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I think there is a decent chance that the Market of Lemons incurred thanks to LLMs and such does have a real chance of playing out as described. There are obvi

I think there is a decent chance that the Market of Lemons incurred thanks to LLMs and such does have a real chance of playing out as described. There are obvious off-ramps that may be taken to avoid the predicted outcome, but those most likely to try and guide users onto those off-ramps are also those most invested in the underlying tech that will lead to a road to nowhere resulting in the Market of Lemons. One thing I did take exception with is one of his possible influences that lead us to avoid a death of the online interaction. "that AI technologies won't be perfect substitutes for actual human-to-human contact" is, on its face, a compelling argument but the fact is that humans rarely look for "perfect" solutions to anything... especially in the social sphere. There is a non-trivial number of people right now that are using virtual companions driven by the questionably convincing ChatGTP LLM who howled in anger and pain when the company who created and sold the tech decided to alter the companion to be less overtly sexual. Sure, even in a pre-Internet era some of those fixated upon such companions would have found some other evolutionary dead-end but a large number of them would have engaged in satisficing behavior to find another human and reproduced. What we face now is a noteworthy population of humans that opt out of the complexity of human relationships and reproduction because an over-powered chatbot weaponized their empathy against them and made them a genetic dead-end. I'm hardly advocating for some Butlerian Jihad, but I would suggest that we need to think about the potential ramifications of a social Market of Lemons that is also operating in parallel with a technology that offers a satisfactory empathetic alternative to that Market that is also a Lemon in the long term for humans. If nothing else, it provides a neat basis for a sci-fi premise.

morsch 2y ago
You're overestimating the number of people who will indefinitely prefer relationships with AIs to the exclusion of real people. And you're underestimating the number of people who were voluntarily asexual for one reason or another in the past.
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  I know a few people who prefer online relationships to real life ones. An AI relationship seems like a small step. Especially if they don't realise they are interacting with an AI.
- atoav 2y ago
  The problem with AI is the way it is being presented in many cases. E.g. having a prominent pink button on top of your PDF like in Adobe Acrobat for Android with zero explaination what the heck it is supposed to be doing, how it deals with my data and no way to remove it other than going into fullscreen is feeling like they actively try to shove it into my face. Thanks Adobe that you put an AI button I can't read onto my boarding pass which I am trying to read with my own eyes and scan into a barcode scanner. What is next? Putting AI into orange juice?
  - skydhash 2y ago
    It’s PDF Expert on iOS for me. They have a light blue button that keep disturbing me. And it’s not even working as I don’t have premium. And I don’t intend to get it because the price is outrageous ($50/year).
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
>What we face now is a noteworthy population of humans that opt out of the complexity of human relationships and reproduction because an over-powered chatbot weaponized their empathy against them and made them a genetic dead- The future, if it belongs to people at all, belongs to people who make it a priority to connect with others. Same as it ever was. Isolation has always meant the end of the road for your bloodline for us humans, whatever one chooses to make of that - even if the isolation is comfortable, even if the isolation is more comfortable than the outside. That's what life in a social species is all about. (Artificial wombs might upset that equilibrium permanently, of course, but then I guess we just end up with a planet full of asocial nerds who don't even chat to each other on Hacker News. That's far enough outside what I can imagine that I'm lumping it under the "moral intuition inverse square law": Much like gravity, your sense of what is right and wrong becomes dramatically worse as you increase the distance between yourself and the abstract situation you're imagining.)
beefnugs 2y ago
Some of his exact examples happened for me long ago: i dont answer phone calls anymore, and feel dumb paying for a phone number. I also have some kind of mental disorder where i see a trend and extrapolate it out in my mind very quickly: the first time i got no replies except a single prostitute on a dating website I realized I can never touch this terrible system again. The TV show "Sunny" (mild spoiler) has an interesting idea that they made this friend-bot to try and coax people out of isolation... but i only see that as a real hard kick in the face if this thing is faking love and devotion and you are thrust right back into a world of transactionalism and the truth that some people will never be lovable
anal_reactor 2y ago
It's not that people are getting lured into spending time with ChatGPT instead of fellow human, but rather that the value of human interaction itself completely collapsed. 200 years ago if you wanted to survive you absolutely had to have friends and exchange favors with them, and in many places you also needed to have a partner. People stayed in bad relationships because that was the better option. Like, ok, your husband beats you, but also does a lot of work growing crops, and getting beaten beats starving to death. At some point we just... stopped needing other people. It's perfectly viable to live on single income, and getting yourself into the complex world of "he did me a favor so I need to do him a favor" doesn't make sense when you can buy/rent everything you need for a few dollars. The only reason why you'd form relationships with other people is for fun. And most relationships aren't fun. They are difficult, they require lots of work, compromise, empathy, mutual understanding, openness, and so on. If this doesn't come to you naturally, you're screwed. I don't care about being an evolutionary dead-end because when I look at families around me I see that committing yourself to spreading your genetic material is rarely a good deal. Once we figure out how to make AI models fun, there will be no reason to form relationships at all. I'm not ashamed to say that I'd have zero reservations forming a bond with a robot. In fact, I'd be happy to be an early adopter.

morsch 2y ago

You're overestimating the number of people who will indefinitely prefer relationships with AIs to the exclusion of real people. And you're underestimating the number of people who were voluntarily asexual for one reason or another in the past.

chairmansteve 2y ago
I know a few people who prefer online relationships to real life ones. An AI relationship seems like a small step. Especially if they don't realise they are interacting with an AI.
atoav 2y ago
The problem with AI is the way it is being presented in many cases. E.g. having a prominent pink button on top of your PDF like in Adobe Acrobat for Android with zero explaination what the heck it is supposed to be doing, how it deals with my data and no way to remove it other than going into fullscreen is feeling like they actively try to shove it into my face. Thanks Adobe that you put an AI button I can't read onto my boarding pass which I am trying to read with my own eyes and scan into a barcode scanner. What is next? Putting AI into orange juice?
- skydhash 2y ago
  It’s PDF Expert on iOS for me. They have a light blue button that keep disturbing me. And it’s not even working as I don’t have premium. And I don’t intend to get it because the price is outrageous ($50/year).

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

>What we face now is a noteworthy population of humans that opt out of the complexity of human relationships and reproduction because an over-powered chatbot weaponized their empathy against them and made them a genetic dead- The future, if it belongs to people at all, belongs to people who make it a priority to connect with others. Same as it ever was. Isolation has always meant the end of the road for your bloodline for us humans, whatever one chooses to make of that - even if the isolation is comfortable, even if the isolation is more comfortable than the outside. That's what life in a social species is all about. (Artificial wombs might upset that equilibrium permanently, of course, but then I guess we just end up with a planet full of asocial nerds who don't even chat to each other on Hacker News. That's far enough outside what I can imagine that I'm lumping it under the "moral intuition inverse square law": Much like gravity, your sense of what is right and wrong becomes dramatically worse as you increase the distance between yourself and the abstract situation you're imagining.)

beefnugs 2y ago

Some of his exact examples happened for me long ago: i dont answer phone calls anymore, and feel dumb paying for a phone number. I also have some kind of mental disorder where i see a trend and extrapolate it out in my mind very quickly: the first time i got no replies except a single prostitute on a dating website I realized I can never touch this terrible system again. The TV show "Sunny" (mild spoiler) has an interesting idea that they made this friend-bot to try and coax people out of isolation... but i only see that as a real hard kick in the face if this thing is faking love and devotion and you are thrust right back into a world of transactionalism and the truth that some people will never be lovable

anal_reactor 2y ago

It's not that people are getting lured into spending time with ChatGPT instead of fellow human, but rather that the value of human interaction itself completely collapsed. 200 years ago if you wanted to survive you absolutely had to have friends and exchange favors with them, and in many places you also needed to have a partner. People stayed in bad relationships because that was the better option. Like, ok, your husband beats you, but also does a lot of work growing crops, and getting beaten beats starving to death. At some point we just... stopped needing other people. It's perfectly viable to live on single income, and getting yourself into the complex world of "he did me a favor so I need to do him a favor" doesn't make sense when you can buy/rent everything you need for a few dollars. The only reason why you'd form relationships with other people is for fun. And most relationships aren't fun. They are difficult, they require lots of work, compromise, empathy, mutual understanding, openness, and so on. If this doesn't come to you naturally, you're screwed. I don't care about being an evolutionary dead-end because when I look at families around me I see that committing yourself to spreading your genetic material is rarely a good deal. Once we figure out how to make AI models fun, there will be no reason to form relationships at all. I'm not ashamed to say that I'd have zero reservations forming a bond with a robot. In fact, I'd be happy to be an early adopter.