#659 - Rob Brooks - Why Are People Falling In Love With Robots?

31:44They have a story, throughout history, has very few prospects of ever finding a mate and taking their place in society that would come with having a mate and possibly having kids and all that kind of stuff. Now, your ancestors and my ancestors, however, did not have that problem because they cut him. The winning team. We were the winning team. Congratulations. And all of your listeners, you were all winners because you've managed to transcend that again and again and again. 40 % of men and only 80 % of women throughout history, right? Yeah, yeah exactly. So twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, but every single one of your male ancestors managed to transcend that at least once have sex at least once and raise a kid who managed to do the same thing.

32:35You said artificial intimacy has got two things to say about young male syndrome. Yeah, okay, so one is it's potential to actually tap some of that energy, some of that which can be creative energy, but can also be incredibly destructive energy is huge. It's like pornography on steroids, as you said earlier, in that it can basically deflect a lot of that, which can probably be a good thing, probably deliver a net benefit. But on the other hand, it can, you know, if artificial intimacy gets really good at pairing people up, we haven't talked much about the algorithmic matchmakers, but the matchmakers like currently Tinder and Grindr etc are matching people up.

33:25If they are giving us what we want, which is somebody who is way above us and way more attractive than us, etc. which is what people want them, want to win in that regard. If it's delivering that especially for women, then it may well be worsening the young males syndrome by narrowing things. If you have to go to parties and you have to go out on dates in order to find people in order to start conversations, etc. We're all constrained, but we all have 24 hours in the day and so that the opportunities to possibly date and mate are spread more evenly. If we're doing it instantaneously on an app by a quick left or right swipe and we're really looking at who's super attractive or who presents themselves really well, we can get this incredible narrowing down to a few super attractive individuals who are going to be having a rampant time on the apps and a lot of people who are getting nothing at all.

34:23And that could worsen young male syndrome. Yeah, what did you look at to do with the algorithmic matchmaking stuff? Have you seen it as a heaven or a hell? I've seen it as currently descending into a potential hell on account of the fact that you know, folks have figured out what they can do. And you know, they want to keep people on platforms, so they want to keep presenting people with the possibility of meeting somebody who's super attractive. where as for it to work in a more benign kind of way in which people match up to other people who, you know, where the relationship really works, there's a lot more learning involved.

35:09You know, those dating platforms that say that they match you to somebody who's compatible or who's like what you want to, this is the app we want you to delete because you're going to find the one, et cetera. They don't know anything at the moment. They really don't, as far as I can tell, have any special insights into it. The currently what we're looking at is platforms that are able to present a catalog of things that look good and then instead of the app doing the work, you're basically doing the work of swiping and messaging and finding them going on dates. I don't, I, I, I, like I said right at the, at the beginning of the show, people, I, I'm reluctant to ever say machines can't do that.

35:57Won't do that because that they're always prove us wrong. At the moment machines aren't figuring out the best ways of pairing people for what it is they want. And part of that's because people themselves don't necessarily know what they want. But as soon as the apps can learn indirectly from us, what it is that we want. and deliver to us what we want. Then that's likely to be a really good thing. Yeah, I think that they already are, in some regard, the problem is what we click on and who we click with don't align very much. The things that people optimize for swiping right and the things that are predictive of a long -term successful relationship often have basically zero correlation.

36:39Like, yeah, they need to get you across the line. Like you need to have an initial attraction to somebody the same as in a bar, right? If there's someone, they need to really, really overcompensate with humor or charm or the way that they move or whatever it might be. If you're not physically attracted to them, which is why physical attraction, the black pill gets some of this stuff, right? That looks are very, very important and they can often be a doorway that is either open or closed. But on the apps, what you are optimizing for is education level implied socioeconomic status and attraction and age and height, I guess.

37:15And within that, it means that pretty much none of those things have any predictive power when it comes to long -term relationship satisfaction, but the only information that the apps get about you are your response to those criteria because they're not going away and observing your interactions with this person over the next three months, perhaps blissful beginning of your lifetime partnership or total catastrophe that ends up in you hating each other and deleting each other from all social media. They don't actually see the stuff that people are optimizing for on the back end. They just see what they're swiping left or right for on the front end.

37:50And yeah, that leads to both the apps and the users gaming the system. So the users, the women will try and overemphasize their looks, the men will try and overemphasize their socioeconomic status and their height. it just creates a game of selection criteria that then the user's reverse engineer to try and work out what works, then it's a battle between human psychology and an algorithm, again, just back and forth, back and forth. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's a classic sexual conflict again. It's an arms race. But instead of the arms race being between women and men, it's an arms race between women and the app, men and the app, And to some extent, between women and men indirectly, as a consequence of that.

38:36And I don't blame the people who make the app. So what they're doing is they're creating something marketplace for busy people who live in a busy places. And there's an enormous cities in most cases. Humans are not evolved to live in cities of millions of people. We still have communities of 150 to 200 people that we interact with. and our social circle spread outwards from there. And current urban living just doesn't deliver on that kind of thing. And so the apps are tremendously successful in one way, in all the ways that you just described. But there is a real space in the market for people to find what they really want.

39:26but they have to know what they really want first and that's, you know, most of us don't. Rob, have you got a dog that's snoring next to you? I do. Can you hear him? Yeah, give him a nudge for me. He's cute. I like him, but let's wake him up a little bit. Everyone can hear him snoring. Millions of people are listening to your poor doggo snoring now. Backsy, what's up, buddy? He's very insecure. I've just been away for four days and he just came in and set next to me. That's all right. But I've got my... He's more important. He's the most important person in this conversation. So I'm glad that he's okay.

40:03Well heard. Are you gonna keep snoring? Do you wanna go outside? Okay. I'll put my foot on his cushion here. We'll see how we can go. You've got some attention. That's cool. So why do you think it is that we haven't got more in -cell violence? Going back to that young male syndrome question that we spoke about before, because given the rates of loneliness and sexlessness that we have at the moment, especially young men, especially in the cohort of men that would do the risk taking behavior to try and get that status up, it seems to me that there does seem to be pretty good evidence that men are being sedated out of this, you know, reproductive and state of seeking behavior through a little titrated dose of community through video games and social media and probably reproductive cues through porn.

40:53Yeah, I think that's exactly right. There's 24 hours in a day, and if you spend time doing the things that compel you and that emulate the violent war mongering competition for status and respect, as well as give you the sense that it's some level attractive or at least stimulated in a way that's like having sex with an attractive person. That's enough to neutralize that for a lot of people. They may not be happy, they may not be better off for it individually, but it certainly completely neutralizes that. And I think that that's a massive benefit that is hard to sell to some people to the Puritans.

41:42But I think that it's something that really has worked. compared that with, you know, there are parts of the world in which access to that kind of technology and to those kinds of things are not really possible and in which access to mating markets that are only get to go through traditional ways. And in those parts of the polarization of young men against older men against families, etc. and you see an enormous amount of in -cell violence. It might not be popular to say that the odd North American in -cell who goes out on a rampage is in a way that the aberrant tip of an iceberg that is actually historically being a much bigger iceberg and is still in a lot of parts of the world.

42:48But you know, it's true that, you know, we're mating markets are freez young men out either because they have to pay bride price and many men can't afford it or because there's a massively male biased sex ratio. Those are places where young men radicalize and fall into violence, property crime, gangsterism, drug addiction, mental health problems in other parts of the world. What are your favourite examples of young male syndrome throughout history or across the world and then how would they dealt with? Are there any examples of this that you think of sort of particularly interesting or illuminative?

43:28Well, I think part of the history of European colonialism is one of sort of second and third and fourth sons who had no political, political in particular. Yes, yes, you know, to very, very few prospects to basically inherit land. And so they had to go forth into the military or into some kind of colonial expedition. And large numbers of them died. They were in many respects to their families expendable as long as the air lived long enough to inherit and to have kids of his own. And so they would have to go forth and make make something of themselves or diet trying. That's classic get richer diet trying scenario.

44:14Other favorite examples, in sort of Imperial China, entire dynasties came to an end occasionally when a sex ratio bias is a consequence of the neglects of young girls and often in fantasies of young girls resulted in very biased sex ratios. And when that sort of built up and built up and sort of got out of hand, you would find that the young men would, those that were froze and out of the mating market would form militias and gangs and armies eventually. And sometimes those armies overthrew the entire regime. And the other side of it is that, you know, in most of history, by history I really mean recorded history, you know, over the last 12 ,000 years or so.

45:11You know, people were at war so often. Every generational too, there would be some kind of a big war and that war would basically eliminate so many young men that those that survived had, you know, a campaign behind them, they had that status, they had that respect and they were able to have families of their own. But it, it, by biasing the sex ratio towards a female biosex ratio, young male syndrome was neutralized. And that's not to say that war is good because it neutralizes young male and cell anger. But the net effect is that intel anger within the society never got bad enough to destabilize the society.

45:59Do you think that that is a contributor then that we haven't had a large -scale conflict for quite a, you know, approaching a hundred years now, whether you want to look at it demographically in that a large chunk of men just haven't been removed due to casualties of war, whether it's more sort of socioeconomically that the men that did go away and came back, that they had more status that they were seen as heroic, which raised their mate value, which made it easy for them to partner up, or whether it was a venting outlet for the disgruntled, young high -test us through on male rage to be taken out on a bunch of other people.

46:38They can come back and kind of almost live the Thanos after he kills half of the universe life of feeling at peace and serene, with PTSD perhaps, but relatively serene. Is there something happening there? Do you think the fact that we haven't had a large skill conflict in that way? I think it's surprising. And not the lack of the conflict, of course. But it's one of those good news stories that's hard to spin because war is generally bad anyway, and deliver so many negative externalities. But I completely agree with you that it's amazing that's young male syndrome, that sort of in -sell anger and violence isn't much much much greater.

47:32And I think that a huge amount of that is that, you know, this culture that is very sex -oriented and much about delivering, you know, experiences whether that's in cinema or computer games or social media that basically push our buttons that make us feel like we've arrived, that make us feel like we're living that life that people might have aspired to live two generations ago has in fact neutralized a lot of that young male anger in in surprising ways and that's you know When you want to complain about popular culture you've got to take into account the fact that it's probably done, you know even though some of it's a bit heinous and and You know a bit concerning for other reasons.

48:18It's probably neutralized all sorts of violence and anti -social behavior and that's pretty good. Yeah, it's such a fascinating area. William Costello from UT is writing a paper on precisely this. I actually got quoted in my first ever academic paper for having coined the term that he's using for this, which is the male sedation hypothesis. Nice. So yeah, I've got my first ever quotation, which is pretty cool. And yeah, it's just it's really interesting to think, okay, everybody has a problem. Everybody rails against modern culture. It's transactional. It's treating people like object. It's atomizing society.

48:55Everyone's an individual as this massive amount of solipsism. This sort of belief that the self is all that matters. We have all of this stuff combined together. And yet it can be true that that might be so optimal and not might be what we don't want. But also that it's probably stopped some of the imbalances in the mating market with regards to male and female mate value from spilling out into causing like real, real social upheaval, like genuine, you know, daily mass murders that occur in multiple locations across the planet. I mean, dude, the fact that career is a country that is able to just operate in any way at all.

49:40Birth rate of like 0 .8, You've got these women in the street. If you heard of the four bees movement, it's like forwards in Korean by something, by something, by something, and by something else. And it's like no men, no work, no patriarchy, and no, it's like radical feminism that includes a rejection of men overall, either as friends or as sexual partners. And it's the most forthcoming presentation presentation of a society where the women just do not care about the men. And largely, all other men may want to be cared about by the women they've retreated from that life in any case. But again, with all of this, is it Japan those vegetable men or herbivore men or whatever they call it?

50:26He keeps him orry. He keeps him orry, yeah. Yeah, they live in these huge apartment blocks. They basically never leave. They do some grunt work for Amazon mechanical Turk or live on government benefits and they just don't leave and they're there. It's like halls of residence for forgotten and lonely men. And yet it sounds fucking dystopian, but it is. That's because it is. And all of this together you would think why are these men not rising up? If this had been 200 years ago, why are these men not rising up? Why are they not trying to take down the feudal lord that's caused this to happen? Why are they not taking women by force?

51:00Why is that not occurring more? And it's because there's things to distract them that they can be sedated by the right amount of Netflix and video games and porn and social media. Yeah, absolutely. It's vaguely terrifying, but you really have to look at what's the counterfactual. And in this case, it's too horrible to contemplate. So you also looked at why bigger gender pay gaps, making markets better and easier for both sexes? Yes. Yes. So you spoke earlier when we were talking about the matchmaking algorithms, about people wanting women wanting to partner with men who are taller than them, or at all, or whatever it is, and who have some socioeconomic status.

51:55And people get very upset when you say that, but it's quite obvious and quite transparent in many cases. And similarly, men wanting to partner with women who have certain attributes as well. Now, it doesn't need to be a sophisticated preference. It could be as simple as, you know, I will only look at people who are as tall as I am and who are as wealthy as I am. For it to actually have a massive net effect, you know, even if there are people who are willing to go the other way around, you still see this super concentration of opportunities amongst those who are both tall and have great earning potential.

52:41Now, when that happens, if there's a gender gap in earnings or income or wealth or whatever measure you want to use, when there's a gender gap, it means that there are more men, it runs deeper into the socio -economic kind of scale of men who present some kind of opportunity. Let's say, you know, a gender gap of one standard deviation is likely to result in instead of 50 % of men earning more than the average woman. Now 70 % of men earn more than the average women. And so when you look at that, you see that those places where there's squeeze in the mating market where some people are left out like the in -cells.

53:30That gets much smaller. So with the gender pay gap of, you know, where men are out and women on average, you see there are fewer men at risk of becoming in -cells, at risk of being frozen out of the mating market. There are also fewer women at the other end of the scale. It's in this case it's the women who earn a lot of money or who have a lot of money who don't necessarily have aren't really able to deliver on their own preferences. And so at that end the families of rich daughters, sorry the families with rich daughters are often families where the daughters don't end up partnering throughout history.

54:10And so, yeah, a gap in incomes has that effect. Interestingly, income inequality, that is, differences within Essex have a similar kind of effect. But in this case, it's high inequality delivers more in cells. And so we did some work where we scraped like all of the Twitter for 14 years. This colleague Candace Blake has this amazing resource, which has got all these tweets that she's downloaded over a period of time before Uncle Elon decided that we could only read a small amount of his proprietary data. And we geolocated them. She created this really cool algorithm that basically was able to geolocate tweets so you didn't have to lie just on the people who said where they were from in their bio, but you could infer in other ways where they were from.

55:07And we then looked at ones associated with the kinds of terms in cells would use, their little in -group language. And we showed that the places in the world where the in cells are most active are in fact places that have narrow gender pay gaps. So we're going moving towards gender equity and high income inequality. and sex ratios that are slightly biased towards more men. So all the things that you would expect making markets to deliver a squeeze on, more angry young men down at the bottom of the socio -economic status ladder who are gonna be upset about that. All of those things delivered more in sales within the United States, which was pretty cool.

55:55Why the high income inequality, what role does that play? Hi, income inequality creates a situation in which there are fewer men who are attractive. They're super attractive because they're right up at the top of the income scale making enormous amounts of money. And in the case of the way that we modeled this mathematically, it's really just, you know, no women wanted to pair with the men down the bottom end. but the tale of men who don't earn enough to be worth the bother of partnering with, that tale because it's a very flat distribution is bigger. And so the higher proportion of men are just not earning enough because those men that are earning the most money are taking most of the money.

56:43And then Candace also found that in areas with high income inequality women self -objectify more, right? They post more sexy selfies. Yes, yes. So that was that was the first paper in that series where she'd basically pulled out Twitter and Instagram stuff and so the idea here is that there may be two ways in which women benefit from sexy selfies. You know that the current narrative about this in academic circles is that Self -objectification is catering to the male gaze. It's its females being disempowered by you know the patriarchy etc etc. And so what we wanted to say was, well, let's have a look at this.

57:23Is it places where women don't have, you know, education, access to jobs, access to income, etc. Are those are the places where you find lots of sexy selfies and they aren't. That's not consistent at all. But what is the case is that high income inequality is a, you know, places where there is high income inequality are places in which women are likely to self -objectify to be sexy selfies, they're also likely to spend more looking at economic data on grooming, hair products, clothing, etc. The argument is that either it's women basically looking to partner up and so they're advertising what they can offer on the mating market in terms of their looks and they're trying to partner up to get one of those extremely wealthy young men or potential partners in high -income inequality situation in order to, because you can climb more in social mobility, or they themselves are looking for other types of economic opportunities.

58:30Being attractive is likely to give you more influencer roles, better jobs, etc. And it could be both of those, of Of course. Yeah, fascinating. Again, another thing that's hard to hold, you know, to conflicting thoughts in your mind at one time, which is that allowing women to have access socioeconomically in terms of education to be able to liberate themselves from being reliant on a male partner is a good thing. It means that they don't need to get into suboptimal relationships. It means that, you know, they're not beholden to staying in a relationship which could be abusive or could be terrible or whatever, because without it they are nothing, they're out on the street potentially with a child.

59:12But on the flip side, it makes the dating prospects worse. It makes the dating prospects more difficult. And this is again, you're just tripping through all the different memes I've come up with over the last year. This is what I've called the tall girl problem. So it's so hilarious that you started this with the hype example. As a woman rises up through her own socio -economic hierarchy, she reduces down the number of men that are above and across from her, which limits her own and dating potential. This is, again, fantastic for their independence and employment and everything. It's really, really brilliant.

59:44But it is a fact that it makes dating more difficult. It absolutely makes dating more difficult until women are able to overcome their hypergamous nature. And from that, there's a conversation. It's so common on the internet. The double standard that happens on the internet of people saying, well, look, women, they have no idea what their standards should be. All of these girls are three out of tens. They think that they want an eight out of ten man. And I'm like, look, you're using a failure of cross -sex mind reading here. You're looking at a woman from the outside for the most part. They say, again, they're both men and women that are massively, massively delusional about what their mate value is.

1:00:27Don't get me wrong. And that may be the majority, right? That may be a useful form of self -deception that we all have. But the bottom line is that a lot of the time when men look at women who say, give criteria about the kind of man that they want, what they're looking at, it's a failure of cross sex mind reading, they're saying, look, I'm judging you woman based on how you present physically, perhaps based on your age, perhaps based on whether or not you're coming into this with a child. What the woman is saying is I am basing this judgment of the man around his socioeconomic status, maybe a lot of the time because she's got but two degree, maybe a bachelor's and a master's, and she earns six figures a year.

1:01:04Maybe she earns, you know, a very, very high net worth. Maybe she's already got a house. Maybe she doesn't care that she's already got a kid. And the failure comes from the fact that the men think, well, what I want from you is youth fertility and attractiveness. What you want from me is socioeconomic status. What you're offering to me is socioeconomic status. And what I'm not offering to you is not the money that you're after. So yeah, it's a really interesting discussion that goes on here between the two and I think it's largely down to a lack of education about the other sexist mating psychology.

1:01:42Yeah, absolutely. I think an understanding of the mating psychology is potentially really helpful to a lot of people to figuring out why it is that they're frozen out. You know, the number of people I've met over time who are, you know, tall women, wealthy, highly educated women who have had to choose to have children on their own, you know, completely solo, is enormous. And that's not the case for, you know, people who are shorter or not don't own as much, etc., etc. And so you can't necessarily, you know, reconcile all of those things only you can, but you know you're the odds are stacked against you.

1:02:21And I think that if people understood this a little bit more they'd understand why they are where they are. But that doesn't change the psychology of it of course because you know partners are wonderful but there also a lot of work, there also a lot of bother. What we see in a lot of the data is that as a couple starts out with the man owning more during childbearing times, the man's owning more, etc. And then where she starts to go up faster than his to the point where it matches, you get this cliff that the couples fall off. As soon as she starts earning more than him, they fall off this divorce cliff, basically, in which it is no longer the relationship that is just less likely to persist.

1:03:15And those couples that do persist tend to persist because she decides to work part -time, or she basically starts to play wife a whole lot more, which is to compensate by doing, even though she's earning more than him, by doing more around the house and more gender domestic things in a way. So you're saying that you're saying that sort of typically female housework is a prophylactic against overachieving socioeconomic women in divorce from their marriage. Yeah, and I think it's a prophylactic against like hurt male feels basically as the power dynamic shifts where she's earning more than him. He doesn't have that sort of whether it's pride or whatever it is.

1:04:05And he may not be doing this within his awareness, but he gets a bit fragile. And as a result, so this is a really, really common question that happens, gets brought up. How much of this issue with the woman out earning the man as whether it be Brad winner, whether it be education or whatever, especially when you get changes in mate value with regards to socioeconomic status within a relationship that's already existing. How much of this do you think comes female to male and how much do you think of this comes male to female? How much of it is the woman, like her hypoagomy switch being turned off and how much of this do you think is the months in adequacy switch being turned on.

1:04:55Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the love to work that out. I'd love to pull that apart somehow. It would, we definitely know that there's a big female side part of that decision in that and divorces in those kinds of couples in sort of wealthy, to both working couples in places like the United States or Australia, et cetera. Divorces tend to be more often initiated by women. And it's the kind of narrative that I've seen around this kind of research has been, there's a baseline level of maintenance that men are somewhat high maintenance for women. They are, they work. work. And so the book needs to be compensated by some kind of advantage.

1:05:42And when that advantage withers, it becomes something that, you know, the women decide is not worth the bother anymore. I'm not achieving social mobility through being with you. There's not, you know, this deal isn't really working out for me anymore. That said, I don't know that the other side of it has been examined to a sufficient degree. Common sense would suggest that it's both both directions because it is a mutual negotiation. Yeah, it also, I agree and I understand women account for whatever it is, 70 % of divorces is massively skewed in their favour for who makes the decision. But you don't know why they did that.

1:06:22That's true. If the man is behaving in a manner that pushes the woman to and beyond to limit then of course. Although it's a very sort of common held trope that, well, you know, women do this many percent of divorces, that's not necessarily because she's the one that caused the issue. Don't get me wrong. Tons and tons of women are bitches in relationships and marriages. I get it, right? But it could be a response to the man. There's also a stat, the average time that it takes for someone in a relationship to say that I love you as three months if they're going to do it. And it is the man, the overwhelming majority of the time.

1:07:02It is so proportionally the majority of the time it is the male that says, that says, I love you first, yeah, almost always, almost always. It's huge. It's like, it's like maybe four in five or three or five or something like that. It's a huge number of them. So there's a lot of things that you that maybe don't necessarily make sense at first and then you actually dig into the data and you realize, hmm, something going on here. It's Yeah, okay, well that's very interesting. I think that some of the more, we talked about some of the less wholesome things that people do, like the kind of love bombing associated with, which is a precursor to co -risk of in controlling behavior in relationships and those kinds of trying to sweep people off their feet, et cetera, is a very male based strategy.

1:07:54And I think it taps into female learning psychology technology and that's why it tends to be so effective. They're over optimizing for that emotional connection on the front end because they know that that's the sort of thing that would get them sexual access on the back end. Very good. There's two studies of yours that I saw from quite a while ago, one to do with the indirect benefits of mating with attractive males outweighing the direct costs. Can you remember that one? Yes, I think that was in house crickets. So indirect benefits are basically genetic benefits. So it sounds very interesting if you're imagining it being a human situation, but you know, in the pop evolutionary cycle literature you would have come across this idea that you know what we're going to do when they're looking for a man is gene shopping.

1:08:47and for about 30, 40 years, the people who work on animal behavior have been arguing about this idea of can an individual benefit genetic sort of in an evolutionary sense by mating with a superior genetic specimen seems kind of obvious, but the benefit in terms of of mating within a good genetic specimen is that your offspring are getting in here as half of that good genetic specimens genes, including some of the good genes. And then when they go through life, then they'll flourish and are more likely to be attractive, etc. So, actually a very difficult thing to prove with any level of certainty.

1:09:36What we do know is that there's often direct benefits that is if the male delivers food or protection or help or whatever that can raise the number of offspring that the female has. And in this case, direct costs, I think, was that attractive male crickets actually kind of are a little bit nasty to mate with. And so they actually suppress the number of offspring that the female has, but they're genetic superior. And so this is one of the... This is one of the insufficiently high, very useless. One of the first situations that did this, I'm very dubious when I see the emphasis that's placed on genetic benefits in make choice in humans.

1:10:17Not to say that there are, I'm telling you, there obviously are, but those are often the dramatic kind of genetic benefits of mating with somebody who's, you know, if fully functioning human being, pretty much, who doesn't have, you know, isn't profoundly inbred, which has historically been really important thing doesn't have a very weak immune system, etc. So, you know, we're queued into that kind of stuff, but, you know, most people in healthy, easygoing kind of societies today don't have that much genetic benefit to deliver that would drive that weird process by which preferences evolve. So going back to the AI stuff, you wrote your book a little a while ago, like two years ago, but that's a lifetime ago in the world of AI.

1:11:12What didn't you predict and given your perspective on this, what do you think we should expect over the next five to 10 years from this world? I think what I didn't predict, what I didn't emphasize as much as I probably would have like to have done was that the capacity to for chat to be so good, the capacity for conversation to be so good. I think that was by far the most interesting part of the book for me to write was the stuff about forming intimacy, about forming relationships, etc. But obviously the titillating thing everybody wants to know about the sex robots and the telly dill done, etc.

1:11:57and that is absolutely fascinating. But it's quite clear now with the big explosion in large language models and in the chatbots that are based on that, it's incredible to see the progress that some of the new kind of romance AI chatbots are able to deliver. And I would double down on my concerns about the missing with our heads or just taking up our time in displacing other activities, social activities that we should be doing. And what about the future? What do you think is coming up over the next five to ten years? What I would like to see is some AI development going into sort of defense, I guess.

1:12:45So like in the antiviruses, when computer viruses first came out, we were all vulnerable to them and then various people started developing antivirus software. Now that runs in the background and basically just tells us the very, very rare occasion where we are threatened by something. You know, it helps us, helps to defend us against this. I would like to see, I don't think that we can rely on our own vigilance to realize when we're being scammed by, like you said, the, you know, our supermarket virtual trolley controlling our dildo, et cetera. But yeah, I would like to see some defense side technologies that could be deployed for users to basically defend us against not just bad actors but manipulation because I think that the capacity of manipulation is so great.

1:13:37And the way it gets under our skin, we're so vulnerable to, so that would definitely be something I think would be huge in the future. Yeah, I was thought about this a lot, you know, this sort of current sex negative trend. It's not even sex negative. It's like human sex negative or intimacy negative trend that we're seeing at the moment is sex recession or the mating crisis. And as with many things, including fast food, what is good for you and what is enjoyable don't always align. And you can often do the thing which is enjoyable and easy and convenient in place of something that's good for you and that can continue to take hold.

1:14:17And we love the idea of, you know, channeling our in and Ryan Holiday and becoming the Marcus Aurelius is sort of stoic, virtuous man. And I'm going to recant this new world of fake connection and fake love and fake trolley dildos and I'm going to make it out on my own and touch grass and do all this stuff. But, you know, all of us every single day attempted by these very convenient, very pleasurable, very enjoyable experiences. We take our phones to the bathroom. We watch YouTube while we eat lunch as opposed to talking to someone next to us or just allowing our mind to have its thoughts because boredom and discomfort has been reduced down.

1:14:54It's been eroded away so much that it's very easy for us to do this. So at the moment, I'm not massively hopeful. I don't think for people pulling themselves away from it. And there are some positives to this. You know, combating loneliness, us, reducing down the risk of young male syndrome, perhaps even offering companionship to women that are socioeconomically very successful and maybe struggling to find that partner that they genuinely do desire, which is, you know, just something that it doesn't seem as going to slow down anytime soon. But I just, I wonder whether that's what's best for people.

1:15:30I wonder whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all, and whether whether the net benefit or the net negative of this actually ends up falling out on. Is the sedation, the fact that you're no longer motivated to go out and do something meet people in the real world yourself, is the titrated dose of real world connection worth that? And then downstream, let's say that it is or it isn't, it doesn't really matter. if that's what people are going to do, you are 100 % going to face some genuine ex -denalities like population collapse. And that's just regardless of whether it's better for people or worse, until you've got IVG and wounds, artificial wounds, you're fucked on that front.

1:16:19So real, real inflection point of change, I think, at the moment. Enormous, absolutely enormous, and proliferating in ways that we don't anticipate either. And yeah, I think it's really important to not get too doom and gloom about it because you're absolutely right. The cherry turquoise says, robots may be better than nothing but they're not enough. And I would say in response to that, they're better than nothing and that's all that some people have because there is so much loneliness out there. And, you know, I think that the replica AI romance spot that, you know, recently they sort of shut off their erotic role play because they had a licensing issue, etc.

1:17:08And, you know, people were bereft. They really, this for them, this was a very real relationship. They know it's not a real relationship, but it feels real and it pushes real buttons for them. And that's the only way that those buttons get pushed. And I think that the potential for this stuff to make us feel more human is enormous. And so all of that good shouldn't be thrown out with all of the bad that's out there. And we will have to navigate it very carefully and very delicately. and hopefully with an openness that isn't simply ideological knee -jerk reactions. It's hard, man. It's hard. You hear about these stories, you hear about these things happening, and you just default to right -load it, switch it off, pull it off the plug.

1:17:59We're not going to have this, or it is a massive amount of conceptual inertia or naturalistic um, fallacy that there's an ik around, you know, you hear about Dave Kat and you think, oh, this guy's doing what with this robot and it's, you know, you think that's, but then, you know, on the flip sides, there's all manner of relationships that people used to think were reprehensible and sometimes illegal and sometimes resulted in castration that have been perfectly accepted. And, um, yeah, it's, it's a really, really tough one, man. When we've got cuddle cafes, you know, and men that pay women not to have sex with them, but just sit and be with them, or vice versa women, you know, increasing amounts of polygene, because you've got a scarcity of men that perhaps some women are looking for.

1:18:56You've got increases in domestic violence and like a benefit in flicking mating behavior from men because women who didn't date hypergumously are threatening that they know that they don't need them, they're concerned that they're going to leave them. When you start to change the dynamics that the mating market has vestigially had for a long time, you end up with some really strange externalities and I think that we're just permanently eating all of those and then technology's speeding them up. The other thing, the most common element that everybody is familiar with when it comes to mating is the matchmaking stuff and the matchmaking stuff doesn't seem to have got particularly much better either.

1:19:37In some ways it's facilitated an awful lot of relationships, I think, between 50 and 60 % of relationships now begin online in one form or another. Even that, they're the most fragile relationships. Also the ones that en route to getting them can probably cause a lot of externalities that people aren't happy with. Ghosting, being swindled, sort of, yeah, it's going to be an interesting few years. Look, Rob, let's bring this one home. I really appreciate you. I think your work is fantastic. Why should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work?

1:20:14Keep up with my writing at Rob Brooks. So, robbbr .ks .net. And on Twitter, it's Brooks underscore Rob. And you should be able to get most of what I say. Perfect. Rob, I appreciate you. Thank you.