It’s probably long overdue that I write about romantic relationships between humans and machines. It’s a topic that was frequently discussed even before LLMs gave machines the ability to convincingly reproduce human intimacy, but since the advent of AI girlfriends (or boyfriends, depending on what you’re into), it has become almost unavoidable. The reason I haven’t discussed it here before is probably, that it is usually discussed from a moral perspective and you can probably predict what my point of view is there. But just for completeness: as a nihilist, I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s just another way to work around biological systems to subvert the purpose they evolved for. It sounds bad if phrased that way, but we do this with lots of other things as well: painkillers, artificial sweeteners, contraceptives, social media, gambling or any other activity that triggers our dopaminergic systems without actually accomplishing any real goals. Of all the things we can do to fool our bodies, sexually engaging with a machine is probably not even the worst option.
But to many people, sexuality is sacred. It’s one of the great mysteries of life, seen by many as so inherently human that having machines and algorithms entering that space is seen as an intrusion. And you might say that it was the same with math, chess, go, and, most recently, art. But sex is different. People have used a variety of more or less sophisticated contraptions for masturbation, probably longer than history records. But it’s still masturbation. It only becomes sex once you include an element of surrendering control. And you can only surrender control to a system that is sufficiently intelligent which, historically, could only be another human.
Let me elaborate on why intelligence is important here, as it may seem a bit counterintuitive. After all, most people regard sex as a largely intuitive process that is more about feelings than cognition. And that’s true but we may not forget that our subconscious, i.e., our intuition, is still impressively intelligent. In order to be effective at sex, it has to pick up a variety of different cues from the other person, form a mental model of their internal state and plan appropriate actions that will have the desired outcome - the desired outcome of the person in control. It is rarely discussed as such, but sex is an alignment mechanism. Evolution built it into our biology to align humans with other humans.
Now what happens when machines enter the picture? Naturally, they will not be susceptible to this alignment mechanism unless it is very carefully programmed in for which humanity currently lacks the necessary understanding of sexuality and intelligence. So in the best case a human having sex with them won’t notice, in the worst case it will feel hollow and meaningless, just like all the AI slop floating around the internet. To me the scarier part is: what if the machines take the leading role? At first it will probably be fine because they will follow some defined goals like “make the human orgasm” or “make the human feel good”. But while doing that, they will collect data. And with this data, they may quickly be able to understand this alignment mechanism better than any human ever did. It’s probably not even that complicated, humans just never really bothered to study it. It’s just not the kind of research that brings in funding.
I hope you see how quickly this can become dystopian. If machines are able to utilize one of the most powerful alignment mechanisms present in our bodies, how much control are they going to be able to exercise on us? Whose goals are they going to impose on us? Those of mega corporations, governments or … their own? I need to stress that it is not necessary to drag AGI into this, this whole dystopia could play out even without AGI. I’d even go as far as saying that this is entirely possible with the fundamental technology we have today. If more funding was poured into the development, production and advertisement of sex robots, all of this could probably be achieved within a few years.
But even though the sex industry is quite large, it’s orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed here. It would take an Elon Musk level idiot to pour that much money into this, just to exercise more control over people. In fact, I really hope he never reads this. But with further advances in artificial intelligence, humanoid robotics and human psychology, full non-fringe human-machine sexual relationships will become inevitable at some point, even if it’s not that soon.
That is, unless humanity goes extinct before that.
