> I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on).
(original comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355)
Here it's not so much about the face than about the behavior and interactions, but I think the same idea hold true.
It seems to me in the near future we may well be faced with a constant exercise in self-control in the face of the multiplication of such projects.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436
I remember joking that this paper puts us marginally closer to the Men in Black memory wiping device, but in the context of this thread that joke seems a bit dark.
I think it's even worse actually, because this is not something that needs to be done explicitly or on purpose.
Simply training AIs with a target goal of maximizing engagement could lead to models discovering and exploiting superstimuli or superstimuli-like bias in humans.
Not to take away from their results, such as they are, but it is very expected that visual inputs should have specific and fairly predictable effects on V4, and one could probably have designed such patterns manually from known perceptual psychology in a few iterations, with feedback from the recording electrodes for the details.
It is not at all obvious to me, and indeed not even plausible, that they'd be able to control arbitrarily chosen neurons this way.
You wouldn't have an article title that I could search for, would you?
GANs may find as-yet-uncovered maxima in the same problem space, but superstimulus-level attractiveness has already been achieved.
https://thechive.com/2015/09/13/heres-what-the-average-perso...
Optimising for minor effects like blindness to areas, up to major effects like epileptic seizures.
I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already, but then again Japan doesn't have as large of a gender imbalance as China does due to the One Child Policy.
On an unrelated note, this also reminds me of the Futurama episode where people start downloading celebrity personalities into robots, and a sex education video scared teens into saying that "robo-sexual" relationships were shunned and did not advance the human race.
Gatebox doesn't count?
This will inevitably happen
Social media influencers contorting themselves to press every button they can.
I wrote an essay back in high school for some english class with exactly the same sentiment when I had to read brave new world. I'd fking love to be either engineered (brave new world) or have an ML algorithm learn how to generate the perfect stimuli for me. If they can do this while avoiding all of the negative effects of normal drugs (and again, brave new world does this with Soma) - I'd be the first to do them.
I think most critiques of hedonism are basically more refined versions of "you should hate nature!". Seeing how John Stewart Mill regarded folks who describe themselves as hedonists made me realize that western Philosophy has a whole project to keep people from enjoying themselves:
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”
Apparently, I am irrational if I choose to give up knowledge or freedom for pleasure. It shocks me about how universal this sentiment is within western philosophy, and how few actually critique it.
Also, it's not like hedonism doesn't have downsides, such as the common effect of needing ever more extreme stimulation to achieve the pleasure you could once achieve with less extreme stimulation, leading to a spiral of debauchery which often has deleterious consequences to the hedonist, even if you overlook the pain and suffering they often have to cause others to please themselves.
There's a reason that so many philosophers throughout history and from different cultures have advocated moderation, but the hedonist has trouble moderating themselves because then they have to do things that aren't pleasurable.
There are also advantages to asceticism, from the (debatable but potentially valid) spiritual benefits, to achieving self-mastery and control, not getting too attached to pleasure or comfort when it could be easily taken away from you, etc...
In any case, the case for hedonism is far from a slam dunk, and you'd really have to do a lot more work to make that case convincingly. Just saying that "Western Philosophy" is against it is not very convincing.
See Plato’s Philebus, and Aristotle NE VII, and many other treatments on this distinction.
I’m not saying your point is not valid, but I would not say that Western philosophy rejected pleasures as a whole, but that it was quite critical of optimizing one’s life for the pleasures of the senses.
It seems to me that we would be in an eternal loop of these algos trying to optimize for our pleasure, succeeding for a time until that's just not enough, and then it's on to the next thing they create until we become abominations.
You can see this type of behavior already in the excesses the ultra wealthy exhibit.
I think it's good for humanity that we don't just live lives of pleasure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chef-d%27%C5%93uvre_inconnu
> In 1927, Ambroise Vollard asked Picasso to illustrate Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Picasso was fascinated by the text and identified with Frenhofer so much that he moved to the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris where Balzac located Porbus' studio. There he painted his own masterpiece, Guernica. Picasso lived here during World War II.
https://static3.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/style...
And also say things that are not nonsense.
(if brief ...)
What I understand is that love is an emotional experience that feels great, and some people will never experience it naturally, just like some people have physical or mental conditions and can't experience health naturally (speaking from experience). I would rather have surgery and be able to experience a normal life if I couldn't do so naturally, and if I was unable to find love naturally, I would also rather have an AI that can effect the same experience in me.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.