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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a notion that an FAI will be able to create better friends and lovers for you than actual humans could be. Family would be a more complex case if you value the history as well as the current experience.
I'm not talking about catgirls-- if some difficulties in relationships are part of making relationships better in the long haul, then the FAI will supply difficulties.
If people eventually have relationships with FAI-created humans rather than humans generated by other means, is this a problem?
See also EYs Failed Utopia #4-2
I'm not sure we can extrapolate this currently. If we knew more, thought faster... maybe.
For me this means that one contraint on FAI is that it may not perform changes arbitrarily fast. Too fast for humans to react and adapt. There must be a 'smooth' trajectory. Surely not the abrupt change suggested in Failed Utopia.
Let's first separate sexual aspects from the need for other companionship. Suppose everyone gets their sexual needs, if any satisfied by catgirls+ (+ for the upgrade which includes relationship problems if necessary). If you have a crush on your coworker (or your sibling, ew!), just add a catgirl copy of them to your harem.
Further suppose that the reproduction aspect is also taken care of.
Now you have a race of essentially asexual humans, as far as human-to-human interactions go.
The question is, does it make sense to have friendbots? What, if anything, is lost when you switch from socializing with meat humans to socializing with simulated ones?
This strikes me as superstimulating. In particular, the more cat girls you have, the more and kinkier cat girls you want.
Not necessarily, Plenty of people are happy with vanilla sex (or without). I suspect that even the kinkiest ones out there also have their limit. If not, let's talk about those who do.
That's because vanilla sex isn't as stimulating. The more superstimulating something is, the more experiencing it causes you to want more of it.
That doesn't seem to be the case, see e.g. yummy food.
I think you're confusing "stimulating" and "addictive".
For people who are into one or another variety of kink, or would be if only they knew about it / were prepared to try it. I don't think it's obvious that that's everyone.
That "explanation" is easily falsified. There are plenty of people who tried kinkier sex, enjoyed it, but reverted back to vanilla. There are plenty of people who tried roller-coasters once or twice but decided it's too much "stimulation".
Different people have different thresholds. If I remember the study correctly, none of the rats that tried directly stimulating their pleasure center ever went back.
Rats != people...
Yes, well it would be unethical to repeat that experiment with people.
People, however, (as shminux said) do try kink all the time. It would not be unethical to do a study on people who are already kinky and see if they get kinkier over time.
Anecdotally, they start doing kink, they either decide it isn't for them and stop, or they do get kinkier for a while - because they're exploring what they like and it makes sense to start at the less extreme end of things.
Then they figure out what they like, which is often a range of things at differing levels of 'kinkiness/extremeness', and do that.
I mean, it's almost trivially obvious that compared to the size of the kink community, there is an almost negligible amount of people doing the human equivalent of directly stimulating their pleasure centres to the exclusion of everything else. They tend to make the news. The moderately kinky majority do not.
Well, there have been experiments on humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center#Human_experiments
It's not self-evident to me that they are separable.
When my heterosexual male friends tell me companionship isn't about sex I ask them how many male companions they've had. Not many, I've gathered from the silence.
For hetero males the usual term for male companions is "close friends". I bet the great majority have some.
But go ask some hetero women whether they think sex and companionship are well-separable :-/
Also I get the feeling 21th century Americans have fewer close friends than the historical human norm.
I don't know what the "historical human norm" is and I suspect there is a lot of variation there.
Try reading literature written before the past 50 years and preferably before the 20th century. That will give you an idea.
I am afraid Victorian England is not all that representative of the historical human norm.
I wasn't primarily thinking of Victorian England. Also "before the 20th century" isn't just the 19th century.
In Finnish the connotations of "companion" are more obviously sexual I see, at least in my circles.
It's probably a language issue, in standard English the word "companion" has no sexual overtones.
More to the point, this subthread is explicitly about separating sex from companionship.
Ah, but it's quite likely that they're heteroromantic as well as heterosexual.
Perhaps, but why haven't I come across any homoromantic heterosexuals or heteroromantic homosexuals?
AFAIK people with mismatched romantic and sexual orientations, though very much existent, are quite rare and the -romantic terms are most often used by asexual spectrum people to describe their romantic preferences.
Asexuals with romantic orientations came across my mind too. I can't imagine romantic and sexual orientations as separate, but the stakes aren't high enough for me to commit the typical mind fallacy so I'll keep my mind open to the possibility :)
You've asked that before.
I don't have any new thoughts on this question, so I'll just quote my answer from there:
I thought that was already part of catgirls?
What's a catgirl?
An indistinguishable-from-live sex toy.
With cat-ears.
This looks to be wireheading lite and if you got there I don't see why you wouldn't make the next step as well -- the FAI will create the entire world for you to enjoy inside your head.
I thought wireheading meant stable high pleasure without content rather than an enjoyable simulated world. What do other people think wireheading means?
Well, technically the term "wireheading" comes from experiments which involved inserting an electrode (a "wire") into a rat's pleasure center and giving the rat a pedal to apply electric current to this wire. So yes, in the narrow sense wireheading is just the direct stimulation of the pleasure center.
However I use "wireheading" in the wide sense as well and there it means, essentially, the focus on deriving pleasure from externally caused but internal experiences and the lack of interest in or concern with the outside world. Wireheading in the wide sense is, basically, purified addiction.
If we're living inside an FAI, "outside world" might be getting a little vague. This might even be true if we're still living in our DNA-based bodies.
Do you think an FAI would let people have access to anything it isn't at least monitoring, and more likely controlling?
Uploads/ems are a bit of a different case.
I don't know, but in such a case I probably would not consider it a FAI.
How? Why does it matter in what substrate the information pattern called you resides in this case? I doubt the meat brain will have any connectibility issues once we have uploads.
I am not an information pattern having, for example, a considerable somatic component :-D
Depends. You could have a robotic somatic component, or a human body grown in a vat.
I don't see much difference between a human body grown in a vat and one grown in a womb.
But, generally speaking, in the context of wireheading the somatic component matters.
I say it's not a problem, but my views are outside the LW mainstream on this.
Depends on what the machine has optimized for. I'm not convinced that many definitions of better friends or lovers are vital optimization goals, or even good ones, in themselves. It's quite easy to imagine a set of relationships that trigger every desirable stimuli trigger an individual enjoys, complete with short-term difficulties if necessary, but leaves the victim trapped in a situation where his or her preferences remain at a local optima or are otherwise Not Correct by some grander standard.
Interaction with external minds and external situations not built toward you seem like very important parts of jostling folk out from such environments. Better optimization goals might do that, but it's not an assumption you can easily take.
I'd argue that non-catgirl created beings are people (tautologically), and while relationships with artificially-produced people is fine itself, there are also some possible ethical issues with creating minds optimized for better relationships for certain people, as well, though they're likely outside the scope of this thread (energy efficiency compared to sorting existing minds, harmful desires, House Elves).