[ExI] Kelly's future

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Wed May 18 05:33:06 UTC 2011


2011/5/17 John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>:
> *Kelly Anderson wrote*
>>>An aside... If I rented out a group of RealDolls, would that be a
>>> brothel? Would it be illegal? Should it be illegal? Is sex with toys
>>> for money a decent business model?
>
>
> *Kelly Anderson replied*
>>Sad that nobody tried answering this question...
>
>
> Kelly, please be careful about being sure to attribute comments to the right
> person (in this case it was unclear).  I realize that with a very long post
> and the accompanying replies, it can get confusing.

I realize it's generally bad form to answer yourself, but that is
actually what I did in that case... :-)

> More comments below!
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 2011/5/11 John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>:
>> > This is a very interesting thread and I had fun responding...
>>
>>
>> > On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> 2011/5/6 salvatore micheal / sam iam <micheals at msu.edu>:
>
>
> I could envision romantic book publishers advertising (in a very public
> way) that women can download the "mind" of particular storyline main
> characters straight into their home male android!

I think that it is very clear that for some women, romance novels
serve a similar escapist purpose that pornography does for some men.
The actual sex in romance novels is usually quite tame, but the dialog
is very seductive. Every hero in every romance novel I've looked at is
exceptionally good at listening to the main heroine.

So while I think you have a great idea here, I think the main thing
women are looking for is a man who will listen, intensely, to whatever
it is they have to say. An android is really perfect for this task, so
I have no doubt that some women will fall in love with their androids,
as long as they are good listeners.

> It is ironic that an android lover for women would need to have much more
> intelligence and personality complexity to be a satisfactory partner. lol

I'm not exactly sure why it's ironic... but it is true. :-)

> I
> suppose human evolution has been pushed forward by females who wanted more
> from their prospective male mates and would not settle for less!

The funny thing is that women are good listeners, in general, and yet
listening is a big part of what they want out of their partners. From
that overly simplistic viewpoint, it is surprising that lesbianism
isn't more popular... :-)

>From an evolutionary standpoint, I could venture a guess as to why
this is the case. Dawkins indicates that women want to find a man who
will stick around long enough to help raise the child. Testing the
man's patience with endless talking would be a good test for whether
they would stick around once things got boring... ;-)

> Hmmm...  And so you would have an android doppleganger to listen to your
> wife or girlfriend talk, and then you would take it's place when it was time
> to eat or have sex?  I don't think a woman would like that one bit...

I wasn't suggesting that you could get away with that... although I
can see how you might have gotten that idea. If you COULD get away
with it, I'm sure a lot of men would try. :-)

>> That's why I don't anticipate a high level of intelligence in
>> companion robots, ever. Unless you are a lab partner, not a sex
>> partner. Why create problems for yourself? Just create a sexual being
>> that lives for sex?
>
> This is where I REALLY disagree with you.  I think many men will want a
> fully sentient/human level of intelligence female android to be a close to
> equal/fully equal partner, rather than having just a very high-tech sex doll
> that can talk and act sexy.  If I am proven to be wrong, then the future may
> be a very depressing place, with people getting physical desires sated, but
> not their emotional/psychological needs.

I think there are two markets here. One for the shallow sexbot, and
another for a more fully functional life partner. It seems pretty
obvious to me that the shallow sexbot will be the first of the two
models that will be technically feasible, and also the first to be
implemented.

Look at the current marketplace. Pornography clearly does not meet
men's emotional/psychological needs, yet it is a multi-billion dollar
business. Same for prostitution, although it comes closer, since it is
an interaction with another human being, and there is the opportunity
for a kind of friendship through repeat business. There are many men
who just aren't looking for the full package.

I agree with you that many men ARE looking for the full package,
probably the majority of men. But the minority is sizable.

>> The limit to your thinking here is that one robot (or one brain) has
>> to perform all the functions. It's said that men want a whore in bed,
>> a chef in the kitchen, a maid to take care of the house, and
>> occasionally someone to talk to, etc. Why not have multiple AGIs
>> hosted in the same body, and switch from one to another as the need
>> arises. I want my partner to be HAPPY to take out the garbage when
>> it's time to do that, and HAPPY to go to bed, and HAPPY to watch the
>> Super Bowl or Star Trek with me. Perhaps one brain can't be HAPPY at
>> ALL those things, so put multiple AGIs in one body, and problem
>> solved.
>
> An excellent point.  But if the android is to mimic the individuality & life
> path of a flesh and blood human, then a single AGI would be the preference.
> I am looking at things from the "having a real/growing relationship with a
> sentient machine" perspective.

Sure, and there will be a market for that too. I think it will lag the
first market by ten years or more, just due to technological issues.

> An AGI mind may be a fragile and not always fully
> healable/fixable/adjustable entity, therefore in some ways on par with a
> human brain.

I think that is highly likely. That being said, if things go badly,
you can probably go to the last good state backup pretty easily if you
mess things up. That is not so easy with humans.

> And so creating your warped android might still be an act of
> abuse.  But then I am thinking of a human level AGI intelligence.  A less
> complex mentality might work fine for your purposes.

Not so much MY purposes, as a mental exercise, but I get your point. I
think it is critical in the appropriate deployment of AI that you
deploy no more intelligence than you need for the task at hand. Just
as we try not to hire employees that are "over qualified" because they
will become bored.

>> Again, think how you would design the perfect sex partner. You
>> wouldn't put a huge brain into such a creature, would you? If you
>> would, I think that's kind of cruel. Think Marvin or the Elevators in
>> Adam's books. That is cruelty.
>
> I think at least some men would want a fully sentient equal partner, as
> compared to the sexy equivalent of a dishwasher that can speak...

Of course. Some would not too.

>> Trekkies and gamers occasionally get lucky, and find a trekkie or
>> gamer girlfriend, but not often in my experience...
>
> My local science fiction cons are practically soap operas the way some
> people hook up! lol

I can only imagine... You don't speak Klingon?!? We're over!

>> Or we'll figure it out, and program them better. See my posts on
>> "raising" robot children.
>
> I suspect that the higher the intelligence, the greater the possibility for
> so-called "negative" behaviors to evolve over time.  Better programming may
> at best only somewhat limit such tendencies.

Programming is a bad word for training AGIs, IMHO.

I disagree that the degree of intelligence is in any way tied to
personality disorder type problems. In my work with borderline
personality disorder (I have years of experience in this particular
area) I have found that those suffering from BPD often have very high
intelligence. Native intelligence is not correlated in any meaningful
way. Hitler, my first wife and Saddam were smart, but twisted.

>> If there is a continuous video feed covering a broad spectrum from a
>> jogger's vicinity to a remote location, I suspect jogging down the
>> Provo River Trail would get much safer, very quickly. I think you
>> could design an android that LIKED being a rape victim, but also LIKED
>> acting like it didn't want to be a rape victim. In other words, one
>> that a rapist would enjoy going after, but who wasn't damaged in the
>> process. It's all about how you wire up the reward system.
>
> Uhhh....  Kelly....  You do seem to have an obsession with this subject!!!

No. I don't. Really. It is just an example of a behavior that is
viewed very negatively by society (rightly so) and is a big turn on
for a very small group of people who mess up other people's lives. It
seems like there is room in society to replace innocent victims with
victims of design. It's a tricky issue because it still seems wrong in
some way. There is also the risk that you are training rapists, just
as first person shooters train soldiers. So going down this road might
be a very bad idea indeed.

I do know women who have been raped, and it's no joke. I would like to
see what could be done to minimize it in the future. I don't know if
android or VR rape would make things better or worse, but it does seem
possible that it could.

I do think you can train an AGI to perform well for any purpose, and
that is more to the point I was trying to make. The vast variety of
human sexual preferences will require a large number of different AGIs
with the right set of compatible preferences. I could have used any
number of alternative fetish examples. I can imagine an android that
would be perfect for someone with a foot fetish, for example. :-)  But
that's not quite so provocative.

>> In WWII, when we wouldn't talk about sex in the US, the US Army was
>> showing STD movies to GIs. The armed forces have a real interest in
>> taking the lead in these areas.
>
>
> Yeah, and those films sure did not have a lasting effect on those horny
> troops!  lol

The purpose was for them to use protection, not to avoid sex. In that,
it may have worked to some extent. I don't know.

>> Again, don't think of your android sex partner as a full human, or
>> even a full intelligence, but one optimized for the purpose. This is a
>> software issue, not a hardware issue. Your wife might not feel so
>> "cheated upon" if you had sex with a brainless android... There may be
>> some women today who would feel less cheated on if their husband
>> visited a prostitute, rather than having a girlfriend on the side...
>> maybe. I'm stretching here.
>
> Again, you look at these androids as super-advanced sex toys, rather than
> potential life partners.  But I certainly can envision how with the
> appropriate software, they could fit into either status.  Elliot Spitzer
> might not have gotten into so much trouble with his wife and media, if he
> had had access to the androids we envision.  He might have been
> heartily laughed at, but possibly not fired from his important job as the
> Wall Street cop.

Sure thing! And we now have Arnold to add to the list of people that
have made poor political choices.

>> It will be harder to create an android that will satisfy women,
>> because their needs are broader. Many men would be fairly satisfied
>> with a sexbot and a chefbot... forget the rest.
>
> The future male androids will encounter female ones to only say, "gee, she
> is dumb and boring!" lol  But I believe in the truth of the classic saying,
> "intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac!"  And it will especially be so
> for our cognitively enhanced future generations...

Successful androids for women will have to have some feminine characteristics.

I agree that the sexbot low intelligence female would not appeal to
the highly intelligent conversational male android. Not good matches.

>> Human women are magical to human men because human men are evolved to
>> think so (and vice-versa). As we unravel the whys and wherefores of
>> this, I think we can create androids that will be just as attractive
>> as the real thing.
>
> In outward physical ways, most certainly.  But I think there may be aspects
> of the human to human dynamic that will be very hard to fully duplicate.
> And so I see human/android (highly sentient androids) relationships being
> different from human/human.  But are we talking about strictly mechanical
> androids, or perhaps other design types?  The "bioroids" of science fiction
> that are mostly flesh and blood, but quickly manufactured using
> super-advanced "printing" processes might become the most popular
> android sex partner template.  But because of our common biology, such
> technology could be extremely controversial and the need for legal oversight
> would be great.

It would be hard for me to sign up for much more legal oversight... :-)

There is a lot of room for abuse, of course, and when androids advance
to the point where they need protection from us, then yes, we will
need some laws. As for some kind of bio-robot, that seems like a
pretty natural extension of the sort of thing I'm thinking about. The
question is when are they human? When they have a bio brain? It is
going to be difficult to get to the right legal balance, especially
when things change more rapidly than legislators can keep up with. Of
course, we may eventually be able to elect non-biological AGIs to
political office. I hope so.

>> Good for you John. That is definitely the best thing going today!!!
>> Tomorrow, who knows?
>
> I won't replace her just yet...   : )

I wouldn't recommend it. :)

-Kelly




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