this feels part of a larger question along the lines of “is wireheading okay?”. On one hand, with increased technology, the probability of being able to subject ourselves to a bubble of hyper stimuli that all tickle our natural fancies far more than the real thing approaches one. On the other, since perhaps the most important of those fancies is interaction with other human beings, something which is also by its nature imperfect in its real state, this essentially is one and the same with the disgregation of society into a bunch of perfectly insular individuals confined within an hedonistic self-tailored reality. This can then result in only two outcomes—either collapse of civilization if the AI isn’t able to run the world by itself, or essential replacement and permanent disempowerment of humans by AI if it is. Either way, our story as a species ends there, though we may keep having plenty of fun;
framing the question directly and specifically in terms of baby-making is pretty much guaranteed to lead to violent political polarization. Demographic worries are typically right-wing and Christian-coded, even though in general it is absolutely true that again, even if you think that the scenario above is okay, you need to first have a way to replace humans with robots for all productive functions if you want to wrap yourself into a hedonistic bubble without that bubble being burst by catastrophic civilisational collapse. More generally, I think we should address the issue in a much broader scope—it’s not just about making babies, it’s about human connection. Less connection leads to less empathy leads to less ability to cooperate. This matters absolutely even from a left-wing perspective! Insular humans are terrible at coordination, and are easily manipulated by large systems. In a world in which even the most traditionally intimate of relationships can be artificial and essentially a business product, people are deprived of any real agency;
no discussion of this topic can ignore the fact that this is not, right now, in the real world, a choice between individual freedom and enjoyment at society’s expense, and individual sacrifice for society’s sake. Because a free market of profit-motivated companies is a misaligned system; it will usually try to provide you with enjoyment, as long as this means that you pay for it; but if it discovers that it can sell you misery and make you pay even more to stay miserable it’ll just do that. It’s not optimizing for your happiness—that’s an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. So, the relationship here is fundamentally adversarial. See social media, gacha games, the examples are everywhere. That’s exactly what an artificial AI girlfriend would be in the current economic system. Not a genuine fulfillment of needs you can’t fulfill otherwise, replacing the real thing with an even more pleasurable hyper-stimulus, leaving you with a complex responsibility vs personal enjoyment dilemma. But a skinner box carefully designed to keep you miserable and make you love your own misery and pay for it, the sum total of human engineering and psychology aimed specifically at fucking with your reward centers to squeeze money out of you. Digital crack. So, honestly, there’s really no dilemma here; the concept itself is abusive trash and it should be curbed before it develops enough. Just for comparison, consider what you would think of a woman that studies specifically seduction techniques to target and hook a man on the internet and get him to wire her money perpetually while never meeting him, then imagine a board of CEOs in suits and ties doing that on purpose, to tens of thousands of people, while laughing all the way to the bank with their profits, and consider what you should think of them.
A few points:
this feels part of a larger question along the lines of “is wireheading okay?”. On one hand, with increased technology, the probability of being able to subject ourselves to a bubble of hyper stimuli that all tickle our natural fancies far more than the real thing approaches one. On the other, since perhaps the most important of those fancies is interaction with other human beings, something which is also by its nature imperfect in its real state, this essentially is one and the same with the disgregation of society into a bunch of perfectly insular individuals confined within an hedonistic self-tailored reality. This can then result in only two outcomes—either collapse of civilization if the AI isn’t able to run the world by itself, or essential replacement and permanent disempowerment of humans by AI if it is. Either way, our story as a species ends there, though we may keep having plenty of fun;
framing the question directly and specifically in terms of baby-making is pretty much guaranteed to lead to violent political polarization. Demographic worries are typically right-wing and Christian-coded, even though in general it is absolutely true that again, even if you think that the scenario above is okay, you need to first have a way to replace humans with robots for all productive functions if you want to wrap yourself into a hedonistic bubble without that bubble being burst by catastrophic civilisational collapse. More generally, I think we should address the issue in a much broader scope—it’s not just about making babies, it’s about human connection. Less connection leads to less empathy leads to less ability to cooperate. This matters absolutely even from a left-wing perspective! Insular humans are terrible at coordination, and are easily manipulated by large systems. In a world in which even the most traditionally intimate of relationships can be artificial and essentially a business product, people are deprived of any real agency;
no discussion of this topic can ignore the fact that this is not, right now, in the real world, a choice between individual freedom and enjoyment at society’s expense, and individual sacrifice for society’s sake. Because a free market of profit-motivated companies is a misaligned system; it will usually try to provide you with enjoyment, as long as this means that you pay for it; but if it discovers that it can sell you misery and make you pay even more to stay miserable it’ll just do that. It’s not optimizing for your happiness—that’s an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. So, the relationship here is fundamentally adversarial. See social media, gacha games, the examples are everywhere. That’s exactly what an artificial AI girlfriend would be in the current economic system. Not a genuine fulfillment of needs you can’t fulfill otherwise, replacing the real thing with an even more pleasurable hyper-stimulus, leaving you with a complex responsibility vs personal enjoyment dilemma. But a skinner box carefully designed to keep you miserable and make you love your own misery and pay for it, the sum total of human engineering and psychology aimed specifically at fucking with your reward centers to squeeze money out of you. Digital crack. So, honestly, there’s really no dilemma here; the concept itself is abusive trash and it should be curbed before it develops enough. Just for comparison, consider what you would think of a woman that studies specifically seduction techniques to target and hook a man on the internet and get him to wire her money perpetually while never meeting him, then imagine a board of CEOs in suits and ties doing that on purpose, to tens of thousands of people, while laughing all the way to the bank with their profits, and consider what you should think of them.