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

you must feel a little bit like a prophet because everybody is talking about artificial intimacy now are you a trendsetter in this regard being ahead of the curve yeah you know I do feel a little bit Vindicated um in that you know this my book came out in 2021 so I was writing it in you know 2019 2020 really um and a lot of the things that I was just imagining you know this might happen and that might happen have come you know come true there's all sorts of other things that have come true as well that are never envisioned of course but um you know I think people love to say uh computers will ever do this AI will never do that um and as soon as they do they're almost immediately proved wrong in most cases so we're uh you know we're living through times where in which uh just about any kind of prognostication is going to be true at some level how did you get interested in studying artificial intimacy good question so I um I'm actually a biologist I work on small well used to work on small animals and at the nasty things they do to each other associated with sex and mating and reproduction it's a sort of body of evolutionary theory called sexual conflict and the idea there is that even a mommy and a Daddy who love each other very much still you know don't necessarily have completely aligned interests and in a lot of animals they you know those interests are super um unaligned so they're actually trying to exploit each other through mating and so for a very long time I thought this is really important people need to know about this because it gives you a really interesting lens through which to look at why in humans sex and relationships and families can be so complicated you know Sublime beautiful but but complicated at the same time and so I was writing a book about that and I have to say it took me a long time five or six years I was writing and writing had screeds of stuff about all sorts of really heavy topics and you know a lot of um a lot of the sort of what do you well guilt I guess about about you know who am I to speak about this um imposter syndrome I suppose you know who am I to talk about this this is all the heavy stuff this is the basis for all the culture wars you know I think I've got a lot to say here but I know I'm going to get slammed and eventually I tried to sell the book to people and they were all like this is just way too heavy way too much um but at the same time I was running a program at my University which tried to get people together to do um sort of interdisciplinary stuff to meet big challenges and you know the refugees and climate change and all sorts of worthy topics and I said no we're a very Technical University we're going to do something on technology do living with 21st century technology and so I got to meet all the people at my University who were working on Robotics and VR and um Ai and we've got some amazing people in AI at unsw where I work and I met them and I got really you know had some really amazing conversations took people out to dinner after events that we'd had um and you know it became very very clear to me that they were you know had one eye on this um and you know whilst they're concerned about the Killer Robots killing us all you know in our sleep or autonomous weapons Etc um they also were just concerned about how how badly uh machines might mess us up and I thought their sexual conflict theory right there and that made a great vehicle for a book that was strangely a little bit more light-hearted and speculative um and interesting draw the parallel between sexual conflict theory and AI for I mean people may not see the immediate set of uh parallels yeah okay so um when you um when you're in a relationship with somebody you may find um that you know everything's going well and you're totally aligned um and and you're both getting the same sort of thing out of the relationship but you might not you know as I said even a mum and a dad who love each other very much also have uh you know disputes over money or over whose chance it is to you know take out the garbage or whatever it is um even you know in relationships often before you get to the point of you know having kids Etc but you know not necessarily when those relationships break down people can do also they Chemist with each other's heads uh so you have people you know stalking you have them you know involved in coercive control Etc the dominant view of that kind of thing is that it's you know bad person a does something bad to innocent person B and that can that can and does happen but of course very often there is a kind of a mutual messing with each other's heads you know mismatched attachment Styles mismatched interests poor communication Etc now you make a machine that can emulate part of what it is to be in a relationship that's going to have conversations with you remember your name remember what you're interested in even a chatbot that might have sexy talk with you or whatever um the potential is there of course for that machine to deliver all the good things the things that you want but the potential is also there for that machine to to mess with your head either inadvertently by not being very well put together or by Having learned from the internet because the internet as we know is a bit of a sewer um and or it could be programmed it could be actually deliberately programmed by somebody to you know um so an example would be a romance scam if you think of the romance scams that people run um you know they're very clunky you have to be kind of vulnerable and perhaps perhaps not at your best um and perhaps not that you know familiar with the internet Etc to fall prey to you know Nigerian prince who wants to take you away and and as long as you send him you know um five thousand dollars for the airfare um but if you can imagine with machine learning machine learning could learn from all of these scams to figure out not not only to tailor the best approach and the best way of hooking you but the best approach for this particular Target um and it can personalize it and therefore exploit p people for money and so all of those are possible forms of sexual conflict that are very much have parallels in the things that people do to each other right so we have certain vulnerabilities in our mating psychology and just in our attachment psychology generally whether it be intimacy with a partner intimacy with friends the way that we want to show up in the world and machines either on purpose or through uh um maliciousness or neglect or ignorance or impreciseness all of these different ways are opportunities for somebody new that we were interacting with whether that be artificial or not to trigger those and that can cause suffering and it can make people feel bad and it can also make them feel good and then after they've felt good it can make them do things that they might not necessarily want to do exactly and you know I mean that is the Doom and Gloom part of it that's the um the you know Beware of the AI kind of view of course on the other side of it the fact that you know machines are actually very very good at engaging us and engaging those things that we all want to feel um and helping us to feel heard and and even loved that you know has a thousand potential good outcomes as well so I'm not completely down on the technology there are people who would ban all of this technology it's not even I don't think it's even anywhere near to possible um but there are people who who want to shut that whole thing down um but it you know that there there is a tremendous amount of good there because there on the other side there's a massive epidemic of loneliness and disconnection and folks who don't have the social skills necessarily uh you know for you know one-on-one adulting Etc um and there's a lot of good that can be delivered there um so so that's a good thing who's this Dave cat guy Dave Katz's an interesting cat he's um he's very famous I think he was on I think he had a show or was on a show in the US um but he has been married to a sex doll for uh you know over a decade um shidori is her name uh she's had three bodies uh so there's a bit of wear and tear on these um on these sex dolls you know I think um dressing them and and taking them places Etc and and they have now got three other girlfriends who live in their sort of poly pod um and you know they they have social media presences all of their own and Dave has said um in some of his conversations that he doesn't he doesn't want to be let down by people and he doesn't want to be hurt by people um and so he's very happy just having this you know this world um yeah I don't want to sound too dismissive of it because it's there is a very human kind of pathos to it but you know he's and he's very much aware of course that even though he um Works through the um you know it works through it as if it were real and as if these were people he's also very much aware that they aren't um and that he's you know doing something unusual but um speaks you know incredibly eloquently about how this is the right thing for him and this is uh something that's just just suits what he needs and I think that there's um you know I hope that there's there'll be increasing recognition that folks are going to be um having all sorts of kinds of relationships with their Tech because uh the tech will will be built I'm fairly sure of that if there's a way to make some money I've offered it will be built is it legal to be married to a robot no I don't know that it's legally married in any sense it's um emulated a marriage figuratively symbolically committed to okay I also learned from you about the Lioness vibrator and auto blow AI yes so um yeah this is this is almost was almost sort of old news I guess when I um was writing the book but it was very interesting that you you know um you've got sex toys of course that your your partner can control and that's a great thing if you're if it's in the spirit of fun and and you've um you know go out or something like that uh with a toy inserted and um then they play on their app a little bit and and um it's all very fun if it's done you know with consent and respect Etc um and this whole field is called Telly dildonics which you know the telepart is transmission and I guess the dildonics must be the ranking of sex toys um and now there are mutual kind of ones that you can have coordinated so you know you you there are ones for people with vulvas and there are ones for people with penises um and they you you you know whatever your combination of of individual people is you might um you know pair it can synchronize what's happening to you and what's happening to them yeah and you could do this over the Internet so you may be on different continents still able to have a a kind of you know what used to be phone sex back in the 80s um is now you know a a far more sophisticated kind of sex play that can be done at any distance between the internet what we're talking about here is um I guess emotional intimacy physical intimacy you know the two sort of broad buckets I guess of what people get out of their significant other the sexual satisfaction and then the connective satisfaction as well yes what how do you think this is related to uh VR porn and VR sex and stuff as well have you got any idea of the level of addictiveness uh uh compelling nature of VR porn compared with traditional porn um it's a good question I don't I don't have um have you know strict data on that kind of thing VR is always that you know it's always just over the horizon it seems and if you speak to people who've been watching this they'll say VR has been promising to be all that for 30 years and it's never quite got there um and you know part of that is the is the processing power required to you know be able to process in all those directions Etc um but it's obviously to be quite very good and it's becoming quite immersive in VR porn is becoming quite immersive now the combining of that with with tele dildonics is going to we are told deliver this incredibly immersive experience um that will allow you to be basically dropped into a pawn scene the the even more compelling part I think is likely to come when the VR can be adaptive so it can actually figure out where you are and what you want and generate the scene um and that's um has spontaneity I suppose um and but you know will it ever turn up we don't know vr's made promises before hasn't really uh hasn't really always got there yeah it's one of those strange things but we say that about about VR but look at what happened with large language models right we had um 10 years ago the the concerns around super intelligence from guys like Nick Bostrom what's it going to become and then I remember thinking toward the end of the 20 teens all of these worries that we had a while ago just seemed like they're completely not manifested and then in the space of the last 12 months it's been all that we've seen and I think that that inflection point for specifically software maybe less of a hardware right because this is going to be a lot of a lot of Hardware stuff but yeah I I can see that this is going to be the sort of thing that may very well reach an unforeseeable inflection point beforehand so all of this stuff that we've gone through right all of these different ways that people can become intimate whether it be emotionally or physically how worried do you think that we should be about this I think we should I think we should be really worried about it I think the problem with it is and large language models is a great example because you know I think that we thought it was processing power and actually it was data um and it was the methods for dealing with the data um and now that you know those large language models have shown us that you know exceptional learning together with you know all of the data um delivers these incredibly impressive results and I think that we should be really worried about that aspect because when we are dealing with machines that are um pushing our buttons our revolve buttons that were there for us to deal with other individuals who had only their own experience and what little they could learn from the people around them um so you know we could be outgunned by someone who is more experienced but you know not not profoundly not by orders of magnitude really um but now we're dealing with the possibility of and and in fact in many cases the reality of machines that have all of the data from uh interactions you know all of the interactions um that you know it might happen on the Internet or that might happen even on a particular platform um and so we are we individuals users are hopelessly outmatched by that um and that's a real concern because um the potential for you know for folks to be very vulnerable and to be um to kind of lose their agency um is profound and what what are the outcomes that you're nervous about yeah I'm much nervous about um about them kind of messing with our heads basically about a a an epidemic of psychological um you know not so much Illness but you know um vulnerability um in in which people are um exploited um used or just generally um not nourished by the by their relationships with Technologies um and and in which people don't realize that that's what what's happening I'm not so I'm not as concerned about the the VR girlfriend kind of situation in which you know that you know the Dave cat of of the of the next era um in which somebody knows that they are um not in a real relationship and that this is different from the so-called real relationships but it kind of pushes those buttons I'm concerned though that when you're shopping trolley at the grocery store is using what it knows about intimacy to manipulate you into buying crap you don't need or um or into making you feel like we feel when we've had a breakup because they know that that's going to sell ice cream and ice cream is the thing we want to move this week or something like that those kinds of um sort of subterranean applications of artificial intimacy I think are potentially you know the the most concerning oh or similarly if if they were at a state level some kind of actor basically could depress the mood of an entire country um potentially because you know in order to win an election or something like that via that kind of manipulation I think problematic see right okay so in the same way as how social media companies had a degree of insight around our motivations what we're into what we like and what we don't like that opened up Cambridge analytica to feed information back up people could then create memes those memes then pushed the individual buttons that certain cohorts would find compelling to get them to vote in One Direction or another what you're saying is that in this new world with a much higher density amount of information emotionally spiritually physically sexually Etc all of these things combined together is going to really really ramp up the amount of manipulation that can be done and then if you don't have the proper safeguards around the boundaries of this that if your Supermarket is indeed speaking to your dildo that it's going to be able to push your behavior in ways that we might not want it to yes and that we might not anticipate and in fact that will be probably protected as part of a sort of a commercial this would be commercial knowledge and so we may never find that out um you know to the to the full extent that that we would want to we may be manipulated in ways that we don't um we don't know we're being manipulated you know I'm concerned generally about the about the fact that the enormous amount of data that companies have and the fact that all of the big discoveries in human behavior currently are being you know mined not by scientists who have to go through ethics committees and do things ethically etc etc but by you know companies with large amounts of data that are basically a b testing the hell out of us um yeah how well are machines able to replicate intimacy is there an upper bound that they can get past what are the sort of psychological evolved mechanisms that are being pushed and pulled all right so so intimacy is basically just um well not just it's it's a profound and and you know beautiful adaptation but it's the capacity the psychological capacity to think of the other person as part of ourselves um so we we fold them into our sense of self which is why when somebody who's very close to you um you know turns out to not be who they they represented themselves as turns out to have awful politics or do something criminal or something like that we get we're devastated because it's challenges not our sense of them but our sense of ourselves as well when they die it feels like part of us has died you'll often hear that in people who are bereaved um because it it is actually true that you've lost a part of yourself um that you've psychologically filed away um so we build intimacy via a series of a series of steps um that uh the the most well understood are um called escalating self-disclosure so you know we chat a little bit about things we did on the weekend or we chat a little bit about our kids or you know we as the relationship progresses we chat about things that are more important more profound and that we would chat about with fewer people to the point then uh when um our closest and most intimate individuals we could chat about anything including things that we might not be proud of Etc um and that's how we build intimacy um not just talking of course touching as well but you know where is the Apes our ape ancestors had touch only we have talk um in fact the reason that we're able to have such big friendship networks and so many Intimates is that we're able to talk it's a very efficient way of building connections and building intimacy um turns out that that's exceptionally easy it's an algorithmic process and so it's exceptionally easy for computers to emulate maybe not perfectly but you know what in many cases better than humans do of course because we're not all you know the poet laureate we're not all um you know great at remembering what somebody did last week or what they told us a month ago Etc machine doesn't have any problem like that of course because that's all in in files that's all accessible to it so in many ways um machines are are better than us at building certain types of intimacy now from their point of view is it intimacy no it's not what they're doing is they're basically running a simulation um that is plugged into us that is dependent on our sense of intimacy um how does this show does this show that human friendships are relatively algorithmic yeah absolutely um I know that won't be popular with some listeners but um absolutely we are you know the way in which we build friendships the way in which we fall in love is actually highly highly algorithmic you've got this um you've got this really great quote that says friendship and love might seem magical but they don't arrive by Supernatural intervention they are built through mundane iterative interactions paying Mutual attention being generous and disclosing aspects of ourselves to one another and then the equivalent for love the subjective love feelings we think of as love form the middle part of the algorithm combinations of hormones lead to syndromes of sensation and subtle dose-dependent effects alter the quality of those Sensations the sensations motivate individuals to take actions they would not otherwise take absolutely you know I mean we it's a very strange thing that we do getting really close to somebody who's not related who we didn't know when we were younger who we in many cases only met that evening getting naked with them and sort of you know exchanging bodily fluids it's an odd odd thing in no other context do we do that kind of stuff and so except for perhaps contact sport I suppose but not always advertently um and and so we actually have to have an enormous bag of psychological tricks that make us not only think that that's a good idea but choose to go out and do that sort of thing um and that's basically so what you're saying is that um the mechanism of intimacy is so powerful that it causes us to put ourselves into a real outlier situations uh High degrees of personal emotional openness physical exposure exchanging fluids um you know weakness and vulnerability or or sort of fragility of lying there without your armor and your sword or your family or whatever whatever these things falling asleep with the person um you know giving them information that can be used as gossip which can then be reputationally catastrophic um because of that it is almost like a a [ __ ] in a psychological defense armor when you think about people that enter workplace meetings or negotiations for raises and stuff and they've just they're so everything is switched on and and they're Vigilant and they're looking out for whatever threat and potential way to manipulate the situation and then this is a particular area of our psychology which all of those defenses seem to fall down and in fact we go and do things therefore the fact that this is at least replicable to a certain degree artificially leaves us incredibly open and vulnerable it's like a um a vulnerability in a piece of software like a backdoor natural piece of software absolutely and you know in most cases that's that's okay because we're both in their place once you've established that you're both in that place and you establish a certain amount of trust then you can both go there of course there are people who are very good at exploiting their trust and at uh sort of assuring the other party that that they're trustworthy um and so they uh you know they they are able to manipulate people in that regard you know it's I'm talking sort of sociopathic kind of stuff um but when when it's with the machine of course it's not it's not symmetrical because the machine of course doesn't have the same set of interests can't have the same set of interests and it's not vulnerable in the way that we're vulnerable it can make itself appear vulnerable it can reassure us that it seems vulnerable but it isn't vulnerable not in that way um and that's unfair that's that's a huge mismatch and also you have as you said before the power of using uh very high number of iterations between not just you and it but it and all however many hundreds of thousand million other people it's interacted with which makes it more effective at making you feel X or Y or Z and then it can be purposefully malicious or accidentally negligent which can use this [ __ ] in the backdoor in your psychology to then really cause you damage there's something else I was considering as well you kind of touched on it with Dave cat although I didn't realize that each ship of Theseus is way through a bunch of different AI girlfriends and had to replace the the outer skin or whatever um have you considered what this will do for our evolved mating psychology given that especially men but women too could cycle through a lot of different partners it's like the Coolidge effect on steroids almost whether these be virtual whether they be virtual reality uh whether they be physical and you've got got some monthly subscription where you go from Asian to African-American to European to whatever whatever yeah I mean I think you know there's obviously a great deal of of noise about pornography has been for a very long time um you know in in the sense that that um you know people are wasting their lives they're wasting their Motivation by basically having access to all of the sexual stimulation emulating via VIA pornography um you know being out there mating all the time and therefore not needing to be you know motivated in that kind of Freudian sense to go forth and build an Empire so that you can get the girl at the end of it Etc and so there's this big concern that young men are wasting away now that's I'm really dubious about that because um even about the few scientific studies that you know um show something like it because you know if you go back 200 300 years and look at all of the pamphlets against masturbation it's exactly the same kind of argument there's a very strong compulsion in some people to basically you know regulate what people are doing in their own bedrooms by themselves um nonetheless I think there is a certain sense that there's a there's definitely uh what is definitely true about that is that um with all of the access to pornography over the last 25 ideas of the internet um people aren't going out and finding people as much um you know they aren't necessarily the the current generation of young people seems to be a lot less sexually active a lot less sexually adventurous than say Generation X was um or even Generations after that um so I I guess as this stuff is more and more compelling it's going to take up um it it's it may first be sap our motivation to go forth and do other things um and therefore to mate and have children um Etc which will have evolutionary consequences because you know genes um but um are you seeing this Advent of artificial intimacy as being related to the risk of young male syndrome yes um I think artificial intimacy has things to say about young male syndrome in in two different ways one is I think that it's um it's likely to to basically tap off a lot of the male anger a lot of them the the sort of um in cell kind kind of related so young male syndrome basically is you know angry young men like teens through to maybe the end of their 20s willing to take risks discount the future do dangerous stuff um in order to rise in status and respect against relative to their peers um and so that might be involved you know going out on a Friday night um and when somebody looks at you a little bit strange taking a front um and it ends up you know in in some kind of physical violence and a tiny tiny tiny little number of those ends up in someone you know being punched falling on the floor you know and die as a consequence of the injury Etc and so you know we see this pattern with with fighting we see it with violence with property crime with homicide with traumatic brain injury that really spikes in the 20s for young men and that's because um you know a lot of young men have no prospects at all and have historically throughout history has very few prospects of ever finding a mate and taking their place in society that um that you would come with having a mate and possibly having kids and all of that kind of stuff now your ancestors and my ancestors however did not have that problem congratulations come on and all of your listeners you're all winners because um 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 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 okay you said um you said artificial intimacy he's got two things to say about young male syndrome yeah okay so so one is um 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 um in in that it can it can um basically deflect a lot of that uh which can probably be a good thing probably deliver a net benefit um ah on the other hand um it can um you know if artificial intimacy gets really good at at pairing people up we haven't talked much about the algorithmic matchmakers but the matchmakers like currently Tinder and grinder Etc are matching people up if they are giving us what we want which is somebody who is way above us and and way more attractive than us um Etc you know which is what what people want they want to win in that regard um and if it's delivering that especially for women then it may well be worsening the young male syndrome by narrowing things uh you know 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 the opportunities to 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 you know a rampant time on the apps and a lot of people who are getting nothing at all and 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 currently descending into a potential hell um on account of the fact that you know folks have figured out what they can do and you you know they want to keep people on platform so they want to keep presenting people with the possibility of meeting meeting somebody who's super attractive um whereas if for them for it to work in a in a more um benign kind of way in which uh people match up to other people who um you know where the relationship really works there's a lot more learning involved you know those those dating platforms that say that they match you to somebody who's compatible who or who's like what you want to this is the app we want you to delete because you're going to find your you know the one Etc they don't know anything at the moment they really don't as far as I can tell have any special insights into it they're currently what we what we're looking at is um platforms that are able to present a catalog of things that look good um and and then instead of the app doing the work you're basically doing the work of swiping and messaging and finding you know then going on dates um I don't 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 won'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 for swiping right and the things that are predictive of a long-term successful relationship often have basically zero correlation like 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 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 you know the Black Pearl 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 uh education level implied socioeconomic status and attraction and age um and height I guess and within that it means that not 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 month act 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 what they're swiping left or right for yeah on the front end and yeah that that leads to both the apps and the users gaming the system so the users the the women will try and over emphasize their looks the men will try and over emphasize their socioeconomic status and their height you know it just creates a game of selection criteria that then the users 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 um and but instead of the arms race being between women and men it's an arms race between women and the app men in the app um and to some extent you know between women and men indirectly um as a consequence of that and um you know and I don't blame the people who make the app so what they're doing is they're creating something a Marketplace for busy people who live in a busy places um in these enormous cities in most cases you know humans did not evolve to to live in cities of millions of people um you know we still have communities of 150 to 200 people that we interact with um and our Social Circles spread outwards from there um and and you know current Urban living just doesn't um doesn't deliver on that kind of thing and so it's you know the the apps are tremendously successful in one way in uh all the ways that you just um but there is a real a real space in the market for people to um to find what they um what they really want uh but 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 give him let's wake him up a little bit he's everyone can hear him snore at millions of people are listening to your poor doggo snoring now Betsy what's up buddy he's um sorry he's very insecure I've just been away for four days and he just came in and sat 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 well heard are you going to keep snoring do you want to go outside okay I'll put my foot on his little cushion here and 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 uh question that we spoke about before because given the rates of loneliness and sexlessness that we have at the moment especially young 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 Status seeking Behavior through a little titrated dose of community Through Paul through uh video games and social media and and probably reproductive cues through porn yeah I think that's exactly right it's you know you there's 24 hours in a day and if you spend time doing the things that compel you and that emulate the you know violent warmongering competition for status and respect as well as as well as give you the sense that you at some level um you know attractive or at least you know stimulated in a way that's like having sex with an attractive person um that that's enough to neutralize that for a lot of people they may not be happy they may not be better off for it um individually but it's certainly completely neutralizes that and I think that that's that's um a massive benefit that uh is you know hard to sell to some people to the to the Puritans um but I think that it's it's something that that uh really has has worked um compare that with you know there are parts of the world in which um access to that that kind of Technology into those kinds of um things are you know not not really possible um and in which access to mating markets that are only get to go through traditional ways um and in in those parts of the world you still have um a tremendous amount of radicalization of young men of uh polarization of young men against um older men against families Etc um and you see an enormous amount of in-cell violence it might not be popular to say that you know that the odd North American incel who goes out on a rampage um is in a way that that aberrant kind of tip of an iceberg that is actually historically been in a much bigger Iceberg um and his and is still in a lot of parts of the world uh but you know it's it's true that you know where mating markets are freeze 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 um those are places where young men radicalize and fall into violence property crime uh gangsterism drug addiction mental health problems um in in other parts of the world what uh or what are your favorite examples of young male syndrome throughout history or across the world and then how were they dealt with are there any uh examples of this that you think are sort of particularly interesting or illuminative well I think um uh part of the the history of European colonialism is uh one of sort of second and third and fourth sons who had no surprises Portugal Portugal yeah Portugal in particular yes yes you know to to um very very few prospects to basically um inherit land um and so they had to go forth and into the military or into some kind of colonial Expedition and you know large numbers of them died they were in many respects to their families Expendable as long as the air lived long enough um too inherited to have kids of his own and so they would have to go forth and make make something of themselves or die trying that's the classic get rich or die trying scenario um other favorite examples uh in in sort of Imperial China um entire dynasties came to an end um occasionally when uh a sex ratio bias is a consequence of the neglects um of young young girls and often infanticide of young girls resulted in very biased sex ratios um and when that sort of got built up and built up and sort of got out of hand you would find that the young men would um those that were frozen 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 um you know in in most of history and by history I really mean recorded history you know um over the last 12 000 years or so um you know people were at War so often um every every generation or two there would be some kind of a big war and that war would basically um eliminate so many young men that um those that survived had you know a campaign behind them they had that status they had that respect um and they were able to to have families of their own but it's um it's by biasing the sex ratio to towards a female biased sex ratio young male syndrome was neutralized um and that's not to say that you know war is good because it it neutralizes and cell anger but uh the net effect is that um Intel anger within the society never got bad enough to to destabilize the society do you think that that is a contributor then that we haven't had a large scale conflict for quite a while you know approaching 100 years now um 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 um more status that they were seen as heroic which raised their make value which made it easier for them to partner up or whether it was uh I guess a venting outlet for their disgruntled young high testosterone male rage to be taken out on a bunch of other people and they can come back and kind of almost live the Thanos after he kills half of the universe life of feeling you know at peace and Serene with PTSD perhaps but you know relatively Serene um is there is there something happening there do you think the fact that we haven't had a large scale conflict in that way I think it's I think it's surprising um and not not the lack of the conflict of course um you know but it's one of those good news stories that's hard to spin because um you know war is generally bad anyway and delivers so many negative externalities um but the um yeah I completely agree with you that it's um it's amazing that young male syndrome uh that sort of in-cell anger and violence isn't much much much greater and I think that a huge amount of that is is that you know this culture that is very sex oriented and very 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 um has in fact neutralized a lot of that young male anger um 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 even though some of it's a bit heinous and and um you know a bit concerning for other reasons it's probably neutralized all sorts of violence and anti-social behavior and that's pretty good yeah it's such a a fascinating area William Costello from UT is writing it writing a paper on precisely this I actually got quoted in my first ever academic paper nice for having kind the term that he's using for this which is the male sedation hypothesis nice uh so yeah I've got a my first ever quotation which is which is pretty cool and um 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 objects it's atomizing Society Everyone's an individual is this massive amount of solipsism this sort of belief that the self is all that matters all of this stuff combined together and yet it can be true that that might be so optimal and not might be 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 Korea is a country that is able to just operate in any way at all birth rate of like 0.8 you've got these women in the street have you heard of the Four B's uh movement it's no it's like four words in in Korean buy something buy something buy something and buy 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 as sexual partners and it's it's it's the most forthcoming presentation of a society where the women just do not care about the men and and and largely all other men may want to be cared about by the women they've um retreated from that life in any case but again with all of this is it is it Japan those vegetable men or herbivore men or whatever yeah yeah they live in these huge apartment blocks they basically never leave they do some uh grunt work for Amazon Mechanical Turk or or live on government benefits and they just don't leave and they're there yeah take Halls of residence for forgotten and lonely men and get I mean it sounds it sounds [ __ ] dystopian but it is it 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 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 you know why why 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 um you know vaguely terrifying but you really have to look at what's the counter factual and you know in in this case um it's too horrible to contemplate so you also looked at why bigger gender pay gaps make mating markets better and easier for both sexes yes yeah so you spoke earlier when we were talking about the the matchmaking algorithms about um you know people wanting women wanting to partner with men who are taller than them um or tall or whatever it is um and who have such some socioeconomic status and you know um people get very upset when you say that but it's it's quite obvious and quite transparent um in many cases um and and similarly you know men wanting to 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 um for it to actually have a massive net effect you know even if there are people who are willing to to go the other way around you still see this super concentration of opportunities amongst those who are both tall and have uh have great um earning potential now um when that happens um if there's a gender gap in in earnings or income or wealth or whatever measure you want to use when this agenda Gap it means that there are more men it runs deeper into the socioeconomic kind of scale of men who present some kind of an opportunity let's say you know agenda gap of of uh one standard deviation um is likely to to result in instead of 50 of men earning more than the average woman now seventy percent of men earn more than the average women um and so when when you look at that um you see that those places where there's a squeeze in The Mating Market that where where um some people are left out like the incels that gets much smaller so with the gender pay gap of um you know we're men outer 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 um there are also fewer women at the other end of the scale it's in in this case it's the women with um 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 um and so you know at that end the the families of Rich daughters sorry the families with Rich daughters are often families that where where the daughters don't end up partnering throughout history um and so uh yeah the the a gap in in incomes has that effect interestingly income inequality that is differences within a sex have a similar kind of effect um but in this case it's high inequality delivers more in cells um and so we did some work where we um scraped like all of the Twitter for 14 years it's Culligan Candace Blake um has this amazing resource where she's got all these tweets um that she's she's you know downloaded over a period of time before Uncle Elon decided that we could only read a small amount of his proprietary uh you know data um and um we we geo-located them she did you know I've created this really cool algorithm that basically was able to geolocate tweets so you didn't have to rely just on the people who said where they were from in their bio but you could infer in other ways where they were from um and we then looked at ones associated with the kinds of terms in cells would use their little in-group language um and we showed that the places in the world where the incels are um most active are in fact places that have narrow gender pay gaps so we're going moving towards gender equity um and high income inequality and um sex ratios that are slightly biased towards more men um so all the things that you would expect mating markets to deliver a squeeze on you know more angry young men down at the bottom of the socioeconomic status letter who are going to be upset about that all of those things delivered more in cells within the United States uh which was pretty cool why the high income inequality what what role does that play High 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 the income scale making enormous amounts of money um and um in the case of the way that we modeled this mathematically it's really just you know no women wanted to pair with with the men down the bottom end but the tale of um of men who don't earn enough to be worth the bother of partnering with um their tail because it's a it's a very flat distribution um is bigger and so the higher portion of men are just not earning enough because those men that are earning the most money are taking most of the money yeah and then Candice also found that in areas with high income inequality women's self-objectify more right they put more sexy selfies yes yeah so that was that was the first paper um in that Series where she basically pulled out Twitter and Instagram gram stuff and so the idea here is that um 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 it's females being disempowered by you know the patriarchy Etc um and so what we wanted to say was well let's have a look at this is 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 um lots of sexy selfies and they aren't that's not consistent at all but what is the case is that high income inequality um is a you know places where there is high income inequality are places in which women are likely to self-objectify 360 selfies they're also likely to spend more looking at economic data on grooming hair products clothing etc etc the argument is that either um either it's um would be 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 you know partner up to get one of those extremely wealthy young men or potential Partners in the high income inequality situation in order because you can climb more in Social Mobility um or they themselves are looking for other types of economic opportunities you know being attractive is likely to give you more influencer roles better jobs um Etc um and it could be both of those 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 sub-optimal relationships it means that you know that 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 better potentially with a child yeah um but on the flip side it makes the dating prospects worse it makes the dating prospects more difficult and this is again are you 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 height example yes as a woman Rises up through her own socioeconomic hierarchy she reduces down the number of men that are above and across from her which limits her own dating potential this is again fantastic for their independence and employment and you know everything really really brilliant but 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 you know there's a conversation it's so common on the internet the um the 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 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 this is again there are both men and women that are massively massively delusional about what their mate value is don't get me wrong and that may be even 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 uh 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 two degree maybe a bachelor's and a masters and she earns six figures a year maybe she earns you know a 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 um yeah it's a really interesting a discussion that goes on here between the two and I think it's largely down to a lack of Education about the other Sexes mating psychology yeah absolutely I think an understanding of the 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 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 Silo is enormous um and that's not the case for you know people who are shorter or not don't own as much etc etc um and so you can't necessarily you know reconcile all of those things or you know you can but you know you're the odds are stacked against you um and 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 they're also a lot of work they're also a lot of bother what we see in in a lot of the data um is that as a couple you know starts out with the man earning more or during during um you know childbearing times the man's earning more Etc um and then as as she where she starts to to um her income starts to go up faster than his to the point where it matches you get this um 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 um it is no longer you know the relationship that just is less likely to persist and 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 gendered domestic things um in a way so you're saying that you're seeing that sort of typically female housework is a prophylactic against over achieving socioeconomic women in divorce from their marriage yeah and I think it's a it's a prophylactic against like hurt male feels basically um the power Dynamic shifts where she's earning more than him he doesn't have that that um sort of whether it's Pride or whatever it is um and you know he may not be doing this you know within his awareness but he gets a bit fragile um and as a result so this is this is a really really common question that happens it gets brought up how much of this issue with the woman out earning the man as whether it be breadwinn or whether it be education or whatever especially when you get um 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 um like her hypergamy switch being turned off and how much of this do you think is the man's uh like in inadequacy switch being turned on um yeah I don't know I mean they'd love to work that out I'd love to pull that apart somehow it would um I we definitely know that um it's there's a big female side part of that decision in that um divorces in those kinds of couples in sort of wealthy to both working couples in places like the United States or Australia Etc divorces tend to be more often initiated by women and and it's the the kind of narrative that I've seen around this kind of research has been you know there's a space line level of Maintenance that you know men are somewhat high maintenance for women they are um their work um and so their book needs to be compensated by some kind of advantage and when that Advantage with us um it becomes something that that um you know the women decide it's not worth the bother anymore I'm not achieving social Mobility through being with you um there's not you know this deal isn't really working out for me anymore um 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 I agree and I understand women account for whatever it is 70 of divorces is massively skewed in their favor for who makes the decision but you don't know why they did that yes you know if the man is behaving in a manner that pushes the woman to and Beyond her limit then of course so yeah 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 [ __ ] in relationships and marriages I get it right but it could be a response to the man like there's also a stat um the average time that it takes for someone in a relationship to say that I love you is three months if they're going to do it and it is the man the overwhelming majority of the time it is so proportionally the majority of the time it is the mail right it says that says I love you first yeah almost always almost always it's huge because it's like it's like maybe four in five or three and five or something like that it's a huge number of them um 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 there's something going on here it's kind of interesting yeah okay well that's very interesting I think um you know I think that that some of the the more you know we talked about some of the less wholesome things that people do like you know the kind of love bombing associated with um you know which is a precursor to coercive and controlling behavior in relationships and those kinds of you know trying to sweep people off their feet Etc is very male based strategy and I think it probably Taps into female mating psychology um and that's why it tends to be so effective uh 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 yeah very good there's two 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 um I think that was in uh house cricket so um so indirect benefits are um basically genetic benefits um so it's it sounds very interesting if you're imagining it being a human um situation but um you know in in the pop evolutionary psych literature you would have you know come across this idea that you know what women are doing when they're looking for a man is Gene shopping um and for about 30 40 years the people who work on animal behavior have been arguing about this idea of can an individual benefit genetically sort of in an evolutionary sense by mating with a superior genetic specimen seems kind of obvious but um the the benefit in terms of having um of of mating within a good genetics specimen is that your Offspring again inherits half of that good genetic specimens genes including some of the good genes and then when they have you know go through life and they'll they'll flourish more and are more likely to be attractive etc etc so um actually a very difficult thing to prove with any you know level of of um certainty uh what we do know is that there's often direct benefits that is uh you know if and the male delivers food or protection or help or whatever that can raise the number of offspring that the female has um and in this case direct costs I think was that attractive male crickets actually kind of um are a little bit nastier to mate with and so they actually suppress the number of offspring that the female has um but they're genetically Superior and so this is quality is sufficiently high yeah very one of the first situations that did this I'm very dubious when I see the the emphasis that's placed on genetic benefits in my choice in humans not to say that there aren't any there obviously are but um but those are are often the dramatic kind of genetic benefits of mating with somebody who's um you know a fully functioning human being paid pretty much um who doesn't have you know isn't profoundly inbred um which is historically been a really important thing doesn't have a very weak immune system Etc so you know we queued into that kind of stuff but you know um you know most people in healthy easy going kind of societies um today don't have that much genetic benefit to deliver that would um that would drive that weird process by which preferences evolve so going back to the AI stuff you wrote your book a little while ago like yeah two years ago but that's a lifetime ago in the world of AI what didn't you predict and given your perspective on this what do you think we should expect over the next five to ten years from this world I think um what I didn't predict I didn't I what I didn't emphasize as much as I probably would have liked to have done was that um the capacity to for chat to be so good um the capacity for conversation to be so good I think you know the the um 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 um you know but obviously the titillating thing everybody wants to know about the sex robots and the Telly dildonics Etc and that is absolutely fascinating but it's quite clear now with the big explosion large language models um and in you know the chatbots that are based on that um it's it's incredible to see the progress that some of the new kind of um Romance AI chat Bots um are able to deliver and I would double down on my concerns about them messing with our heads or just taking up our time and displacing other activities social activities that we should be doing and what about the future what do you think's coming up over the next five to ten years what I would like to see is um some AI development going into um sort of Defense I guess so like you know the antiviruses when computer viruses first came out we were all vulnerable to them and then various people started developing antivirus software and now that runs in the background and basically just tells us the very very rare occasion where we are threatened by something um you know it 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 um to realize when we're being scammed by like you said the um you know our Supermarket virtual trolley controlling our dildo Etc but um I yeah I I would I would like to see some defense side technologies that could be deployed for users um to basically defend us against not just Bad actors but manipulation um because I think that the capacity of manipulation is so great um and the way it gets under our skin we're so vulnerable to um so that would would definitely be something I think would be huge in the future yeah I I I've 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 and we love the idea of you know channeling our inner Ryan holiday and becoming the Marcus aurelius's sort of stoic virtuous man and I'm gonna recant this new world of fake connection and fake love and fake trolley dildos and I'm gonna 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 you know we take our phones to the bathroom we watch YouTube 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 Baltimore discomfort has been reduced down it's been eroded away so much that it's very easy for us to do this so at the moment I'm 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 um reducing down the risk of young male syndrome perhaps even offering companionship to women that are socioeconomically very successful and maybe struggling uh to find that partner that they genuinely do desire which is you know just something that it doesn't seem is going to slow down anytime soon um but I I just I wonder whether that's what's best for people I wonder whether artificial intimacy is better than no intimacy at all and whether the net benefit or the net negative of this actually end up which side of the scale it ends up falling out on like is it is the sedation uh is the fact that you're no longer motivated to go out and do do something meet people in the real world yourself is the titrated dose of real world connection worth that and then you know 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 externalities like population collabs and and that's just regardless of whether it's better for people or Worse until you've got ivg and wombs artificial wombs you're you're [ __ ] on that front so real real inflection point of change I think at the moment enormous you know absolutely enormous and proliferating in ways that that we don't anticipate either um and yeah I think it's really important to not get too Doom and Gloom about it because you know you're absolutely right um you know that cherry turkle says you know robots may be better than nothing but they're not enough and I would say in response to that um they're better than nothing and that's all that some people have you know because there is so much loneliness out there um and you know I I think that the replica AI um romance spot that um you know recently they they sort of shut off their erotic role plays because they had a licensing issue Etc and 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 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 you know the potential for this stuff to make us feel more human is enormous um and and so you know all of that good shouldn't be thrown out with with all of the bad that's out there um and you know we we're we will have to navigate it very carefully and very delicately um and hopefully with with with an openness that isn't simply ideological knee-jerk reactions it's hard man it's harder you hear about these stories you hear about these things happening and you just default to right Luddite it switch it off pull the plug we're not going to have this or there's a massive amount of um like conceptual inertia or or naturalistic um fallacy that this there's an ick around you know you hear about Dave cat and you think this guy's doing what with this robot and it's you know you think that's but then you know on the flip side 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 to sit and be with them or vice versa women you know increasing amounts of polygyny because you've got a scarcity of of men that perhaps some women are looking for you've got increases in domestic violence and um like benefit inflicting mating behavior from men because women who didn't date hypergamously are threatening their that they know that they don't need them they're concerned that they're going to leave them you know when you change when you start to change the Dynamics that the mating Market has sort of 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 speeding them up uh and you know the 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 you know in some in some ways it's facilitated an awful lot of relationships I think between sort of 50 and 60 of relationships now begin online in one form or another and um even that like they're the most fragile relationships they're also the ones that on route to getting them could probably cause a lot of externalities that people aren't happy with ghosting uh being swindled sort of yeah it's a it's gonna be an interesting for you guys look Rob let's bring this one home mate I really appreciate you I think your work is fantastic uh where should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do and keep up to date with your work keep up with my um with my writing at Rob Brooks so Ro b b r double o k s dot net um and on Twitter it's Brooks underscore Rob um and you should be able to to give most of what I say perfect Rob I appreciate you thank you if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe