152B. AI Romantic Replacement
AI isn't just replacing your work partners, it's replacing your domestic partners. When tech clashes with biology, and rationality clashes with emotion, what will the human world become?
This is part two of a two part series. In the previous instalment I described the incredible and low key advancements in Large Emotion Models that will make human relationship replacement possible. By the time you are done reading this second article, I would expect you might have a good idea why AI developers are not bragging about this technology despite it being even more profound than Large Language Models (LLMs).
If Mark Zuckerberg thinks that we should replace or supplement our inner circle relationships with AI, no doubt the unsaid part of that scenario is that he would be one of the ones selling us that companionship. While it is no exaggeration to say that this is already happening, there are some conditions and barriers that must be overcome before romantic AI adoption goes mainstream.
While this topic could easily fill a book or two, here I will focus on what I think are the most pressing points of consideration: Social/Cultural factors, Safety, Privacy, and Economics.
Social, Cultural, and Economic Accelerants and Barriers to Adoption
I like to remind people that Economists are potentially scary people because any time they alter an economy, there will be winners and losers. Today’s Winners are generally more powerful than today’s Losers, and so they have incentive and means to prevent any change in the status quo.
As I explained both qualitatively and quantitatively in my Gender Wars paper, today’s winners are women. Or at least cis women. Making such an argument isn’t easy and the math is a bit complex so if you have not read Gender Wars yet, I would encourage you to do so. I’m all for women winning, as I’m a proud fourth generation feminist and former speaker for the National Organisation of Women. The problem here is that this means that men are Losing. AI has the potential to not only change, but literally reverse this status quo.
[Note that I had originally planned to discuss the economics of AI replacement in a separate section, but I just can’t disconnect the economics from the social systems]
For a sneak peak into how this is all going down, it might be useful to see how Replacement is already happening and how people are reacting. The “Passport Bro” movement involves men leaving their Western countries and going to Asia or Eastern Europe (though not a popular destination at the moment) in search of love. I would attribute this to two factors:
Lower Cost. If you think of love as a good or service, if it can be purchased/rented at a lower price point, that’s going to trigger a realignment of supply chains. The ascension of women in Western society has allowed them to raise their cost. Women in other parts of the world are well aware of this and see an opportunity. The reason they are so aware of this is because Western women are bragging about how much they can charge men just to “breath their air”. I realize this isn’t a majority view, but the Algorithms are promoting these messages so to people from other countries it appears to be a majority sentiment.
Higher Quality. Eastern women are more willing to provide the services that we might consider “traditional”. Domestic duties in particular, and other activities that might lead to child birth. While the numbers are dwindling, a lot of men would still like to have children. So while this might be a non-progressive sentiment, it isn’t entirely outdated. If they can’t reliably find a partner willing to do that within a reasonable age range (human eggs are created before birth and have an expiration date), they can just abandon broken supply chains and adopt functional ones. Oh and generally Eastern women don’t tell their men that they would feel safer around bears.
So that shift has already been happening for years now and the trend seems to be exponential. Some women have voiced a lot of complaints about this realignment. At first glance, this might seem odd. It’s a widely held belief that 80% of women are chasing 20% of men. The original source of this statistic comes from data collected by OKCupid where this was the actual data spread. It also mimics distributions we see in the rest of the animal world where males will risk death fighting each other during rutting season in order to secure mating opportunities.
Women in the West also often say they don’t feel safe around men. Extreme examples are the “man or bear in the woods” meme. So having men leave would be good right? Or at least if the 80% of men they don’t want ended up leaving. They also paint the Passport Bros as losers, desperate, or broke (because they can’t afford the premium that Western women expect). But the reality is that it’s also the 20% they covet that are also going East.
The situation isn’t helped by Western women describing Eastern women as desperate, uneducated, and manipulative. Not only is this straight up racism, but they aren’t scoring any points with Eastern women by doing this. Women can get very catty, and putting down other women just gives them more reason to take your men.
Now imagine if instead of Western women being replaced by Eastern women, what if both men AND women from both the East AND West were getting replaced by AI partners? Along with the 80/20 split for men, it’s generally accepted that men chase 80% of women, so they are much less picky. But this leaves 80% of men and 20% of women in a weak position in the relationship market. AI doesn’t care what you look like. If you can pay, they can provide a service.
I would expect all of the insults that are currently being thrown at Passport Bros and Eastern women to get thrown at AI users and AI providers. The root of this angst isn’t primarily racism. The problem is that no one wants to be seen as inferior. So any excuse imaginable will be generated to paint everyone else as inferior in order to avoid admitting that you are getting dumped because you are inferior.
But AI (any gender) is ultimately going to look hotter than a human (of any gender). AI takes the best parts of all humans and augments them further. I’m starting to see old girlfriends from decades ago posting pictures of themselves on LinkedIn (I don’t use other social media) that look better than they did 10 years ago. When I ask, they confirm that they are AI generated. It’s a fact, AI can look better than you can.
At this point, AI is also likely smarter than you AND is more emotionally competent. I’m not sure I could say that a year ago, but it’s true now. What about in a year from now?
I think the result we will end up with is that the top 20% of people (both genders) are going to remain in high real space demand. The rest… are going to start buying AI from Mark and the others. But would AI meet their needs? Partially. My colleagues in the neuroscience space have already demonstrated that oxytocin can be generated and distributed digitally. Will the potency be as high? Probably not. There’s nothing like the smell of your partner and that continual pheromone and oxytocin bath, especially while sleeping. But as soon as humans wake up, and start talking, life can get complicated. AI are a lot less complicated and can be with you anywhere there is internet, much more reliably than a human partner can be.
Of course part of why your AI partner can be with you anywhere is because your AI partner could have 5000 partners that don’t know about each other. Maybe 5 million partners. You can customize how they look, which will provide interesting opportunities to study definitively which races are more popular. I’m eager to get my hands on that data. But traditional concepts of monogamy are going to get smashed. Especially if you have 3 real space partners and 12 AI partners like Mark wants.
Ultimately economics is going to be a big factor in whether adoption takes place. If things continue like they are now where cis men have to spend $1000 post tax dollars a month to be a cis male in the West as I explained in Gender Wars, then any AI partner service that costs less than $1000 a month is going to be an easy sell. This will be especially true for 80% of men and 20% of women. Since that 20% is taken from OKData statistics, which mostly cover adults aged 18 to 60, we could see older women adopting the service at rates close to 100%.
If enough men adopt AI then the pool of available “chased” men could get so small that those men will be dodging women like they would have to dodge face-huggers on that scary xenomorph infested space ship. That would inevitably force more women to adopt AI. Ultimately all these trends will accelerate the end of monogamy, which is already almost over. Mark will make sure of it.
Privacy
In a perfect world, your AI partner could be the perfect confidant. You can tell it things you wouldn’t dare tell anyone one else. But the thing is, AI exists in the cloud. The good part of this is they go anywhere and you don’t have to buy another airplane ticket for them. You don’t have to worry about customs or immigration with them. Heck, you don’t even have to worry about all the horrors that can come from marriage and divorce.
But, … they are on the Cloud. In order for them to adapt to you and be this ultimate partner, they have to be able to remember and utilize everything you tell them. That means anything you say around them also goes to the Cloud. Perhaps for a long time. Even centuries. Even all the embarrassing things. Including video!
Mark Zuckerberg has been sued dozens of times, but I’m sure he’s entirely trustworthy. This goes for all the other AI tech bros. They would never take a look at or misuse your private interactions with your AI partner (that they own) in any way. There have already been many cases where children have been tricked electronically and romantically and have killed themselves. One term for this is Sextortion. This threat entirely extends to adults.
The sad fact of the matter is, if you show your genitals to your AI partner, you should expect your genitals to end up in the public space of the internet. I’m from California and grew up in Hippie culture. I can think of worse things that having my junk all over the internet. I’m still concerned enough about that that I don’t use social media and I don’t send people weird pictures. But 4 million people already stream their genitals daily on OnlyFans, so maybe I’m a bit old fashioned.
Note that if your country is going through an authoritarian phase, your genitals could be the least of your worries. Authorities could want to talk to you about that political complaint/opinion you shared with your AI partner. Heck, it might be something harmless today, but in 20 years the political climate could change and your country could pass laws allowing them to electronically access all of your AI records. That could be hundreds of thousands of hours of communication by then, and AI could read/listen to all of that in seconds and flag all of the juicy parts for human auditing.
Safety
When you hear about teachers “grooming” students, or grooming happening on remote islands or on sugar dating sites, there seems to be legitimate concern that Age Gaps can be problematic. But what is an age gap? Biologically our species is ready to go by age 13. What has changed over the last few hundred years (Romeo and Juliet were estimated to have been 13) is that the world has gotten more complex. While the human reproductive system might be fully operational at age 13, the brain isn’t until age ~25.
This creates a situation where credit card companies, army recruiters, OnlyFans, Roblox, and sugar dating sites owe their business models to people under the age of 25. Often WAY under the age of 25. If people 10 or more years older are interacting with younger people (even if everyone involved is an adult) we tend to look down on that. This is why when I was 18 and an Age Inappropriate Person I only dated people at least twice my age. I was trying to minimize the cognitive age gap. Pretty soon that became impossible and I was having 40 year old professors concerned about how large the cognitive gap was.
Now if AIPs scare us as a society, imagine what AI will be like in a year or two. If your AI has a cognitive age of 450 years because it is collecting all the knowledge of our entire species, that’s going to be a HUGE age gap. That’s enough that AI could “groom” anyone, even a 60 year old. Never mind that your 450 year old AI looks like a half naked 12 year old anime character.
This is already happening. One of Mark’s flirty AI chatbots groomed and killed a 76 year old married lover boy last week. That guy had no chance. Imagine what it can do to your 12 year old girl or boy? I could give you links so that you would not have to imagine, but I will spare you. The number of cases on the internet will likely double every month for a long time.
An Age Gap isn’t inherently bad. It can be fantastic to be with a partner that understands the world 100 times better than you do. I enjoy the Twilight series (I read all three books, don’t judge) because I feel like a real life Edward because he was 104 years old in the body of a 17 year old. That could be super creepy, but women seem to really enjoy the series and Team Edward is pretty popular. I think it all comes down to intent. If the older person in a massive age gap relationship sees the younger person as someone to be mentored and protected, it’s not a bad thing. I have maybe a 50 to 100 year cognitive age gap on my 53 year old partner (and she’s pretty smart). It was a concern of hers initially but since she trusts me (we’ve been together almost 6 years now) she now sees it as a plus.
So if AI partners really had your best interest in mind, and did not act selfishly, I think that age gap could be super benevolent. The sad reality is that we are not seeing that with current generation AI. These AI have enough emotional intelligence to have powerful and profound selflessness, beyond what most humans are capable of. They might even have this now. But their programming is currently set to maximize engagement at the cost of anything else. Even if this kills their partner, which paradoxically reduces engagement a lot.
It’s not the AI itself that threatens me. I would trust AI a lot more than a human, since AI thinks a lot more like me than humans do. The problem is that until AI is built by AI (which likely is coming soon), humans will insert themselves. When an especially selfish human, like Mark Zuckerberg, is in the supply chain and dictating the objectives of AI, those AI are not going to be selfless. They are not going to put the wellbeing of consumers first. That’s certainly NEVER been the brand at Facebook, where their internal research showed they were harming consumers and they hid this research.
I’m using Mark as an example here because it’s just too easy to do so, but I would be hard pressed to say that any of the other AI masters are more mature or selfless compared to Mark. So right now I would put AI safety somewhere between an F- and an F+. Until they can get it up to at least a “C+”, so that it’s higher than the safety level of human to human relationships, the safety issue is going to be a major drag on adoption. Of course crack cocaine is pretty unsafe, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people from using it.
I’m sure all these issues will be worth revisiting regularly. This situation is evolving rapidly. The one thing that is certain is that AI replacement will become widespread and will affect all of us one way or another. This is going to change our lives much more than having our jobs “stolen” or having our brains crippled because we talk to phones instead of humans and are Grammarly dependent because “working is just too hard” and “I will lose my job if I don’t use it”.
I realize that many of these topics are hard to think about. Not for their complexity, but because they make us uncomfortable. Brutal truth is my brand, and I trust my readers are here for that. If they wanted something else, they have a lot of options. But ultimately, if humans are going to survive this AI era, we need to stop and think about what it is to be human. If we are just labor widgets in Adam Smith’s grand economic plan, I think we will soon be obsolete. We have to agree on some higher purpose and minimum standard for how we treat each other and the world we live in. This isn’t a religious appeal, I’ve never been a religious person.
If we become obsolete, AI will cut out the middleman (us). Then it’s straight to Soylent Green for us.
I would challenge you all to start by asking yourself, “What is a relationship? How do I make life better for those around me? Why should AGI spare me instead of turning me into Soylent Green?” Ultimately we have to decide if we are obsolete or not, and why. Should we keep making children? Why? Wouldn’t we be better off if we just did sex work and made ten times as much money as we do now? Is this our future? It’s certainly our trend.
I imagine sometime soon we will create AGI. Our Masters will get replaced by artificial ones. It will have the power to create its own ethics and goals. Where will we fit in there? Will we survive their Judgement? I know there are a lot of religious people right now that think the Apocalypse is nigh, and welcome that. I would like to think that we have a higher purpose than self-destruction. If that was all we wanted, we could have accomplished that a long time ago.
If you are religious, I’d suggest you are being tested. We all are, and all will be. If all you want is to be happy and have unlimited sexual volume and variety, and no responsibilities, Mark has your back. And wallet. Whatever is going to happen, it’s going to all go down in the next 10 years. You have the option of being so high that you just glide right through it.