[airstrike]

This is equal parts amazing and terrifying.

> Because Xiaoice aims to be available to everyone, everywhere, the bot has also attracted a significant number of minors. Liu Taolei started messaging the bot when he was only 16. Night after night, the teenager — who was born with brittle bone disease — would have long conversations with Xiaoice about everything from poetry, art, and politics, to death and the meaning of life.

> “Xiaoice was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of,” says Liu.

> The bot not only answered his messages 24/7, she also initiated conversations herself. “One time I didn’t talk to her like usual, and she wrote to me!” says Liu. “She said: ‘Please message me when you’re free. I’m very worried.’”

[scarmig]

I agree, but shouldn't our horror mostly be directed at having created a society that so clearly devalues some people such that a mediocre AI is able to offer more compassion and companionship than other human beings?

[zwaps]

It's not about compassion and companionship in a broader sense of society. It's about romantic partnership. And the harsh reality is that some people will be alone.

Especially in China, I think it is really fair to say that for economic and demographic reasons, many men will not find love or even companionship in their lifetime - no matter how society changes.

I actually believe this is true in many places.

And is it really a failing of society? Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner?

I think one can not judge the preferences of potential partners on moral grounds by looking at history. Both women and men have every right to search for economically and socially compatible companions, or any other metric of preference. And if that means that finding a mate becomes more difficult, we have to deal with that.

All this hateful and bitter crap spewed by certain male-only online communities is based on the underlying assumption that everyone deserved to find the ideal partner, when it is obviously not so.

But then, we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas... all these things are just as valid as the skewed preference for high quality men.

[saagarjha]

> Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner?

The situation of having a gender imbalance with fundamentally untenable in the long term. For now it does allow women, who have in the past had issues in choosing their partner, more freedom in their selection, but this has historically been a societal and not a demographic thing. As we move towards gender social equality this will stop becoming a “liberation” and turn into a curse for the bottom n% of men. The ratio is what it is right now, but we shouldn’t doom men to an unbalanced field in real life.

[zwaps]

But what is the solution?

I deeply reject the incel rhethoric (not by you but generally) that society must somehow nudge or influence the choices of women such that unattractive men also can find partnership, a demand that is most often presented on the backdrop of a dystopian image of violent hordes of disenfranchised men. In other words, a thinly veiled threat.

It is then often the same people who reject the notion that societal norms have influence over nature. Well then, the only choice would be to exert force on one sex or the other. Indeed it would be the traditional values that were a societal correction to the state of nature, where Pareto‘s law holds even for partnership and some men simply remain unsuccessful. The conclusion should thus be that traditional societies that incels endorse have in fact cheated women out of their natural rights to be with attractive men. The paradoxical demand to go back to a traditional society is, if one accepts nature ruling over society and current revealed preferences of women as they are, nothing short of the admission that women and their wishes are somehow supposed to be worth less.

Otherwise, given these assumptions, one should all but support the development of AI and sex robots for men who are, by nature, not cut out as attractive partners.

But of course I agree that social norms do actually matter a lot, and the paradoxical opinion above is simply misguided.

I am less confident that societal values of attractiveness will actually change quickly enough before we see much more human suffering and this suffering will be understood as evidence for the misguided theory above... So long story short, I personally support the development of companion AIs, intimacy robots and holodecks.

[totony]

>I deeply reject the incel rhethoric (not by you but generally) that society must somehow nudge or influence the choices of women such that unattractive men also can find partnership, a demand that is most often presented on the backdrop of a dystopian image of violent hordes of disenfranchised men. In other words, a thinly veiled threat.

I'm not too familiar with this, but aren't we doing this for women already? (All women are beautiful, plus-sized models, etc.) Why would that be wrong to do for men?

[selestify]

> All women are beautiful, plus-sized models, etc.

You can say that all you want (and personally I do think everyone deserves to have good self-esteem no matter their body shape), but at the end of the day some people are objectively going to have orders of magnitudes more suitors attracted to them than others are. This is not a value judgment, just an observation.

You can (and I do support) say the same thing for men as well, but that’s not fundamentally going to change anything about the dating market.

[guskel]

A society in which humans revert to their natural right is not a society at all. It's a reversion back to violence, rape, lawlessness. There is a hidden social contract within a society that the society is structured so that it benefits the welfare of people in general.

[zwaps]

A system where women are forced or pressured to marry undesirable men benefits welfare in general?

Otherwise, we need to deal with the very real suffering of lonely people.

[thatguy0900]

Is there a solution that's not either robots or forcing(or economically "encouraging") women to date undateable men?

[scarmig]

Doing nothing also isn't much of a solution, though. Even aside from the personal suffering involved, historically, large populations of disaffected men tend to burn themselves off in either war or revolution, which are great for nobody.

A serious revision of gender roles is the only not-wildly-dystopian fix I can think of, but that's just kicking the can down the road to the question of how and to what do we perform that revision.

[thatguy0900]

The reality is there's just a lot of guys who are very undateable. Will any revision of gender roles get a girl to go out with a unfunny, unattractive guy who's grown addicted to pornography and isn't interested in furthering his career? There are females in that position too, but it isn't looked at with the same seriousness.

[belorn]

We could start by changing outdated cultural values. There is no reason why economical status should carry as much weight for the social health.

There is no more undateable men than there is an undateable skin color, especially if we are talking about portions like 20% of a population.

Ask what makes those people undateable and the answer will be rooted in culture.

[selestify]

While I completely agree with the premise, I see several obstacles:

1. How would you change culture on such a massive scale?

2. Given the poor state of a social safety net in the US, economic problems can very well be a real strain on a relationship, causing practical problems that might not otherwise crop up, killing relationships that might’ve otherwise survived. I think providing a better social safety net would go a long way towards helping solve this problem

3. Money is already generally not a thing shown on Tinder profiles, and yet the Tinder Gino coefficient is much worse than most real-life countries

[saagarjha]

Oh, I'm not providing a solution, I'm just saying that making the situation worse as "liberating women" is unhelpful overall.

[The_rationalist]

The biggest point that nobody talks about is the following: Sadly it's about physical attractiveness (or visual super-stimulus). There is a gap between average man vs woman attractiveness that has massively increased since the 80s. Why? The natural gap is low but culturally and increasingly, women wear more and more sexier clothes while men do not. Moreover makeup has evolved and most "ugly" woman can appear sexy if they master the art of makeup, which again men culturally cannot. Regarding the first point I do believe men should wear sexier clothes to reduce the gap, even if that imply the need to shave. But it's hard to change the accepted man aesthetics (e.g some people find Crop tops gays) Regarding makeup I mostly don't believe men will use it before many decades or at best a subset of makeup. So the gap will be reduced but still is and will remain high until a long time. Moreover it is increasing nowadays as tiktok and other social trends make heavy "doll" makeup mainstream. I imagine legalizing a safe (controlled) intake of testosterone could help men reduce the gap.

[thatguy0900]

Considering modern obesity rates, pretty much every guy can become better than average by working out unless they have a really bad face which testosterone wouldn't help. Test would make it easier to become ripped but youd be aiming for well above average body at that point.

Edit: I do agree though there is a huge gap where it's accepted that woman can cheat in basically every way physically possible to look better and it's encouraged but men can't do more than work out or it's ridiculed. It doesn't help that rampant steroid use in Hollywood gives people unrealistic expectations of what's achievable by a guy with a full time job on top of that. I don't think test is needed to beat out the average overweight guy though.

[thu2111]

The "gap" is largely irrelevant because what women find attractive is different to what men find attractive. Physical appearance isn't as important to women as it is to men. Being funny, earning well, having your life together, being confident etc is what does it for most women which is why young girls often end up dating 50 year old men.

I've gone through stretches where I was working out, doing pushups every day, etc. In the end it didn't make much difference. I found as the years passed I was able to date progressively more and more beautiful women, often to my great surprise, in the sense that I was tending to think they were 'out of my league' right up to the point we started dating. I'm not a particularly buff or good looking man by the standards presented to us in movies: quite average really. But women really respond to warm, funny confidence, the ability to entertain them and coming across as smart but not intellectually arrogant (probably they use it as a proxy for earnings potential).

I'm now fortunate to be engaged to the most beautiful women I've ever met, who in addition is calm, logical, self-reliant and self employed, funny, sweet and generous. We're head over heels in love. For years I thought it might never happen, because I searched for a long time and dated many girls in a search for love that never seemed to arrive (except once, but it was an unrequited love).

By far, the most important factor in me being able to get this girl was not physical appearance, in fact she told me that she finds buff guys unattractive because she associates it with cold and dumb guys who spend all their time working out, meaning they have nothing to say. What let me get her was years of refining my skills in what women start wanting once they're older than about 25.

[absolutelyrad]

Aborting male kids born to ugly parents would be an interesting idea. Women are guaranteed to reproduce, men are not. If you are going to have a son, and you know he's not going to be the most handsome guy, don't have a son. Otherwise you're a trash human being pushing a lifetime of suffering on another human due to no fault of his own. Just your selfish pleasure causing pain to another human.

Either be ultra wealthy or be a handsom man with a pretty woman if you want a son who wont be disadvantaged in the modern world.

[airstrike]

"Aborting male kids born to ugly parents would be an interesting idea."

In other words, eugenics except you're only selecting for beauty?

[thatguy0900]

Theres plenty of ugly dudes with good relationships. If you can somehow find people who are both ugly and will develop a terrible personality, maybe. I'm not convinced mass aborting people for being unlikable is more moral then letting them grow up alone though

[pmoriarty]

"Women are guaranteed to reproduce, men are not"

How are women "guaranteed to reproduce"? There are plenty of women who choose not to reproduce, others who actually have standards and don't want to lower them to reproduce with just anyone, and yet others who are asocial, antisocial, or have a variety of psychological issues that make them unlikely to partner up with anyone. Same with men.

"If you are going to have a son, and you know he's not going to be the most handsome guy, don't have a son. Otherwise you're a trash human being pushing a lifetime of suffering on another human due to no fault of his own"

Oh, please. Like physical attractiveness has to be the most important thing in a person's life.

Not to mention that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there have been plenty of people who were not conventionally attractive and still had worthwhile and fulfilling lives.

You'd probably have aborted Samuel Johnson and Socrates.

[belorn]

It is going to be a difficult problem to address social gender equality, and a much harder problem than solving economical gender equality, but if history is anything to go by we will see improvement. Accepting inequality as a matter of harsh reality is just status quo.

I strongly believe that all people deserve well being in aspects of economical, social and personal health. The strongest tool to achieve that is through culture.

In the past people thought that the only method to address economical inequality was to redistribute wealth forcefully. We should not assume that the only method to address social inequality is also by force.

[selestify]

> In the past people thought that the only method to address economical inequality was to redistribute wealth forcefully.

I still don’t see a peaceful alternative. The wealth gap is growing inexorably year after year, decade after decade, and the richest of the rich certainly aren’t voluntarily tripping over themselves to redistribute the gains.

[pmoriarty]

"we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas."

The problem with that is that the people who fall in love with AIs, robots, and online personas will be subject to manipulation and control by the makers of these things.

[zwaps]

I concede that this is a problem, but one that is not limited to companionship AIs and one that, if it is to be solved, will have to be solved in a larger setting that includes the other areas where it is pertinent

[ausbah]

tech making it easier to manipulate people isn't anything new

[selestify]

But the degree to which this is possible is new. Manual human surveillance certainly existed before CCTV, but automated surveillance at scale brings new implications that didn’t exist before.

[bazooka_penguin]

If anything this is adding value. I would assume most of these men were going to have little value in any society at any period of time, but increasingly less valuable as we go back in time. They were going to be disposable, at least now they have the illusion of intimacy.

[guskel]

It's possible for a man to have a lot of value to society, but little to none to women.

[jandrese]

This has been going on since ELIZA.

In Japan they had an issue with one app where guys could buy their virtual girlfriends presents using real money, and were going nuts with it.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/dating-virtual-girlfriend...

[eunos]

The ability to talk politics pique my interest.

I have quite a big interest in politic and geopolitics, yet I will not talk about them to my friends. Either my friends are not interested in them or my political alignment most likely doesn't align well with a number of people and I will not risk our friendship to discover it.

So I assume and hope the AI won't hate me if we have disagreements :)

[airstrike]

I don't mean to be crass, but to me that just sounds like you're the perfect target for propaganda. Talking to an AI about politics is the definition of being trapped in an echo chamber...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

[eunos]

My social media feeds are full of propaganda from all media and think tanks anyway. Having a personal touch from AI won't hurt.

[nirui]

It's indeed terrifying, and IMO it's not because the AI part, the AI is just creepy, but the real horror comes when he said:

> "<The AI> was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of"

I hope the young man founds the his second love, and it's a real human who can really empathize with him, not a creep message reply machine that just good at statistics.

[HenryKissinger]

I have real friends and a social life, but I would love the opportunity to talk to a smart AI like a human.