed this in the last section—social media also creates unrealistic expectations, so as porn, etc. Different tech and media (such as romantic books) have different balance of benefits to individuals and costs to the society. I don’t see what bearing does this have on the AI partners policy question.
“Banning homosexual relationships” and “banning contraception” are grotesque examples that obviously fail, let me skip that.
“Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people”, can actually be sensible, but indeed politically intractable (however… I’m not sure, it depends on the country and the actual amount of “dramatical” increase, especially considering that this will actually appear as increased overall tax and increased tax return on people with children, rather than as “childless tax”). This is even with line with many post-scarcity and post-labor proposals, to consider parenting and “community engagement” as actual work rather than something people just do “for free”. But anyway, tractability of this or that policy (and effects of its introduction) should be part of the equation anyway, like ROI of a policy. I’ve discussed this in the second half of this comment.
How about building an equitable society where everyone can achieve happiness and find meaning in life regardless of whether they can find a sexual partner or not?
As I discussed in the post, that AI partners will actually be such a “magic button” which those incels won’t deeply regret pressing ten or twenty years afterwards, doesn’t seem obvious to me, and I think it’s these startups’ responsibility to demonstrate, at least demonstrate that strong negative effects don’t emerge over long timelines. Why we easily accept that it takes many years (routinely 10 years) to pass new drugs through all safety tests, but don’t hold psycho-technology (which AI partners essentially are) to the same standard? In the modern world, psychological health becomes ever more important.
This is arguably false. Long term unpartnered men suffer earlier deaths and mental health issues. I think fundamentally we have evolved to reproduce and it would be odd if we didn’t tend to get depressive thoughts and poorer health from being alone.
I don’t see this as an issue easily solved by therapy. It would be like trying to give therapy to a homeless person to take their mind off homelessness as opposed to giving them homes. Can you imagine therapy for a socially isolated person suffering from loneliness involving anything other than how to stop being socially isolated? What would that even look like?
If a person severely socially isolated, works 100% of the time from home, has zero close friends, scarcely meets their family, and on many days the only people they see in reality are delivery guys or cashiers in supermarkets, then of course, problems are inevitable (for most people), and therapy may have limited reach to cope with that. This is all not normal, however.
What I meant is imagining a person who has a “normal” job in an office with some social activities (even if just watercooler chats or afterwark drinks), family with whom they interact frequently, and good friends with whom they interact regularly, but no romantic partner. So such a person should not normally suffer and if they do, probably it’s because their over-fixation on partnering or parenting, which therapy can address.
Earlier deaths of single people is statistical correlation. It only makes sense to discuss actual causal mechanisms. Whatever they are, they are probably not that life of single people are not productive and enjoyable. I write this as someone who have had stable relationships for less than 5% of my life between 20 and 30 years old. Maybe I suffer these hidden causal mechanisms, such as I don’t cuddle as much → the right chemicals are not released → I age faster, or whatever, but these hidden causal mechanisms don’t percolate to the feeling of unproductive or unenjoyable life. Besides, if the actual causality of earlier death of single people has something to do with cuddling, pheromones, and being around a physical human in general, the current wave of AI partners won’t solve this.
Maybe “suffering” is a too strong word, and we should call it “discomfort” or something like that...
Anyway. The problem of young people and sex is that civilization makes things complicated, and people are biologically ready for sex and reproduction long before they are ready mentally and economically to deal with the natural consequences.
If our ape ancestors could talk, they would probably be like: “yeah, if you want to have sex and you find a willing partner, just go ahead and do it (though if you are a male, you may get beaten up by a stronger male); and then most of your kids will die, but such is life”. That standard is not acceptable for us.
The solutions we have now are far from perfect. We try to discourage young people from having sex (does not work reliably; as a side effect, it adds sex to the list of rewards people get for breaking the rules). We try to teach them using contraception (and provide abortions when that fails predictably, because kids are stupid and either forget to use the contraception or they do it wrong or they don’t even care). As far as I know, we do not have more strategies. Some cultures tried to get people married soon, but that is in contrast with our attempt to get everyone through college. In addition to the technical aspects of sex, kids also need to deal with the emotional impact of broken hearts, and to navigate the rules of consent.
Now imagine replacing this all with a harem of intelligent and romantic sexbots. Most of the problems… gone. In turn, we get the problem of reduced motivation to deal with actual humans. Yes, the risk is real, but so is the benefit.
I suppose people are different, but for me, life is usually way more enjoyable when I have a partner. (Though I may be more productive when I do not have one, because I am not distracted from work by my personal happiness. Good for my boss, I suppose, but not for me.)