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Kevin comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong
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Does your conception of monogamy extend past the Singularity? When you say you want your relationships to be permanent, does that mean you seek an actual eternal commitment as opposed to just human-level permanent?
Actual eternity sounds pretty swell now. I don't know if it'd still sound swell after 500 years. (After that long, I might have my life sorted out well enough that I'd welcome the introduction of some complications.)
As a relatively new visitor to LessWrong, I find myself moderately disturbed by the fact that that was your first thought upon reading the word "permanent".
I was surprised no one had brought it up sooner. If we're talking about permanence, let's actually talk about what that would mean.
It says something about the way I think, that to me it seems like a primary reductio of monogamy that it wouldn't scale to a million years.
Does it say something about the way I think that I don't consider million year monogamy particularly absurd at all? A desire for a monogamous relationship is by no means an incoherent or implausible preference to have. And these people have a superintelligence as backup. I wouldn't say it seems likely but reductio definitely doesn't work here.
I wouldn't describe the idea of million year monogamy as intrinsically incoherent in the abstract. However, the scale of changes on such a time scale seem to make it exceedingly unlikely. Consider just the problems to the idea of personal identity if we just added high-bandwidth links to human brains. Even with no AIs, and even no other changes to human bodies, that one addition, no faster than an optical fiber of today's technology, could make nonsense out of what counts as a person - and therefore as to what counts as a monogamous couple.
Those inevitable large scale changes are the thing that makes monogamy a plausible option. If, one year after the emergence of a Friendly-to-them singularity, they particularly want to remain monogamous ~forever then they will. If they don't, they will not. There need be no inevitable changes in desires when the limerance fades after a few months, the few years of a produce-one-child pair bond expires or boredom after a several decades. Those are optional (given the right technology) and if they really want to be monogamous they will.
You seem to be viewing a Friendly-to-them singularity as freezing in place the couple's utility functions. I agree that it might be able to stabilize it against currently-known changes, such as those you cite, fading limerance, human pair bond stability, some others. I'm skeptical about stability with respect to all important changes over a million years. Even a superintelligence is going to encounter surprises, whether from exploration of the boundaries of design spaces or exploration of physical space. Even for it, the future is uncertain - and the balancing of subgoals and values must likewise have some uncertainty. If the consequences of one of those surprises makes one or both of the members of a couple morph into something rather different, is sticking with the original bond sensible, or even meaningful? If the couple precludes all such changes, is that at all a reasonable choice over such a long time period? Is it even viable? Precluding change in the face of surprise is a dangerous choice.
It might be that relationships can last successfully for 50-60 years but not for thousands of years -- long-lived people could have many relationships, each as long as our longest marriages.
Having several hundred 50-year relationships actually might be interesting. You have enough time to get to know your partner deeply and intimately, through fifty years' worth of life stages. It wouldn't be the "post-Singularity equivalent" of a one-night stand, because you actually do have fifty years to learn what makes that person tick, in all his subtlety and complexity. But you never have to worry about feeling trapped because hey, it's only fifty years, you've got lots more time.
The depth of the relation is not necessarily related to the time spent together.
It wasn't my first thought, but it was something I had been vaguely meaning to ask Alicorn for a while and this was an appropriate opportunity.
As a long-time transhumanist, that was my first thought upon reading the word "permanent".