The catgirls are already here, in a prototype form that only works on a select few individuals: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3710987618964917848
I challenge anybody to argue, no matter how sexually open minded and unjudgmental they are, that these relationships are healthy.
Darn it, I shouldn't have told Eliezer about my specific catgirl fantasy! Now I've ruined it for everybody.
1Sorry for the double post - I'd just like to ammend the normative "healthy" in my post to "desireable."
Also, Futurama had an episode on this: I Dated A Robot. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a link to the 'educational video' included in the episode. It outlines the situation in a humourours way (if you want, the full episode can be found on Google Video, but I thought it impolite to link to pirated TV on this site).
Seems like it would be more polite to wait for it to actually happen, and then let the demographic name themselves.
Incidentally, which is better, for the losers in the mating game:
A non-sentient lover, or involuntary celibacy?
Spoken like somebody who'd far enough up the food chain that the difference between them seems pretty small.
Doug, why couldn't a fembot be programmed to be sentient? I think the term you're looking for is "nonsentient romantic/sex partner."
Doug, I understand that the overwhelming majority of fictional catgirls (catboys) have been sentient. But you could say the same about fictional androids, and modern actual "fembots" are not what I'm talking about at all. There's a reason why the one said "a million years having sex with catgirls" and not "a million years having sex with fembots".
I hope the spirit of lost C'Mell will forgive me if I overload the term for this usage.
(Ironically, the TV Tropes page you linked to shows the nonbiological (nonsentient? AI? hive-entity?) Asakura Ryouko dressed as a catgirl, which she's not.)
Matt, that's like putting out fire with... a different kind of fire.
Aurini, "desirable" isn't normative? If you wanted to be as least judgmental as possible, you could call them the ones who got shafted by the statistics.
"I want to spend a million years having sex with cat-girls after the Singularity." Eliezer, I think your mental picture of the cat-girl scenario is a straw-man.
Suppose you had done all the philosophy right, and you knew exactly what eudaemonia meant for you, and then designed a cat-girl. What would that sort of cat-girl be like? Different from your friend's imagined version in more than a few important respects, I'd wager.
"""If you take that fun and redirect it to something that isn't socially entangled, if you turn sex into an exclusively single-player game, then you've just made life that much simpler - in the same way that eliminating boredom or sympathy or values over nonsubjective reality or individuals wanting to navigate their own futures, would tend to make life "simpler".""" For starters, a properly designed cat-girl mightn't necessarily make things "simpler" at all. I think the real problem is that you're imagining cat-girls which are too easy. Does playing chess against a computer still count as a "single-player game"? The computer really is trying to beat you, even if it isn't sentient or trying ...
This is why I consider 'catgirls' a legitimate addition to the dating game, like NPCs in so many online multiplayer settings.
I thought a big part of the appeal of the super villain fantasy wasn't your standard of living but in comparative standard of living. It's boring if everyone has a volcano lair. People want a doomsday weapon so that they are feared and respected.
Steppenwolf, I thought about "north" and "south" but I didn't want any arguments over who got to be on top. So I used "east" and "west" instead.
In response to your main point... either (a) you're sympathizing with something nonsentient that doesn't actually have any feelings - either deceiving yourself into caring about a person who doesn't exist, or changing the value itself. Or (b) you're losing out not only on present human sympathy, but on future extensions of sympathy, the telepathic bond between lovers a la Mercedes Lackey and/or Greg Egan.
Being in a holodeck, and knowing that the people around you aren't real, has to change either your feelings or your values. That's the problem with the volcano lair, if there's no one there who's real except you. That's the simplicity I fear.
Nazgul, the "comparative standard of living" thing is one of few parts of human nature that I would seriously consider eliminating outright (see Continuous Improvement). But the environmental solution would be, indeed, nonsentient human-shaped entities of lower status, to tell your brain that you're in the elite. Though I don't know if that works - we may have a brain category for nonpeople we don't even compete with hedonically.
That's the problem with the volcano lair, if there's no one there who's real except you. That's the simplicity I fear.
It's still, as I understand it, possible to leave the volcano lair (with your private hoverjet) at any desired time and arrange a meeting with some other real person who got bored and left their own volcano lair. If somebody didn't get bored until day 1, year 10^6 then that's when they'd go outside, and there would be million-year-old post-singularity social institutions ready to greet them.
Early in the development of agriculture, was there someone who feared the simplicity of a grain silo or refrigerator in the same way? Too much food, but it's not real food: monoculture grains, none of the bruises and parasites and honest work of gathering or tracking. Losing respect for the spirit of the slain animal.
They'd be right, of course. Cheap food changed us. Destroyed the concept of what it is to be human every bit as thoroughly as a chicken destroys it's egg by hatching.
Though I don't know if that works - we may have a brain category for nonpeople we don't even compete with hedonically.
" May have ?" I'd be shocked if we didn't. The question is not whether a sufficiently well-designed machine could appeal in that way, it's whether digging up and overstimulating that particular instinct is what we really want to do.
Our drive to do better than our neighbor is a deeply ingrained metric of how we judge ourselves. In essence we recognize that our own assessment is biased and look for cues from others. Eliminating this seems like eliminating past of the foundation of a social species.
I think you're being remarkably binary about this. I think it more realistic that non-sentient sexdroids will enable healthier relationships. When people get the urge to procreate with fitter partners they can just spend an afternoon in the holodeck. I see what you're saying as advocating keeping people a little hungry so that they appreciate food more.
I do not think you can refer to "The Christian Heaven" as if there was only one concept. One of the Spiritualist principles is something like "continuous development for every human soul". The carol refers to "the children crowned/ all in white shall wait around" which is bathetic, and it is hard to see the attraction of it. Someone said thinking about Heaven is like the foetus speculating on the nature of life outside the womb. I see the Christian heaven as being with God, who is Love, and probably with other people too: so h...
I see what you're saying as advocating keeping people a little hungry so that they appreciate food more.
If it's a little hungry and not massive specieswide sex-drive mismatch the way we have now, then sure. You don't necessarily want to match the histograms - to eliminate the current bipolar orientation of human sexuality - just nudge them close enough together that the sexes aren't so frustrated with each other.
In my head I have an image of the parliament of volitional shadows of the human species, negotiating a la Nick Bostrom. The male shadows and the female shadows are pretty much agreed that (real) men need to be able to better read female minds; but since this is a satisfaction of a relatively more "female" desire - making men more what women wish they were - the male shadows ask in return that the sex-drive mismatch be handled more by increasing the female sex drive, and less by decreasing male desire...
Maybe it's just my mortal caution speaking, but whenever I envision tampering with human nature, I try to envision soft and subtle changes. At least to start with.
Sorry. You can get your psychological nudges, I'll get my (optimized AND sentient) catgirl thank you very much.
He said an odd thing at this point. 'You never see any, hm, any Ents round there, do you?' he asked. 'Well, not Ents, Entwives I should really say.' 'Entwives?' said Pippin. 'Are they like you at all?' 'Yes, hm, well no: I do not really know now', said Treebeard thoughtfully. 'But they would like your country, so I just wondered.' -- TT, 75 (III, 4)
I'm not sure I follow you. Yes, this would be a problem if people would, indeed, create mostly nonsentient catgirls. But I'm pretty sure that most people would prefer to have sentient companions. Even if they didn't, they'd want companions that seemed like they were sentient, and the easiest way to create truly sentient-seeming companions is probably to create companions that are sentient (remember the Zombie Arguments). So the exact problem you're describing won't be an issue.
Also, most people will want human-like companions, not things with an obviously alien cognitive architecture. So it seems to me that a far more likely scenario is that a major fraction of the populace will go on to create themselves sentient companions, who they then live with happily ever after (or whatever). There's no divide into separate societies, since those new companions will be mainly human-like as well, and thus will have lives apart from simply being mates and will integrate into society just as much as everybody else. (This ignores the people who don't actually want companions but devoted slaves. They might split off, but they're a minority.)
No problem as I can see it.
The male shadows and the female shadows are pretty much agreed that (real) men need to be able to better read female minds; but since this is a satisfaction of a relatively more "female" desire - making men more what women wish they were - the male shadows ask in return that the sex-drive mismatch be handled more by increasing the female sex drive, and less by decreasing male desire...
I wonder how many people are reading this and screaming hubris, and if it might be a good idea to do a top-level post on FAI means no programmer-sensitive AI morality. (Or maybe you did and I forgot.)
I'm mostly with Kaj; I don't see the problem. Designing a companion seems like it will often be a superior strategy than trying to acquire one largely through trial-and-error with existing people. Why would anyone want to "catgirl" when they could make a human who was perfectly suited for them?
If anything, I think problems may come from women, who will find themselves no longer able to acquire resources by virtue of their attractiveness. Of course, if we have enough technology to create companions, we could probably easily modify women (or men) to be as attractive as the "catgirls", and maybe make women on equal footing with men in the engineering department (so they don't suffer economically).
People want to be high in the social hierarchy, it's an instrumental value stronger than almost all other human drives including sex (which is also an instrumental value). The civilization was developed only because of this drive.
Do you want to remove this strongest and most complex human drive, or populate the world with low status beings like catgirls so more people can feel they're high in the hierarchy than mathematics allows? There's no obvious third way, and catgirls seems to me like much less of a problem than drastically altering human nature by removing social status drive.
An interesting topic, but I think you've overlooked an important sex difference on the whole "each gender goes its own way" scenario. When it comes to relationships men are generally looking for an affectionate, physically attractive sex partner, so the idea of building non-sentient (or otherwise specially engineered) companions seems plausible.
But women are primarily looking for a source of material support, preferably of high social status. This pretty much requires a partner her society considers a legal person, capable of earning money and ow...
Be warned; every time you mention catgirls into a discussion on applied theology, a physicist writes some Permutation City self-insertion fanfic.
And every time a physicist plays God, we get one step closer to making catgirls reality.
Alternatively, every time someone calls the Singularity "The Rapture of the Nerds", some catgirls get physical with each other.
@Manuel Mortelmaier:
How about "Every time nerds on OB discuss human relationships, one decibel of evidence is added to the hypothesis that the singularity will look like a sci-fi fanfic novel"
Is the cat{girl,boy} scenario just a specific instantiation of the "permanent orgasm implant" problem?
rw: methods of short circuiting the sex drive falls into two categories. the first would be controlling sensory input (holodecks/virtual reality and or cyborgs). the second is bypassing the senses and directly messing with the brain itself via implants or genetic manipulation.
the second type is more prone to unintended consequences than the first.
"How about "Every time nerds on OB discuss human relationships, one decibel of evidence is added to the hypothesis that the singularity will look like a sci-fi fanfic novel""
That gets to near-certainty too fast.
is there any aspect of human existence as complicated as romance
Yes. Parenting and politics. Given a good enough model of humanity, you could probably prove that romance comes in precisely third after those two. Unlike romance, it's not even all that sensible to consider those two with non-sentient NPCs, a sign of their inherent complexity. Otherwise, good argument.
I'm coming in late, but I will say that you should probably examine the game-design literature. They are (for good commercial and aesthetic reasons) pretty much in line with your theory of fun, and in some ways advanced of it.
Seems like the most simple solution would be to trend people towards being bisexual and reduce the need for monogamous relationships. So instead of having one perfect mate that a person spends all their time with then have many different mates that all fulfill an different essential need or hunger. I know if I was living a very long life I wouldn't want to spend it all with the same person.
My comment got flagged as spam. I'm removing the links now but would appreciate it if this comment was removed when the original gets approved.
I've never understood the fascination with cats, which is perhaps because I'm allergic to them. For misanthropic reasons, I suspect I'd prefer replacing you all with some sort of non-sentient beings (though perhaps not when I'm at my most misanthropic).
He said, "Well, then I'd just modify my brain not to get bored -" And I said: "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE" Why? You've just given a frightened response ...
Extending Aurini's point, I think it is worth asking to what extent we have already integrated catpeople into our culture today. I think many of us would agree that the women featured in pornographic films are catwomen of a kind. What about pop stars, boy bands, etc.? What about mainstream fiction? On Firefly, Kaylee is beautiful, has an above-female-average sex drive, and falls in love with the introverted, socially awkward intellectual character - isn't she exactly the sort of catgirl most male sci-fi fans would want?
It seems like the problems you've identified here don't suddenly begin at the moment you switch on a fully convincing interactive simulation of a human being - there is a continuum, and as our technology progresses, we will naturally tend to move down it. Where shall those of us who look ahead and wish for a eudaemonic future dig our trenches and hold our ground?
(posting from a different homepage today - it seemed appropriate, given the topic)
Eliezer: I ask it in all seriousness - is there any aspect of human existence as complicated as romance? Think twice before you say, "Well, it doesn't seem all that complicated to me; now calculus, on the other hand, that's complicated."
Wait...have people indicated to you they believe otherwise--that they would actually say that and need to think twice? People not in a coma? Or haven't comedy clubs and chick flicks done their job and taught the apparently perpetually unattached who have never experienced a relationship about the irrational comple...
"AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE" ?
If the Singularity is the Rapture of the Nerds, self-modification of the brain must be Hell; a way to screw up to an arbitrary degree that most people don't even understand well enough to fear.
nazgulnarsil I think it more realistic that non-sentient sexdroids will enable healthier relationships. When people get the urge to procreate with fitter partners they can just spend an afternoon in the holodeck. I see what you're saying as advocating keeping people a little hungry so that they appreciate food more.
PUA techniques suggest that this may actually help. If men are able to score with hot women on the holodeck, this may make them feel more "alpha", which will then make them better at picking up women - and more attractive to women (so...
@Mike Blume
"On Firefly, Kaylee is beautiful, has an above-female-average sex drive, and falls in love with the introverted, socially awkward intellectual character - isn't she exactly the sort of catgirl most male sci-fi fans would want?"
No. That would certainly freak the nerd out. M. Vassar and I have several times discussed this problem - nerds seem to integrate their low status, so often if any even half-decent skirt shows an interest in them they reject instantly, thinking "wow, I know I'm a loser, so you must be worse to like me." Nerds would do better to uncoil from the defensive crouch of that identity ASAP.
I think nerds fantasize about women being more like men psychologically in the sense of them being the ones who take initiative and risk loss of face in courtship.
Yes, when a character gets a Magical Girlfriend, "I'm not worthy of you!" is one of the most common reactions.
Why would anyone want to "catgirl" when they could make a human who was perfectly suited for them?
If catgirl technology precedes pseudo-human technology, corporations may shape our preferences so that we truly prefer the catgirls.
Sure this isn't a utopia for someone who wants to preserve "suboptimal" portions of his/her history because they hold some individual significance. But it seems a pretty darn good utopia for a pair of newly created beings. A sort of Garden of Eden scenario.
Wow is that NOT how I would characterize my side of the position that I have discussed with Frelkins. Just...WOW!
In my head I have an image of the parliament of volitional shadows of the human species, negotiating a la Nick Bostrom. The male shadows and the female shadows are pretty much agreed that (real) men need to be able to better read female minds; but since this is a satisfaction of a relatively more "female" desire - making men more what women wish they were - the male shadows ask in return that the sex-drive mismatch be handled more by increasing the female sex drive, and less by decreasing male desire...
What happens to those who absolutely refuse to accept a "few psychological nudges" done to themselves? They obtain the benefit of species-wide correction yet either don't contribute to the satisfaction of the other sex or are forced into it.
Sorry, my overemphasized antiauthoritarian emotional module had to bring that up.
Eliezer, I've been pondering reconciliation between male and female sex/relationship preferences for a while, so I really like this line of thought:
Eliezer said:
The male shadows and the female shadows are pretty much agreed that (real) men need to be able to better read female minds; but since this is a satisfaction of a relatively more "female" desire - making men more what women wish they were - the male shadows ask in return that the sex-drive mismatch be handled more by increasing the female sex drive, and less by decreasing male desire......
Could we argue that forced "combat" with the opposite gender is good training for negotiating cooperation with hostiles towards futures higher in our preference ranking?
Err, and that such training is valuable.
Meta: This post seems to have a problem where all marked-up text has no whitespace around it. (If it were possible to apply the changes, I would take the time to fix it.)
When I consider how easily human existence could collapse into sterile simplicity, if just a single major value were eliminated, I get very protective of the complexity of human existence. ,,, If you delete the intricacy of human romantic/sexual relationships between sentient partners - then the peak complexity of the human species goes down. The most complex fun thing you can do, has its pleasure surgically detached and redirected to something simpler.
This is outstanding stuff - deep and important.
But if you drew two histograms of the desired frequencies of intercourse for both sexes, you'd see that the graphs don't match up, and it would be the same way on many other dimensions.
This is probably true - but may be overestimated because of the different resulting distributions in frequency of intercourse between the sexes. Men and women have the same amount of heterosexual intercourse on average. But a Swedish study, "The web of human sexual contacts: Promiscuous individuals are the vulnerable nodes to target in safe-sex campaigns", Fredrik Liljeros, Christofer R. Edling, Luís A. Nunes Amaral, H. Eugene Stanley and Yvonne Åberg, in Nature June 21 2001, which I've...
both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles... yep, looks like it.)
The thought that immediately sprang to my mind, was that this result could be greatly exaggerated by homosexual couples being more likely than heterosexual couples to invent their relationship dynamic themselves, rather than following the cultural script.
Addendum:
Another factor that could be contributing to that statistic, is that there exists cultural pressure to be in a heterosexual relationship, and there also exists cultural pressure to not be in a homosexual relationship. I could easily imagine this skewing the sample even further, by creating a much higher average threshold of wanting to be together necessary for homosexuals to enter the category "couples".
"Romance is complex" is a very common cached thought, but unless my experience is utterly freakish, a wrong one. My partner and I get in fights, like anybody does, but not over anything particularly mysterious or complex. Sure, part of the pleasures of early romance is discovering the various nuances of someone, until you have a better working model of them than yourself, but the joys of a relationship aren't over after that point. You may end up taking joy in the merely real.
I say this as someone frequently helpless and confused when it comes to how to deal with friends, strangers, co-workers, &c.
I had not heard the term catgirl before reading it on Lesswrong. Does this come from the story in The Man-Kzinn Wars series about the woman who gets gradually converted into a Kzinn female (which are only borderline sentient), or is this from some other niche in nerd culture that I am not familiar with?
But I can't quite manage to argue... that such a wish should be binding on someone who doesn't have it.
I would have had a problem with this post if not for that line.
I'll take a nonsentient perfectly tailored romantic partner anyday. Or perhaps better yet self-modify to no longer require interpersonal entanglement.
80 comments and nobody complained about the volcano lair part? That sounds kind of dark and cramped and hellish.
You don't get a real volcano lair, which might be dark and cramped, and might also be subject to nasty dangerous gases and at risk from lava. You get an optimized meme-volcano lair which is roomy, well-lit, mostly safe, only adds drama when it improves the story, and is lavishly appointed.
In the same spirit, cats and girls are capable of being annoying, though in rather different ways. Catgirls are only annoying if it's cute.
That's a clearer and better way of saying what I was implying. The volcano would be about as "hellish" as the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean attraction is "pirate-y". A few dark passages and boiling kool aid lava would do it for most people. A dragon or a fire god might also be a cool addition.
I ask it in all seriousness - is there any aspect of human existence as complicated as romance?
Politics.
Edit: It seems I was not the first to say so.
He said, "Well, then I'd just modify my brain not to get bored -"
And I said: "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE"
AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE meaning ‘if you're willing to do that why don't you just wirehead yourself?’, right?
But seriously, I can't see why someone would prefer catgirls to real women if they don't also prefer prostitutes to girlfriends. So I'd just have asked him, “Why aren't you spending all of your disposable income on prostitutes, then?”
Having a non-sentient romantic partner is masturbation.
I like masturbation and all, but ultimately it is just like any other self-time, such as eating a tub of ice cream while watching one of those guilty-pleasure-romcoms.
Catgirls : Book reading :: Romance : Intelligent conversation
In a nutshell—sex/romance, as we know it now, is a primary dimension of multiplayer fun.
What happened to boardgames?
Well, obviously the correct decision isn't catpersons OR human partner. The correct decsion is catpersons AND human partner.
Although I would say that in many many instances the average person wouldn't be a more satisfying sex partner than the average catperson. And that goes double for when the catperson is designed by genetically modified to have a human body and a cat's brain, which is probably the quickest path to catpersons from here.
Okay, maybe I don't want to spend a MILLION years doing this.
But once the technology is available, I want my consciousness transferred from a male body into a female body. Then I want to have sex/flirting/cuddling with a large number of women. And I want the sex to involve my unusual fetish.
Thing is: once we have the technology, there will be a large number of men transferring their consciousnesses to female bodies in order to pursue female-female sex and relationships, and the more men do this, the larger the potential mating pool for these men (who will no longer be men) because they will mate with each other.
Thought: Something we could do (eventually) to make the world a better place is to use technology to upgrade every man's body. Make most men taller, more muscular, leaner, etc. Men who currently have relatively less attractive bodies will get a larger upgrade than men who have relatively more attractive bodies to make it fair. But make sure there is still variety in what men's bodies look like.
Do this until the average man is as sexually attractive to the average women as the average woman is to the average man. That would solve a lot of problems. And I do...
Is there any significant difference between finding sentient beings who self-modify into becoming sentient catgirls for the purpose of serving you in your volcano fortress and engineering de novo sentient catgirls who desire to serve you in your volcano fortress?
An answer of "There is probably one but I can't figure out what it is." is equivalent to an answer of "I can't find one."
I'm not making a mathematical conjecture that is probably true but might not have a proof; I'm asking what is wrong with engineering fully sentient catgirls who want to serve people in a volcano fortress that isn't also wrong with allowing existing people to follow their dreams of changing themselves into sentient catgirls and serving people in a volcano fortress.
Today I shall criticize yet another Utopia. This Utopia isn't famous in the literature. But it's considerably superior to many better-known Utopias—more fun than the Christian Heaven, or Greg Egan's upload societies, for example. And so the main flaw is well worth pointing out.
This Utopia consists of a one-line remark on an IRC channel:
I've come to think of this as Reedspacer's Lower Bound.
Sure, it sounds silly. But if your grand vision of the future isn't at least as much fun as a volcano lair with catpersons of the appropriate gender, you should just go with that instead. This rules out a surprising number of proposals.
But today I am here to criticize Reedspacer's Lower Bound—the problem being the catgirls.
I've joked about the subject, now and then—"Donate now, and get a free catgirl or catboy after the Singularity!"—but I think it would actually be a terrible idea. In fact, today's post could have been entitled "Why Fun Theorists Don't Believe In Catgirls."
I first realized that catpeople were a potential threat, at the point when a friend said—quotes not verbatim—
"I want to spend a million years having sex with catgirls after the Singularity."
I replied,
"No, you don't."
He said, "Yes I do."
I said, "No you don't. You'd get bored."
He said, "Well, then I'd just modify my brain not to get bored—"
And I said: "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE"
Don't worry, the story has a happy ending. A couple of years later, the same friend came back and said:
"Okay, I've gotten a bit more mature now—it's a long story, actually—and now I realize I wouldn't want to do that."
To which I sagely replied:
"HA! HA HA HA! You wanted to spend a million years having sex with catgirls. It only took you two years to change your mind and you didn't even have sex with any catgirls."
Now, this particular case was probably about scope insensitivity, the "moment of hearing the good news" bias, and the emotional magnetism of specific fantasy.
But my general objection to catpeople—well, call me a sentimental Luddite, but I'm worried about the prospect of nonsentient romantic partners.
(Where "nonsentient romantic/sex partner" is pretty much what I use the word "catgirl" to indicate, in futuristic discourse. The notion of creating sentient beings to staff a volcano lair, gets us into a whole 'nother class of objections. And as for existing humans choosing to take on feline form, that seems to me scarcely different from wearing lingerie.)
"But," you ask, "what is your objection to nonsentient lovers?"
In a nutshell—sex/romance, as we know it now, is a primary dimension of multiplayer fun. If you take that fun and redirect it to something that isn't socially entangled, if you turn sex into an exclusively single-player game, then you've just made life that much simpler—in the same way that eliminating boredom or sympathy or values over nonsubjective reality or individuals wanting to navigate their own futures, would tend to make life "simpler". When I consider how easily human existence could collapse into sterile simplicity, if just a single major value were eliminated, I get very protective of the complexity of human existence.
I ask it in all seriousness—is there any aspect of human existence as complicated as romance? Think twice before you say, "Well, it doesn't seem all that complicated to me; now calculus, on the other hand, that's complicated." We are congenitally biased to underestimate the complexity of things that involve human intelligence, because the complexity is obscured and simplified and swept under a rug. Interpersonal relationships involve brains, still the most complicated damn things around. And among interpersonal relationships, love is (at least potentially) more complex than being nice to your friends and kin, negotiating with your allies, or outsmarting your enemies. Aspects of all three, really. And that's not merely having a utility function over the other mind's state—thanks to sympathy, we get tangled up with that other mind. Smile when the one smiles, wince when the one winces.
If you delete the intricacy of human romantic/sexual relationships between sentient partners—then the peak complexity of the human species goes down. The most complex fun thing you can do, has its pleasure surgically detached and redirected to something simpler.
I'd call that a major step in the wrong direction.
Mind you... we've got to do something about, you know, the problem.
Anyone the least bit familiar with evolutionary psychology knows that the complexity of human relationships, directly reflects the incredible complexity of the interlocking selection pressures involved. Males and females do need each other to reproduce, but there are huge conflicts of reproductive interest between the sexes. I don't mean to go into Evolutionary Psychology 101 (Robert Wright's The Moral Animal is one popular book), but e.g. a woman must always invest nine months of work into a baby and usually much more to raise it, where a man might invest only a few minutes; but among humans significant paternal investments are quite common, yet a woman is always certain of maternity where a man is uncertain of paternity... which creates an incentive for the woman to surreptitiously seek out better genes... none of this is conscious or even subconscious, it's just the selection pressures that helped construct our particular emotions and attractions.
And as the upshot of all these huge conflicts of reproductive interest...
Well, men and women do still need each other to reproduce. So we are still built to be attracted to each other. We don't actually flee screaming into the night.
But men are not optimized to make women happy, and women are not optimized to make men happy. The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don't know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles... yep, looks like it.)
I find it all too easy to imagine a world in which men retreat to their optimized sweet sexy catgirls, and women retreat to their optimized darkly gentle catboys, and neither sex has anything to do with each other ever again. Maybe men would take the east side of the galaxy and women would take the west side. And the two new intelligent species, and their romantic sexbots, would go their separate ways from there.
That strikes me as kind of sad.
Our species does definitely have a problem. If you've managed to find your perfect mate, then I am glad for you, but try to have some sympathy on the rest of your poor species—they aren't just incompetent. Not all women and men are the same, no, not at all. But if you drew two histograms of the desired frequencies of intercourse for both sexes, you'd see that the graphs don't match up, and it would be the same way on many other dimensions. There can be lucky couples, and every person considered individually, probably has an individual soulmate out there somewhere... if you don't consider the competition. Our species as a whole has a statistical sex problem!
But splitting in two and generating optimized nonsentient romantic/sexual partner(s) for both halves, doesn't strike me as solving the problem so much as running away from it. There should be superior alternatives. I'm willing to bet that a few psychological nudges in both sexes—to behavior and/or desire—could solve 90% of the needlessly frustrating aspects of relationships for large sectors of the population, while still keeping the complexity and interest of loving someone who isn't tailored to your desires.
Admittedly, I might be prejudiced. For myself, I would like humankind to stay together and not yet splinter into separate shards of diversity, at least for the short range that my own mortal eyes can envision. But I can't quite manage to argue... that such a wish should be binding on someone who doesn't have it.