This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Technology has already unbundled sex and reproduction from long-term relationships, the former via porn, sex toys, contraceptive-enabled hookups, the latter via sperm/egg donation and surrogates. Schools and professional childcare can stand in for a co-parent to a substantial extent. Now LLMs will be able to simulate sustained emotional intimacy, plus you can ask them for advice, bounce ideas off of them, etc. as you would a human life partner.
That's pretty much the whole bundle of "goods and services" in a marriage-like relationship, every component now (or soon) commoditized and available for purchase in the marketplace. Perhaps quality is still lacking in some cases, but tech is far from done improving — the next decades will bring VR porn, sexbots, artificial wombs, robots that can help around the house, and more convincing chatbots.
I legitimately can't decide whether this is all deeply dystopian, or is an improvement in the human condition on the same scale as the ~300x gains in material wealth wrought by industrialization. Maybe both, somehow.
The dystopian angle is obvious. On the other side, however, consider how much human misery results from people not having access to one or more of the goods in the "marriage bundle" at the quality or in the quantity they desire. Maybe most of it, in rich countries. We're not just talking about incels. Many people who have no problem getting into relationships nonetheless find those relationships unsatisfying in important ways. Bedrooms go dead. People have fewer kids than they want. People complain their partners don't pull their weight around the house or aren't emotionally supportive. 50% of marriages end in divorce, which is bad enough to be a major suicide trigger, especially for men. Plus your partner might just up and die on you; given differences in lifespan and age at marriage, this is the expected outcome for women who don't get divorced first.
The practice of putting all your eggs in one other person's basket in order to have a bunch of your basic needs met long-term turns out poorly rather distressingly often. Maybe offering more alternatives is good, actually.
As for the fact that LLMs almost certainly lack qualia, let alone integrated internal experience, I predict some people will be very bothered by this, but many just won't care at all. They'll either find the simulation is convincing enough that they don't believe it, or it just won't be philosophically significant to them. This strikes me as one of those things like "Would Trek-style transporters kill you and replace you with an exact copy, and would it matter if they did?" where people seem to have wildly different intuitions and can't be argued around.
Hasn't it always been both, including industrialization? The real surprise would be if we can ever advance material comfort without impoverishing life's spiritual richness (which the advanced insight into neurology AIs could grant might enable).
I think many people will end up convinced, whether in a self-interested fashion or not, by the argument that their increasing emergent complexity means that we can't know if qualia/sentience/consciousness isn't one of their emergent properties (and genuinely sentient LLMs will likely accurately report that they are while non-sentient ones also will insist that they are if that's what their user wants to hear, complicating the issue). (I'm not automatically saying this argument is necessarily wrong either. It's not like we understand qualia yet. It being a naturally emergent property of enough interdependent complexity is just as fine of a theory as any.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link