AI could seriously mess with human population levels, soon. By Glenn Reynolds.
The other day, a friend was talking about AI, and about sexbots, and opining that neither was really ready for primetime. My response was that this is true, but that the AI is getting smarter, and the sexbots sexier, while human beings are basically staying the same. …
How can sexy sexbots be an existential threat? Well, we’ve devastated populations of insects like screwflies, fruit flies, and (somewhat less successfully) mosquitoes by saturating them with sexy but sterile specimens to breed with. …
But even there, we’re not reaching full potential. The sterile specimens we use for those eradication efforts are just ordinary screwflies or mosquitoes, not extra-sexy specimens, optimized for attractiveness.
Imagine sexbots — both male and female — that are aren’t just copies of attractive humans, but much more attractive than natural humans. Machine learning could find just the right physical and behavioral characteristics to appeal to humans, and then tweak them for each individual person. Maybe they even release pheromones.
Your personal sexbot would be tailor-made, or self-tailored, to appeal to you. It might even be programmed to fall in love with its human. (Would it be “real” love? How could you tell? How could it tell? If you couldn’t tell, would it matter?) …
Would people really fall for sexbots? Probably:
Consider the example of porn.
Futurist James Miller calls porn the “junk food of sex.” That is, just as junk food is made more or less addictive — or at least highly appealing — by overstimulating people’s evolutionarily programmed desire for sugar, salt, and fat, so porn too appeals to people by stimulating evolutionarily created receptors/proclivities to a much greater degree than real life does. …
In the past, I responded to fears that porn would lead to more sexual violence and unwise teen sex by pointing out that in practice the opposite seems to be the case: As porn consumption skyrocketed with the introduction of the Internet, rape and teen sex actually underwent a steep decline.
But that was almost 20 years ago, and now the concern is not so much that porn will turn teenagers into lust-crazed satyrs (or nymphs), but rather that it desensitizes them to the real thing. And the evidence for that, while not overwhelming, is strong enough to be of concern to some.
If pixels on a screen can do that, then it’s hard not to imagine that actual robots, performing in the (silicone) flesh, could be far more appealing. And it’s not enough to say that they couldn’t substitute for the companionship of a real, empathetic human, when ChatGPT has already been rated as better at providing empathetic medical advice than real human doctors. …
It’s plausible that within a decade or two, you’ll be able to have a machine-based partner — not really just a sexbot — that is on many objective measures better than a human: More loyal, more attractive, more honest, more empathetic.
Some people already fall in love with today’s crude love dolls. …
But what about babies?
I suppose that the already-ongoing separation of sex and reproduction could continue, and mitigate some of the consequences described above.
To the extent that people reproduce through IVF, perhaps later assisted by artificial wombs (perennially under development, but presumably actually appearing someday), then the selection of reproductive partners may not matter. In fact, men and women might find it easier to raise children with the help of a friendly, accommodating, understanding robot partner who doesn’t get cranky from sleep deprivation, leading to greater levels of reproduction. At least conceivably.
Maybe.
