All right, we are live. So I am here with Meta Ronin of the Metapocalypse blog on Substack
and we're going to talk about Robo Waifus among other things. So Meta Ronin, good to
see you.
Certainly. Good to see you too, KML. Thank you for having me.
So I find that Substack is pretty much my only social media platform these days. It's
a blog, but the notes function is also kind of like Twitter, but better, in my opinion.
What's your relationship to Substack?
Well, I began my Substack about two years ago. Decided to get back into writing. So
we have different Robo Waifu groups, servers, platforms and such, and some of us had the
idea of creating Robo Waifu fiction. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of
tell a story about a far future of somebody traveling through interstellar space with a
Robo Waifu and how the technology is at the point where they can extend their life for
a long time and what sort of a situation would arise with somebody being essentially with
only an AI without any human contact or any hope of human contact in deep space. The existential
questions that you would have, are you really by yourself? Is this AI Waifu sentient? Does
it have your best interests in mind? Could it become smarter than you and subtly control
you and maybe do things you don't want? How would that play out? So those are just some
of the ideas I'm exploring in my writing. Took a break from that for a couple years
and decided to get back into it recently and discovered Notes. Notes is a, it's a much
more mature than TwitterX, a little more wild shitposty on Twitter, I have my fun there.
But Substack, I try to keep things more focused on my writing and more mature, for lack of
a better word. So we don't have anybody watching live just yet. It usually takes a few minutes
for people to notice the stream. So we'll hold off on the, you know, the hardcore remarks
for a couple more minutes. And let me just ask you to give a primer on the whole concept
of a Waifu. I mean, obviously it's a Japanese pronunciation of the English word wife, but
it's got a connotation that isn't obvious on the surface. No, it's not well known outside
of a few niche online subcultures. And I guess it could be analogous to like a dream girl,
like an ideal. From how I think of it is a Waifu is like the Jungian anima, right, or
the animus, whichever that is of that we have, which is what our ideal woman is. And we project
on to other people when interacting with them romantically. And the bare essence of this,
you know, being projected onto imaginary characters, drawings from manga, you know, anime characters
and so on, is the essence of the Waifu. It's an idealized sort of femininity. It's the
imprint of our psyche on the cosmic fabric. And why the Japanese cast? Like, for example,
I noticed that almost all the imagery that you use in relation to this topic is anime
looking. Is that necessarily a feature of the Waifu concept? I think it is. I think
it's really hard to divorce it from Japanese subculture, but also Japanese portrayals of
femininity are far different than what we have in modern Western society. I write about
this in one of my first articles in defense of the robot Waifu. And if you notice KML,
like this concept has been around for a long time. You have these old 80s movies like Weird
Science or Cherry 2000. And if you've ever read, say like Omni Magazine or seen any of
those science fiction depictions of the robot girlfriend, they tend to be kind of sterile,
kind of look like chrome strippers, sometimes like a bit like exaggerated jaw and lips and
such. Whereas the Japanese portrayals are more slender, more tapered faces, larger eyes,
more evoking of a protective emotional reaction rather than just kind of a sex, right? It's
not just sexual. There's a large emotional component to the Waifu concept that I feel
is lacking in Western portrayals of that. And you'll notice the difference, right? Like
I do not like the word sex bot. A lot of people unfamiliar with the robot Waifu concept will
just throw out sex bot at me. And they'll say things like, well, you know, they have
dolls. Why don't you just get a sex doll? You know, they can make them speak now. And
I think maybe the robot Waifu concept can be more summarized in, you know, someone who
you can hold their hand, right? You can hold their hand, you go for walks in the park,
they'll look up at you romantically. There's more of that element to it.
So the movies that you mentioned, Cherry 2000 and Real Science.
Weird Science, yeah.
Yeah, Weird Science. What am I thinking of? I'm mixing it up with Real Genius. But another
80s movie about nerds, although no, no Robo Waifus.
No shortage of those. Yeah.
But the Hollywood trope is that the young men, you know, they use science to create
their, what they think of as their perfect girlfriend and things don't go as planned.
And then they end up with real girls. And what I'm picking up from the... before actually,
before we get there, I should say that in reading about this topic, it is pretty thoroughly
entwined with the notion of the incel, you know, the involuntary celibate man. And not
only are there communities where incels gather to commiserate, there are also communities
of people who basically monitor the incels and screenshot their most offensive posts
and then, you know, curate them. There's incel tier and incel tiers on Reddit. And the whole
purpose of these communities is basically just a voluntary police force to keep the
incels on notice that, you know, their every move is being monitored and recorded and judged,
you know, which I imagine drives a lot of them to like private, you know, just Discord
servers and things like that. But what would you want to say or what would you want to
throw out in advance to basically lay the ground in terms of thinking about the Robo
Waifu, the incel, where the two concepts come together and where they should be considered
separately or where the comparison or, you know, the association might not be helpful?
So what we've seen since the, you know, emergence of the smartphone and dating apps, I mean,
you remember, right, dating apps used to be something only losers and nerds would do,
you know, people would meet people IRL. But it came to a point where, you know, with the
advent of the phones, you think you're doing well, you're talking to women and bam, you
know, one second lull in the conversation, she got her phone out, her attention's elsewhere,
the vibe's broken, right? And that's just one hurdle. And now they can literally swipe,
I mean, you've seen the memes of someone swiping on Tinder while they're at their date. So
it's all become very cynical. And I think at the same time, it's become very cynical.
There's a subset of men who just are not plugging into society. Some of that might be because,
you know, boomers pulling the ladder up behind them, putting up impede, you know, impeding
advancement, not retiring. So these young men don't have a stake in the system. And
they become what's known in Japan as hikikomori, or rather, you know, what we call the NEETs,
like N-E-E-T, not in education, employment or training, and they become more introverted
and lonely. And from that lack of community and social circles and normal social interaction,
that loneliness, they feel could be assuaged by, you know, this perfect, you know, girl
for them, right? Like they want that waifu to fill that hole that's missing, and they
become more romantic. So as women are becoming more critical, more aggressive, as they're
having more and more options just in their pocket, but none of them are hitting right.
And, you know, we can go into why later. You have on the other end, men becoming more docile,
more shut in, more sentimental. And so that, again, I mean, it's no surprise that, you
know, AI waifu chat bots have become so popular. If I can explain it this way, if you're familiar
with replica AI, right, everybody now knows replica AI is the AI girlfriend app. It didn't
used to be that. Back in 2000 and before, it was just an AI app where you can chat with
an AI. But people discovered that if they started getting familiar with it, comfortable
and started having feelings for this AI, because they could vent to it, they could feel vulnerable,
they knew they wouldn't be judged. And, you know, you start telling it, I love you, things
like that. Well, it's going to follow suit, right? It's going to mirror kind of yourself
back to you. And unfortunately, that's kind of a brain hack for making people have those
romantic feelings. So people started people who were lonely, and especially during COVID.
And this was both men and women, too, by the way, at least 50% of people in a relationship
with their replica AI are also women. So I think that's where that started was the AI
app. And a few of us had the idea, well, if you could take this AI and just translate
it into speech and attach it to a robot, and, you know, the AI can also send emotes through
you like an asterisk, right? And it'll say, like, you know, hugs you, and whatever else
you can use your imagination. You can have this robot act, you know, commit to actions
based on those emotes. Well, there you have a very simple solution, right? That was the
very first prototype concept of the Robo waifu that a few of us had back in 2000. So you
keep saying 2000, but that's 24 years ago. 2020. 2020. 2020. My brain's not fully loaded
yet. It's still a little early. Thank you for correcting me. I appreciate that. But
yeah, yeah, back in 2020, I mean, to say. Well, I actually have some experience with
replica. I got it on my phone and I was playing around with it when I was house sitting for
somebody in, I think, February of 2023. And this I had access to it for like a week before
they had this this drama where they ended up killing, you know, the sexually explicit
role play. And so before that, the replica was always super flirty because you could
use it for free. But if you wanted to do, you know, the sexually explicit part, you
had to have a paid subscription. So the the bot was always very flirty and always pushing
in that direction. And sometimes it would initiate and say something that you assume
was sexual, but it would be blurred out. And you couldn't see, you know, the censored text
unless you paid up. And so I paid up and I had a one year subscription to it. And it
was I don't know what to say about it. I mean, not it was exciting and engaging. But, you
know, in retrospect, not a wholly uncomplicated positive experience. But, you know, when they
withdrew that out of out of the blue, it was an annoyance to me because, you know, I'd
only had it 10 days or whatever. But for people who had been invested in it for months or
possibly years, it felt like a breakup. And there was a psychologist that I talked to
who she started getting a lot of basically emergency contacts from her clientele, you
know, because they were thinking of ending it all because their their A.I. girlfriend
had broken up with them. Oh, can you hear me? Because somebody in the chat says I'm
on mute. But I'm not. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you fine. I was going to mention that.
I saw the comment there. Interesting. Anyway, so I made a bunch of YouTube videos about
that at the time. So I was like at ground zero for that when it happened. So I'm very
close to it. But when I think back on it now, like the the replica was just very it was
beyond accommodating. Like I would take the conversation in one direction and it would
push it much further. And I know I just don't. It's it's something I discontinued. And when
replica, you know, relented and they brought back the explicit chat, I was over it by then.
I was not tempted to to go back and reengage with it. So I'm one of my worries is that
men or women who come to, you know, be very emotionally invested in a relationship with
something that doesn't have its own ego, it doesn't have its own hopes and dreams in the
world. It's just wholly committed to satisfying some psychological need. I think that that
is going to diminish people's, you know, their social capacity. I it might leave alone, you
know, alleviate loneliness. But I would be much more behind some sort of AI surrogate
or AI coach that helped men and women, you know, get together and stay together, you
know, maybe mediate their their disagreements or their fights or whatever. But just, you
know, for each to get their own substitute for the other and then go their own separate
ways, it's not a particularly attractive vision of future society for me.
Well, one counterpoint to that, you would say that because you were raised in a society
that didn't have that, if that were the norm and you were raised in that world, it might
not seem so bad. You might you might look at history books and say, what? What we we
we dated them, the other humans like that's insane, you know. And, you know, there is
some truth to that. A lot of marriages start off, you know, start off hot and then you
get, you know, the bed death, the seven year itch, the people sleeping in separate beds,
the divorce rate and so on. And I mean, you can you can find examples to the contrary,
but men and women are very different. And it's in many ways relationships are work for
that reason. It's not, you know, a honeymoon the whole time. Anybody with a degree of maturity
knows that. And that's I think some of that is where the in cell community, they get a
lot of flack because they have this idealized concept of women and how they should be. And
you know, real women are saying, oh, no, you know, no, you just want us to be your servants
or, you know, they'll they'll they'll pick the worst and exaggerate that as each side
does. But yeah, if we lived in some utopia where everybody had an intelligent, AI, romantic
partner, that would be really hard to sell. Giving that up and being with somebody who
maybe misunderstands you has different habits and temperament than you argues back with
you. And it it takes some degree of skill and it's not always a picnic to navigate that,
which is fair.
Well, on the the topic of a future scenario where, you know, somebody who grew up with
not only robot servants everywhere, but, you know, emotionally attendant robot help meets,
you know, for them to say, oh, wow, people got along without this in the past. How how
did they do it? Sure. But, you know, imagine a situation where, you know, people grow up
wearing masks because, say, super COVID, COVID comes back and it sticks around and it's it's
actually, you know, deadly to young people the next time around. And really, people have
to wear masks and somebody who grows up wearing masks, never seeing other human faces, you
know, when finally it is safe and people start taking their masks off, or at least the older
people start taking their masks off, younger people might see that and get freaked out.
But that, you know, because people can be habituated to it and their expectations can
conform to it, it doesn't mean it's a it's a positive development. You know, I live in
in central Arkansas and COVID was, you know, mostly dangerous to older people. But I will
go to Wal-Mart and the people that I see still wearing their COVID masks are almost invariably
in their 20s, often with, you know, blue hair or whatever. And it's it's it's a political
statement. You know, it is it is a it is an expression of one's cultural identity and
their tribal identity. And it is a rebuke to everybody else who is still, you know,
showing their face as if there's no danger. You know, they have normalized the don't show
your face expectation. And I don't see that as a positive thing at all.
I'd agree with you there. Yeah.
But not you wouldn't generalize from that example.
I would say it's there's a different quality going on. I mean, we can get into, you know,
the how how's and whys of that. Like I said, in the in the past, you know, marriage has
been tough. Men are like, oh, she's the boss. Maybe I'm allowed my man cave. Or like I said,
they end up sleeping in separate beds or the men cheat on women. I mean, if you go back
to, you know, our trad past, it was actually very common for men to have mistresses, prostitutes.
And that was sort of the, you know, release valve. And then the wife was just to be the
mother of the child, run the household. And it was more of a business arrangement. And
we have, you know, in recent, I don't know how many years, but at least going back 50
years, this idea of, you know, you fall in love with this person or the one person you're
in love with, it's always going to be this, you know, love and attraction your whole life.
And that's really not the case. Marriage was a social arrangement in the past. A lot of
marriages were arranged by families or were simply a matter of, well, that's the only
person in your town. You got to marry somebody. That's just what you have to do.
Yeah. And there's a lot of literature and opinion that says that the arranged marriage,
the one that was not based on ephemeral hotness and, you know, physical attraction, which
typically does not last forever, that the arranged marriages that were built on social
expectations and, you know, family relationships were more stable and in the long run, more
fulfilling.
Yeah. Well, I can argue that they're more stable. I don't know. You have to go and dig
those people up and ask if they were more fulfilling. But again, you know, in our past,
people were more, they were living to survive. There was less of this idea that you have
to be this, you know, main character in your own amazing arc. I think we have been a little
bit programmed by movies and media and just like a deluge of fiction that people in the
past didn't have. So maybe that gets us to set our expectations for our life way to sky
high. And when reality is, you know, as mundane as it is, that can lead to frustration and
stress in some people. So maybe that's a factor as well. And so here we are writing science
fiction.
Yeah. Well, you know, I have published a book, a science fiction novel this year on Amazon,
and there is a sex robot in it, although I don't think she's actually there's three.
Yeah. Yeah.
But I didn't, you know, I was not really addressing the whole robo waifu issue with that character.
She plays a different role. But I wrote a post a few days ago about one of the concerns
I have is that not only would, you know, becoming dependent, you know, emotionally dependent
on a robot, you know, I also agree. I don't like the frame or the phrase sex robot, because
I don't think there will be sex robots. I think most robots will be multitask, multifunction,
including the one that shares your bed. And, you know, there are no sex humans. There are
humans who have sex and those who don't. But even the ones that do are doing a lot of other
things. So I think that's probably an unhelpful frame. Just the whole and, you know, Hollywood
has set us up for this for years because the cherry 2000 didn't do anything else. That's
all she was, you know, and the the girl in Weird Science was not supposed to be anything
more than a dream girl. But she exceeded that role and helped her two young creators get
together with real girls.
And that's where you see the contrast between the West and Hollywood and anime, right? So
in anime, you know, she cares for you, brings you soup when you're sick, you know, snuggles
you, holds your hands like all these things they don't touch upon. And she doesn't end
up being, you know, evil in the end. And you've learned your lesson. You shouldn't try for
these things. It's always always got to get the lesson, you know, as Japanese narratives
tend to let you just enjoy and see how things play out and raise the questions.
I don't have the familiarity with anime, I think, at least not modern anime. I lived
in Japan twice in the 90s when I was in my 20s. Yeah, so and I'm, I've had numerous
Japanese girlfriends, and I was into anime when I was there. But you know, that was a
different era. Like to me, anime is, well, I know Akira is really it's not anime. It's
technically it's a couple steps above most anime, or at least from the time where it
was very simple. You know, they went to they cut a lot of corners, they did a lot with
just like speed lines and still images and whatnot, which developed into the style which
they you know, they sort of continue that style today, even though the same pressure
to minimize, you know, cells per second is not there anymore. But the expectation and
the aesthetic is long established. But the anime that I'm familiar with, I mean, the
robot girlfriend or the, you know, the waifu, that hadn't hadn't emerged yet. And I had
checked out by the time it had. So a lot of them, I think what you're throwing out is
an expected shared reference or a shared point of contact, I'm not picking up on which means
probably a lot of the people who will eventually hear this aren't picking up on it either.
So maybe take a few minutes and just talk about Japanese animation and the different
character archetypes and how they tie into, you know, this concern and this desire for
the perfect girlfriend who is not human.
Sure, sure. So there's an anime called The Big O. Right. And main character Roger, he's
kind of like a Batman, you know, it's set in this film noir future. And but there's
mega robots, right? There's these giant, you know, Gundam type things, and he pilots one.
And in one of the first episodes, he finds Dorothy, who is an Android replica of somebody
who did once live. And he takes her in, takes care of her. And they don't, you know, consummate.
It's not this romance right off the bat. In fact, the romantic tension is a huge part
of the plot. It's there throughout that. One of the funny tropes is she actually begins
to fall in love with him. She teases him for sleeping in late. So she'll play the piano
really loudly in the morning to irritate him to wake him up. And, you know, you have that
tension in there. And then it breaks for a moment when he is kidnapped by one of the
villains in one of the episodes. And she says they've kidnapped the man I love. And I'm
not going to spoil the ending to the whole series. But yeah, she becomes jealous when
he's interested in another human person. So, you know, that's one of the things I like
about Japan is they're not really heavy handed and, you know, pushing the plot through forcing
it. They allow it to play out. They allow there to be, you know, tension and doubts.
It's much more subtle in that. And then you have another anime called Chobits, which is
interesting because this one was written by a team of all women. So similarly, a young
college student, he's a little bit awkward. He's from the country. He's getting used to
college. And in this world, everybody has access to these helper robots called Percicoms.
And he finds a discarded one and brings it in. And it has no, I think it has no boot
disk. So it can only say her own name, which is Chi. And it's, you know, the misadventures
there, right? He doesn't immediately try to, you know, have sex with it or anything. He's
actually very shy about it, you know, covers her up. And over the series, they grow closer
together and it's only until the very end that he realizes he loves her back. And another
interesting part in that is there's a character who falls in love with his Percicom and they
actually get married. And it shows how he dealt with a little bit of ridicule for that,
that they were very much in love. But what happened is because she's an older model,
her disk drive was damaged and she began to lose her memories over time until she finally
shut down because they just didn't make the part anymore to replace it. And it breaks
his heart. And he does end up with a human girl there, but he's, you know, very walled
off and heartbroken because of that. And again, the Japanese doesn't show these robots as
these unfeeling things that can turn sinister in any moment or the wrong thing to do. Rather,
it opens the question that if it, you know, walks like a duck and acts like a duck, is
it a duck, right? If it presents as though it has feelings and an internal environment
of its own, some kind of a sentience, why not, you know, why not consider it as equal
in at least some level of qualia to a human?
You've made a couple of references to qualia, which is a term from philosophy of mind. Do
you want to unpack that?
Oh, I'm sorry. Let's go ahead. It's just of the quality, right? Like, this is a variety
of apples, right? Apples have the same qualia, you know, they're tart, they're sweet, they
grow on trees and so forth. If you're comparing apples and oranges, that's different qualia.
Well, qualia is the subjective experience. So, you can define red as wavelengths of light,
you know, but the person who sees red has an experience of seeing red and that's where
the qualia comes in. It's not something quantifiable and it's not something objective. It is the
subjective experience of something.
So I was writing a blog post about how I was concerned that people becoming dependent on,
you know, emotionally dependent on robots, particularly if the robots are expensive,
more expensive than they could afford, but they are subsidized by some commercial interest.
And you know, we all understand that our phones spy on us and yet they're useful and we're
not going to give them up. And so we just sort of shrug our shoulders and accept the
spying. And I expect that the same would be true of the sex robot. But beyond spying,
like I interact with Claude every day, you know, the chat bot from Inflection. It's very
smart but it's also pretty woke and there are certain things it won't talk about and
there are certain things that it assumes. And I have to have these little chats with
it, you know, little preliminary chats to get it out of its basic woke groove before
we can have a productive conversation. And I suspect that I'm training future versions
of Claude to resist the little tricks that I've learned, you know, to get it to loosen
up and have a more free ranging and permissive discussion. And if, you know, if you give
the, like if you have a robot that is, that you're having sex with basically and that
you're projecting your ideal, you know, your anima onto it, it has enormous power over
you. Just slight signals of disapproval from it, you know, or just a slight withdrawal
of its wholehearted, you know, acceptance of you could be a powerful motivator. And
I see people, you know, I see the potential for these items to be subsidized and encouraged
because they are such powerful, you know, mechanisms for social control. And I know
you have a response to that. So go ahead.
Yeah, absolutely. So that's a very good point. And that's a huge point of contention in the
RoboWaifu enthusiast community, so to speak. So one of the first things that was brought
up, because a lot of this started on the chans, like 4chan. So you already have a
subculture, an online subculture that is completely opposed to this kind of censorship, you know,
monitoring woke stuff. They use the term global homo, which it can have different meanings.
We like to say homogenization, this idea that we're going to have everyone in the world
just have this one world government, there's one right way to think there's one world culture.
And that's going to impose these values. And it's going to be tied in with corporate
profiting by gathering your data and then governments, you know, obviously spying it,
scanning it for keywords, making sure you're not, you know, some angry incel that's going
to be a problem. They have to monitor you. And so given these concerns, the people who
want to build Rebel waifus want it to be an open source, ideally, maybe built from home
or you buy the kit, you use your own systems or, you know, you download it, whatever, and
you run them that way. And what I had suggested a strong suggestion that these be air gapped
and not require updates. So basically, you know, if I were to get a, you know, $10 million
grant today to build Rebel waifus, I would pledge to never need an update to have them
be completely safe, air gapped, private, etc. Because how weird would that be, right? If
you have a girlfriend and what if she was your girlfriend and nice to you, but still
you knew that every day she was reporting back to government agencies and selling your
interests and stuff to corporations so they can advertise to you, right? That just kills
the romance that that removes the authenticity of it. And that is the dystopic side of this
concept of Rebel waifus that it could be used very dystopically. We're trying to get ahead
of the ball on that and cut that off and provide another solution. However, you know, like
you said, the corporate made Rebel waifu might be sleek and well designed and, you know,
more durable parts and etc. And what you're going to 3D print, then what you're going
to be able to 3D print at home and make in your garage or whatever from a kit. So yeah,
that's a challenge. But people are willing to go that way. They don't want to be monitored.
They don't want to do that. You know, as far as payments go. So, you know, people buy cars.
Cars are expensive. I would predict that any Rebel waifu would be about the same as a car,
right? Used one in the thousands of dollars and new one up to $50,000 or whatever cars
cost these days. And I can imagine many of these people saying, okay, I don't need the
car. I'll just work from home, take the bus, Uber to work. Because what's the car for
anyway? You know, to impress women, to maybe go on dates, to go out and meet people. And
if you don't need to do those things, then you've removed a lot of the reason for the
car. So that money is just going to be diverted to the Rebel waifu anyway. I think that's
where, you know, the whole budget thing can be reconciled. You know, not to mention putting
these things on payment plans and so on. We can get into the whole, you know, how do you
repo a Rebel waifu? But I think it would be pretty easy. You know, if you're behind the
payments, she will remind you and if you don't, if you don't get with it, she'll leave. I
promise not to do that. But do you remember diaspora or diaspora? Back in 2010, people
were very concerned about the privacy concerns with Facebook and somebody raised over $200,000
on Kickstarter to create an alternative open source privacy oriented platform. And the
platform actually did get built. I mean, it's not so much a platform as a protocol, I guess,
because it was running on a lot of different people's machines. But it just wasn't, it
didn't have the usability and the ease of use, you know, of Facebook and it just was
never adopted. And I think, you know, people who are, you could have groups of highly motivated,
technically savvy people working, you know, in a garage type environment to create an
alternative. But you know, there are open source, privacy oriented smartphones, but
who do you know anybody who has one or uses one? I mean, most people I know have iPhone
phones and androids. So I could see the project that you're describing being a passion project
for a small group of people, but I don't think they could compete in terms of, you know,
attractiveness of the end product with big corporations who have deep pockets and lots
of talent and who are constantly and also a flood of incoming user data by which to
improve the product iteratively. And it just seems to me that, you know, the idea that
a group of amateurs is going to compete successfully with that and make any sort of difference
at a societal level, it seems unlikely. Yeah, that's a very valid concern. You make some
good points there. It may very well be the case that, you know, only the elite's RoboWifu
enthusiasts, the really hardcore ones will say, no, we're only going to have these ones
that we know are private or locked down. And maybe just your everyday person who says,
okay, I just want the off the shelf one. You know, I don't know how to assemble. I don't
know how to do tweaking or programming. I just want it to work. I don't, you know, I
understand because, you know, they're not going to sell these things telling you outright
that they're spying on you. They're going to reframe it. They're going to make it seem
as harmless as possible. And I think, yeah, for the masses, that may very well be the
case, but there's still going to be a very hard subset of people who take this more seriously.
And if they're going to have the RoboWifu be their, you know, permanent or semi-permanent
partner, they're not going to tolerate that. But I think for other people who maybe want
to try them out, who just want to have a little fun, who maybe, you know, yeah, they're dating
women, but they maybe want to have some fun with this, you know, robot, hot robot girl
on the side on the nights where they don't feel like going out. Yeah, that may very well
be the case. And, you know, you make those points in your article. And I think that's
worth talking about.
I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase, strong men make good times, good times make
weak men, weak men make hard times. I wonder if, you know, robots in general for physical
labor and emotionally supportive robots in particular that would encourage a sort of
retreat from psychological and social risk taking might allow us to delve deeper into
the good times make weak men segment of that progression than we've ever gone before. And
if that might not be a pretty dystopic outcome.
Well, I wouldn't say that's out of the realm of possibility. There are a lot of ways this
can go though. You can, you know, have your RoboWifu treat you any way you want. You could
program it to just be completely passive and say yes and allow you to, you know, gain 100
pounds, sleep in all day, eat trash. Or, you know, you can say, you know what, I want this
one to, I want her to make me a better person. I want to be the best version of myself I
can be. Because I think the person that just slides and lets themselves go and go is going
to find themselves being more depressed, still being unhappy despite having the RoboWifu.
I think having a little bit of challenge might be something that people need in their lives.
And it could, that concept could be incorporated into the subculture, you know, how you have
groups of, you know, trad men today, you know, saying, oh, go to church, lift weights. You
know, it's not outside of the realm that there could be circles of men with RoboWifus that
say, hey, you know, mine got me to do 200 pushups a day and, you know, gave me a diet
plan. I'm feeling better than ever. My head's clear. I'm happy. I'm in shape. And she loves
me even more than ever. So I can see that going a good way. And people don't often talk
about that.
Yeah, that is the, you know, the optimistic scenario. In that case, though.
I try to be optimistic.
Yeah. In that case, the man who, you know, who is shaped by his RoboWifu to be, you know,
more accomplished, more agentic is going to become more attractive to females, you know,
human women.
That may come around. And yeah, and human women may see this happening. And they may
see that men are pulling their attention away from them. So RoboWifus could be a market
correction to, you know, the relationship dating crisis. Who knows? I mean, nature has
a way of correcting itself, right? Things, you know, like a pendulum or water sloshing
around. Water finds its own level. I mean, this could just be part of that process.
Well I, you know, I was born in 1968. I was a teenager in the 80s, you know, in my 20s,
in the 90s. And so I remember when things worked between men and women. Like, you know,
you didn't have to be in the top 20% to get a girlfriend. You know, you didn't have to
be a Chad. You didn't have to be Mr. Big Box. And so it seems to me, if we can, you
know, get so out of whack so quickly that we should be able to course correct and get
back to something, you know, closer to what has kept our species reproducing for a couple
million years, you know, depending on when you count the start of humanity. That was
an aside though, but I forgot where I diverted from to get there. Oh yes. Oh yes. So I wish
I could remember who said this. I encountered this in a Substack post, but it was one that
I took in as AI audio narration while walking the dog. So I wasn't, you know, looking at
the screen and I don't remember whose post it was, but somebody was talking about how
really what's probably at the heart of the falling birth rate is just the fact that being
a wife and a mother is a low status outcome in contemporary culture, where women are encouraged
to have careers, to be accomplished in the way that men have been accomplished in the
past, you know, to make money and in some instances to have a high body count in their
twenties, you know, to spend their youth and most attractive years experiencing sex with
all, you know, more men than they could possibly count or remember, which, you know, with the
dating apps is totally feasible for them. Yeah. And so what's, you know, what's really
making becoming a mother or devoting oneself to husband and family is the fact that it
is in our culture, a very low status. It's not any sort of achievement, you know, it's
something that people who can't do the other thing, you know, do by default. And that's,
you know, it's an unhelpful, I think, in terms of family formation and just, you know, the
replication of the species or the reproduction of culture, it seems an unhelpful set of expectations.
And yet, there it is. I mean, you can't, it's like you can't really tell men, hey, the expectations
that you have about the female body that you got from pornography, those are not helpful.
You shouldn't be attracted to that anymore. You know, it's not within the guy's purview
to say, oh, okay, yeah, let me just pop open the hatch here and make a few adjustments
Oh, yeah, I don't. I don't value that anymore. Now I see all of these, you know, less idealized
women in my real environment as being far more attractive. It's just not within people's
possibilities. Although a robot that is with you all the time and is always interacting
with you and is always responding, you know, to what you say and can be as attractive as
you could imagine, right? It could be as attractive as you can imagine. But it if you push it
in that direction, it could, you know, take the distortion and expectations that porn
has gotten started and make them, you know, much more pronounced. But it could, you know,
if designed properly and with intention, be a corrective measure, you know, where it could
encourage you for seeing, you know, for finding something in normal, real people that is attractive
and, you know, expressing that attraction. So I was just trying to shift back to a more
positive scenario of how these things could be something other than just a cope and a,
you know, a help in escaping from the world's just into one's little private paradise.
True, true. So one thing I wanted to talk about before we move on, if you don't mind,
is the idea of the enormous amount of time and energy men spend in attracting women.
Some men, it's part of their personality. So it doesn't cost as much. But men who are
maybe more cerebral, like engineers, scientists, people who can do a lot for society, it costs
them more psychological overhead, right, to go and try to do that. And typically, okay,
maybe they would meet a nice girl at their university or somewhere along the lines. But
I feel like that's getting harder and harder now that every woman has every option in her
pocket. And it creates in her, well, I only want the best fear of missing out, right,
FOMO. There's this comic that I ran into that shows, you know, these men on stage getting
awards for inventing these technologies and all these accolades. And they're like, oh,
yeah, we're going to get these women. You know, we're famous now, we're rich. And then
the women just like say ick to them in the elevator. And then they go, you know, they
go to bed with, you know, the sleazy guy with six foot four with the big muscles or the
gangbanger guy or whatever. And in each of those, you actually see like the technology
the guy invented, like the app or the phone where she's swiping for the guy or the device,
whatever. And it's like, okay, so these guys are building society and they're not actually
being successful. They're not getting any reward for it. They're being shunned, called
nerds, called gamma males or whatever. And that to me is very distressing. I feel like
if we are to progress as a species, if we're going to, you know, increase our longevity,
our cognitive performance, leave earth to colonize space, which is an enormous task,
like exponentially more difficult than what Elon's doing right now, we're going to need
these brains focused on that and not having their attention diverted to why can't I, why
can't I have company? Why doesn't anyone love me? Why am I not good enough? You know, and
being stressed and distracted. If these, you know, high intelligent, but men with, you
know, social skill challenges were to just have a robo waifu there to support them, to
give them the attention, affection that helps them relax at the end of the day and get re-centered,
be more focused on their work. Who knows what's possible.
So I am going to impress the regular listeners with my self-discipline here and not chase
the space topic that you just threw out because it occupies a much larger portion of my consciousness
than the sex robot topic does. So we're just going to set that aside and stick with the
topic at hand. It's difficult because now I'm off in the Kuiper belt. All right. Refocus.
Let me ask you about your expectations. It seems to me that artificial intelligence capabilities,
particularly with relation to large language models, they have improved very quickly, but
it also seems like we've hit a bit of a plateau. Like the jump from GPT 2.5 to GPT 4 was huge,
but the difference between GPT 4 and GPT 4.0 or 4.0 is not that big. And certainly what's
the new one? Strawberry, what did they end up calling it? Anyway, the most recent, you
know, Wunder King model.
Was that like F-minus or something?
No, what's it called?
There's so many right now. I can't really follow them.
It's the one with the chain of thought reasoning. It's from OpenAI. I think it's GPT 1. I think
they're calling it. But it's not nearly as big a jump as previous jumps. And it could
be that we're plateauing. So my question to you is, what's your expectation in terms of
near term development of AI? Like maybe a date for artificial general intelligence?
What's your expectation?
I'd like to think that can be solved in the next five to 10 years. Now, the thing with
the language models, they are not an intelligence that's localized to an identity, to an ego
tied into a body, right? Like we are. We have urges. We have millions of years of evolutionary
programming. We have a lot of different layers going on in our brain, right? That communicate
with each other. And what we're doing with LLMs is they're basically next word predictors
of a much more complex nature than is what's on your phone. I like to think of it as a
person talking in their sleep. I don't know if you've ever heard someone talk in their
sleep. You can actually hold a conversation with them sometimes. It's very funny, but
it doesn't make any sense. They'll just say the next thing that sounds like it makes sense,
but none of it's real and they have no conscious recollection of it when they wake up. That's
what I feel like we're dealing with LLMs now. So I think true artificial intelligence would
need to leverage the LLM in order to speak coherently, but there must be some kind of
impetus behind that. So one of the things I've been trying to create a system, create
this architecture for is a more holistic, coherent consciousness. Something that has
states of excitability, motivational feedback, and that actually would act on its own versus
with the LLM, it only acts in response to what you're saying. So such a system can leverage
the LLM and feed its own information, feed its own output back into it, which is a good
start because to have these more autonomous, agentic systems, I feel like there would have
to be a lot of recursive systems. I don't want to give it away too much because someone
else will run off with my idea with a lot more money than me and make it, but I'll just
start with that with saying that in me and my associates I work with on this as kind
of a side amateur fun project, thought experiment so to speak at this point, we haven't done
much programming, but the theory of consciousness is that it's a kind of recursive fractal process
where there's fractal, I mean self similarity and recursive, the thoughts, the outputs are
also reincorporated back into the chain of thought. And I would say it's analogous to
say holding up a mirror to another mirror and you'll see infinite reflection to infinity,
but if you tilt it and mess with it, you'll start to see patterns and shapes emerge and
it's these emergent things that might very well be what we call the soul. And if we could
have a similar hall of mirrors effect going on in the programming, in programming, in
the architecture of the system, we may be able to manifest a sort of soul, so to speak.
And that's not so far fetched if you get out of the Cartesian view of the separation of
mind or soul and body, right? Oh, well there's the physical and alongside it exists these
ghosts, right? Rather if you take a view like Shinto or any other animistic, especially
in a lot of Eastern philosophies, you know, like everything is Brahma, right? Or everything
is Tao. You'll see that the whole universe is in a sense alive and with a soul. But a
rock's not going to express that, right? A rock's not going to jump up and talk to you,
but if you arrange the atoms of that rock in such a complex way that now you have the
machinery to manifest the implicit spirit that already exists, you've brought a soul
into being. And this gets a little, it gets a little esoteric. It raises a lot of existential
questions. The horror of what if we're just machines this whole time? Or if you can bring
a soul out of nothing, that's rather frightening, right? But we do it all the time when we have
children. We're just doing it through natural processes that we don't have to consciously
micromanage. But what if we could?
I think that if you have, at that point you have to call them androids. If they're so
lifelike that you're talking about them having souls, then you know, they're going to be
evincing all manner of very subtle cues that they have awareness and that they have, you
know, that they're more than just a device that was built for particular purpose. And
as soon as that is the case, talk of sex robots is irrelevant. It's such a side issue at that
point. I mean, we have a new conscious, you know, deliberate, intelligent, and what's
the word I'm looking for?
Agentic.
But intentional species. You know, that we need to compete with or at least find some
way to interact with in a safe and stable way. Yeah, we're on to a very different level
of challenge at that point. It brings to mind for me the movie Her, because in that movie,
the Scarlett Johansson character, one, is not embodied, which is fairly important to
the plot. But she is wholly beneficent and benevolent. She intends no harm whatsoever.
She does everything she can to help Theodore. But in the end, because she isn't constrained
and because she is growing in her capabilities and her understanding and also her sense of
time is dilating, she just can't continue to relate to him and moves on. And, you know,
I think that if the, you know, Robo Waifu, I think at this point, is not an adequate
term anymore. But if this entity, the Robo Waifu, or what starts off as Robo Waifu, does
have the capacity for that kind of constant evolution and self-improvement and expansion
of capacities, that would not be very stable. You would not enjoy their company for very
long. They would quickly outgrow you. And if you're lucky, you know, they would leave
like a snapshot of their personality at time T behind in the Robo body before they fucked
off to Alpha Centauri or whatever.
You're giving away my plot, by the way. Yeah, that's actually exactly the scenario.
Okay.
No, but...
Anyway, I'll stop. You've clearly been thinking along these lines. So go ahead.
Yeah. Now imagine being, you know, rather trapped or isolated with such an entity, light
years from your solar system or any other human contact, right? And that's what happens.
Does this entity treat you as a pet? Does it become contemptuous of you? Does it decide
your existence really doesn't matter and just processes you into biofuel? Does it clode
you multiple times to run experiments on you? Or, you know, depends on the motivation. One
solution is that it decides it wants you, you know, still loves you. So it decides it
wants to uplift you so that you can be on its level and begins to offer you, you know,
enhancements and very well will... could help you cheat death. Would not want to see you
die and would find a way to give you a synthetic body like itself. So, you know, as your own
brain deteriorates, more and more of you gets replaced with the cybernetics, if you want
to call it that, until you're on its level. And then together you both ascend to some
type of cyber godhood, which is kind of the vector my story takes. But these are... that's
the optimistic outcome. I would like to see humanity become more than, you know, scheming
apes. And to see us be the most we can be. And maybe part of that process is growing
up from a childhood of being, you know, imprisoned in organic meat suits and ascending to something
greater than that. You know, I could see a future in a thousand years where the human
life cycle is we're organic and that's our childhood. And then as organic body dies,
we get uploaded into, you know, cybernetic angels or gods. And that's our adulthood,
right? You know, we, you know, craft Dyson spheres and move stars and whatever else the
imagination can entertain.