Your marriage is a decision between you and your spouse and is a mutual decision.

A job is a decision that your boss(es) made and can be taken without your consent. You don't have the ownership of your job that you do of your marriage.

Both marriage and job contracts are mutually binding legal agreements. You have the agency within those dynamics that the law gives you, which varies by region/jurisdiction respectively.

Your partner in some (most?) cases can absolutely make an executive decision that ends your marriage, with you having no options but to accept the outcome.

Your argument falls a little flat.

I'm not sure where you live, but employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech. Unions, execs, and rock stars - that's about it. The rest of us are at-will and disposable. Worker protections in the US are limited to "the machine can't eat more than two of your fingers per day" and "you can't work people more than 168 hours in a week".

When you sign your offer letter, you're entering into an employment contract. What you're describing is regulatory limitations on what that contract can say, and how different contracts can have different terms.

Now from what you've said I think they might be right. You don't get a full contract that you sign that details your job, leave entitlement etc in the US?

Unless it's a contracting or union position, what you get is something resembling a contract, but your agreement to it comes with the mutual understanding between you and your employer that no effective enforcement body exists to uphold your interests.

If it says "you work 40 hours per week and have 4 weeks of paid vacation" and your employer, EVEN IN WRITING, compels you to work 60 hour weeks and not take any vacation at a later date, then your only real option is to find work elsewhere. The Department of Labor won't have your back and you likely won't have enough money to afford a lawyer to fight on your behalf longer than the corporate lawyers your company has on staff.

Many programmers don't get treated this way because of the market, but abusive treatment of employees runs rampant in blue collar professions.

Need proof? Look at how few UNPAID weeks of maternity leave new mothers are entitled to under the law. This should tell you everything you need to know.

I have personally seen women return to work LESS THAN A WEEK after delivering a baby because they couldn't afford to not do so.

Oh I'm aware workers in the US are treated extremely badly. In the UK statutory maternity pay is 90% of full salary for the first 6 weeks and around $250 a week for the next 33 weeks.

But I was just trying to clarify if work contracts were a normal thing there. The original post said they weren't where you seem to be saying they are, but effectively unenforceable.

We get that - it’s generally right there on the offer letter, often supplemented by a handbook that it refers to.

I don't get it. Do you sign an offer letter or a contract?

So the normal routine here is you get an offer, if you accept you get sent a contract which is signed by the employer, if it's all ok you also sign and then you get your start date. Is it different in the US or the same?

An offer becomes a contract once accepted - this is afaik consistent across the entire (western?) world.

It’s perhaps customary in some places to have additional paperwork in the negotiation phase?

Exactly how it works in the US, yes.

Most states in the US have at will employment. That means from the moment you sign the contract, they can fire you at will. So it's like a contract that ends straight away after it starts.

> I'm not sure where you live, but employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech.

Single integrated written employment contracts are rare in the US for any but the most elite workers (usually executives); US workers more often have a mix of more limited domain written agreements and possibly an implied employment contract.

> employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech

Is that true? I've never had a job where I didn't sign a contract (in the UK and for multinationals including American companies). I wouldn't start without a contract.

And I'm not in any rockstar position. It's bog standard for employees.

> It's bog standard for employees...in the UK and for multinationals including American companies

^^^ that's the thing. Contracts are by country, not by company ownership.

I worked for an F100 multinational US-based company for many years. My coworkers in the EU (including the UK at the time) got contracts. A buddy who was a bona fide rock star in the US got one. I know VPs got them.

I got nothing, as did the vast, vast majority of my US-based friends. And while I'm not a rock star, I'm pretty well known within my niche and am not a bottom-feeder. It really is as bleak as you might fear.

Do these contracts provide guarantees to you, or just to the employer? In the US it is entirely one sided and provides no protection from arbitrarily being fired without cause.

There are statutory rights that you have anyway, such as for a full time position you are entitled to 28 days leave, so the contract normally covers extra stuff (so I have 33 days under my current one).

Plus it covers things like disciplinary procedures, working hours etc. It's really weird to me that you don't have that. Are you sure it's normal?

To address your specific point, you can mostly be fired without reason if you're a new employee. You get more rights after 2 years so companies generally have a procedure to go through after that. You can always appeal to an employment tribunal but they won't take much notice if you've been there a couple of months and got fired for not doing your job.

I think I have discovered gold in the comments

Someone makes a comment about how its okay for things to be replaced in specialization in business

Then someone equates it to intimacy

Then someone says its only possible in HN

Then we get into some nifty discussion of can we argue about the similarity between marriage and job contracts and first they disagree

Now we come to your comment which I can kinda agree about and here is my take

Marriage and business both require some definition of laws and a trust in state which comes out of how state has a monopoly (well legal monopoly) over violence and how it can punish people who don't follow laws over it and how the past record of it handling cases have been

As an example, I doubt how marriages can be a good mutually binding legal agreement in something like saudi arabia which is mysognistic. Same can be said for exploitations in businesses for countries, same countries like saudia arabia and qatar have some people from south asia like india etc. in a sort of legal slavery where they are forced to reside in their own designated quarters of the country and they are insanely restricted. Look it up.

Also off topic but I asked LLM's to find countries where divorce for women are illegal and I confirmed it, as an example, divorce in philipines for non muslims are banned (muslim woman's divorces are handled via sharia law) I have since fact checked it as well via searching but it's just that divorce itself isn't an option in philipines but rather limiting marital dissolution to annulment or legal separation

"In the Philippines, the general legal framework under the Family Code prohibits absolute divorce for the majority of the population, limiting marital dissolution to annulment or legal separation " [1]

[1]: source: https://www.respicio.ph/commentaries/divorce-under-muslim-pe...

>...job contracts are mutually binding legal agreements.

That is not true far more often than it is true.

Impressive word games at play here, I almost didn't notice that you fail to explain what the actual difference is here.

A job is also a mutual decision between the employee and the employer.

A marriage can also be taken without your consent through divorce (unless you are orthodox jewish or something I think?).

You don’t own your marriage either? What exactly is the distinction you’re trying to make here, that you can hang onto your marriage even if your spouse doesn’t want it?

> can be taken without your consent.

Note that isn’t universally true, for either case. Without mutual agreement, in the EU you can’t fire someone just because, and in Japan you can’t divorce unless you have proof of a physical affair or something equally damming.

Bosses should be able to make decisions about jobs or AI. That ok.

But as a society we have to ask ourselves if replacing all jobs with AI will make for a better society. Life is not all about making as much money as possible. For a working society citizen need meaning in their lives, and safety, and food, and health. If most people get too little of this, it may disrupt society, and cause wars and riots.

This is where government needs to step in, uncontrolled enterprise greed will destroy countries. But companies don´t care, they'll just move to another country. And the ultra-rich don´t care, they'll just put larger walls around their houses or move country.

If robots are a better partner, then maybe your are not that great a partner...

Not necessarily, it’s either that, or the robots are so good it’s unattainable by the imperfect human flesh.

If robots are better partner, then maybe you no longer understand what it means to be human.

Another interesting point: If someone think that robots can be a better partner, then you also no longer understand what it means to be human.

Maybe it depends on what you want in a relationships. AI is sycophantic and that could help people who might have trust issues with humans in general or the other sex (which is happening way more than you might think in younger generations, whether that's involuntary celebates or whatever)

I don't blame people for having trust issues but the fact that they can live longer in some idea of a false hope that robots are partners would just make them stuck even longer and wouldn't help them.

Should there be regulations on this thing depends if this becomes a bigger issue but most people including myself feel like govt. shouldn't intervene in many things but still. I don't think its happening any time soon since AI big tech money and stock markets are so bedded together its wild.

I really don't buy the idea of AI helping with 'X' issue, by becoming a surrogate, because at it's root this is still avoidance.

It's not solving the problem, it's diverging away from it.

That is what I wrote if I wasn't clear. Thanks for putting it in clear words I suppose

I 100% agree. I mean that was what I was trying to convey I guess if I didn't get side tracked thinking about govt regulation but yeah I agree completely.

It's sort of self sabotage but hey one thing I have come to know about humans is that judging them for things is gonna push them even further into us vs them, we need to know the reasons behind why people feel so easy to conform to llm's. I guess sycophancy is the idea. People want to know that they are right and the world is wrong and most people sometimes don't give a fuck about other problems and if they do, then they try to help and that can involve pointing to reality. AI just delays it by saying something sycophantic which drives a person even further into the hole.

I guess we need to understand them. Its become a reality dude, there are people already marrying chatbots or what not, I know you must have heard of these stories...

We are not talking about something in the distinct future, its happening as we speak

I think the answer to why is desperation. There are so many things broken in the society in dating that young people feel like being alone is better and chatbots to satisfy whatever they are feeling.

I feel like some people think they deserve love and there's nothing wrong with that but then its also at the same time that you can't expect any person to just love you at the same time, they are right in thinking about themselves too. So those people who feel like they deserve love flock to chatbot which showers them sycophancy and fake love but people are down bad for fake love as well, they will chase anything that resembles love, even if its a chatbot.

Its a societal problem I suppose, maybe internet fueled it accidentally because we fall in love with people over just texts so we have equated a person to texts and thus love, and now we have got clankers writing texts and fellow humans intrepreting it as love.

Honestly, I don't blame them but I sympathesize with them. They just need someone to tell their day to. Underputting them isn't the answer but talking with them and asking them to take professional therapy as well in the process could be great but so many people can't afford therapy that they go to LLM's so that's definitely something. We might need to invest some funding to make therapy more accessible for everybody I guess.

> [..] we need to know the reasons behind why people feel so easy to conform to llm's.

I think it's ultimately down to risk, and wanting to feel secure. There's little risk in confiding to something you turn off, reset and compartmentalise.

Diverging away from is one way to solve it since it no longer affects you, no ? You can't remove the context. There are no problems in vacuum.

True, but if you diverge away too much, you end up living in a vacuum.

In a hypothetical future, the robot could link up to your wife's brain interface/"neuralink" for diagnostic level information, and directly tune performance instantly based on what's working.

You can compete, but not for long IMO. (No pun)

This is a perfect microcosm of this discussion. You're going to be replaced by robots because they will be better than you at everything but also if they're better than you at anything then that's your personal moral failing and sucks to be you.

HN Comment in 2125: Why would I have casual sex with a real guy, I can have a sexual partner who I can tailor perfectly to my in the moment desires, can role play anything including the guy in the romance novel I'm reading, doesn't get tired, is tall and effortlessly strong, has robotic dexterity, available 24/7, exists entirely for my pleasure letting me be as selfish as I want, and has port and starboard attachments.

What makes you think that sex is some sacred act that won't follow the same trends as jobs? You don't have to replace every aspect of a thing to have an alternative people prefer over the status quo.

"But that ignores why you have sex with your wife: for bonding, physical affection, and pregnancy"

Sure, but we're also putting aside how people do worse without a sense of purpose or contribution, and semi-forced interaction is generally good for people as practice getting along with others - doubly so as we withdraw into the internet and our smartphones

Equating “business” to “profound human intimacy” might be one of the most HackerNews comments of all time

Jobs aren't just business. Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

> Jobs aren't just business. Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

No one is feeling useful or valued working a double shift at Walmart in order to put food on the table.

Feeling useful and valued can come from other means such as caring for the elderly and doing volunteer work.

Majority of people work to simply survive because without it, they would end up homeless and hungry.

For most people, most of the time, jobs are a lot closer to "just business" than "marital intimacy".

You’re right and validating the point.

A specific part of GP’s comment keeps getting overlooked:

  So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income.

Humans being forced to trade time for survival, money, and the enrichment of the elite, is a bug. We are socially conditioned to believe it’s a feature and the purpose.

Nobody is saying robots should replace human connection and expression

Edit: tone

> > Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

Sure, humans relying on jobs for income is a problem with transitions. But people finding purpose in jobs is a problem, too.

Right now how we get there is being "forced to' -- and indeed that's a bug. But if we transition to a future where it's pretty hard to find useful work, that's a problem, even if the basic needs for survival are still being met.

I haven't had to work for 25 years. But I've spent the vast majority of that time employed. Times when I've not had purposeful employment as an anchor in my life have been rough for me. (First 2-3 months feels great... then it stops feeling so great).

Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.

I've done plenty of those self-actualizing things. I've learned to fly airplanes. I've done hobby projects. I've gotten into astronomy. I've learned to make things in many kinds of ways (carpentry, sheetmetal, machining, welding, 3d printing, lithography) and have overkilled so many projects. I've gone to my kids' games. I've 100%-ed a lot of RPGs. I've travelled. I've read too many books.

But I want to be -useful-, too. I enjoy helping and working with kids in my current job more than I enjoy filling my time in empty ways (well, up to a point: summer sure feels nice, too :).

Money gave me the freedom to define the relationship with work in the way that works best for me; and it turned out that's more valuable to me than the ability to escape work entirely.

Thanks for sharing. Absolutely right; people need to feel useful and valued—not to mention, jobs can help us get out of the house and connect with people.

Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI? Do you have an example of what you mean?

> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?

No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.

I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.

LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.

I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.

I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.

It is not a bug, it is a law of nature. The world has limited resources, time and labor being one of them.

The technology proposes a source of labor for the elites so abundant that they will not need to trade their wealth with the eaters.

However much resources you consume, it will be too much to buy for your labor. You will be priced out of existence.

You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.

The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.

There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.

Elites unilaterally claiming and reaping the benefits of automation (i.e. consolidation of wealth) is not a law of nature.

It is. It's not something you can wave away with some new political system.

Automation results in centralization of power. It transforms labor-intensive work to capital-intensive work and reduces the leverage of the working class.

You could have a system that distributes wealth from automation to the newly-unemployed working class, but fundamentally the capital-owners are less dependent on the working class, so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution (you cannot strike if you don't have a job). You are proposing a fundamentally unstable political system.

It's like liebig's law of the minimum or any other natural law. You can try to make localized exceptions in politics, but you are futilely working against the underlying dynamics of the system which are inevitably realized in the long term.

I think you misread the situation. The move is towards open models, small efficient models, what makes you believe there will be a moat around AI for automation?

I think the point here is that a lot of automation still requires "real-world" components (read: hardware). E.g. robots, factories with said robots and so on. So you being able to run LLMs on your PC is still not going to put big factories owned by big companies out of business.

> so the working class will have no leverage to sustain the wealth distribution

As has been seen time and time again throughout history the commoners will only put up with so much and when all else fails and they start suffering a bit too much leverage comes from the end of a barrel.

Yet the elite won't share that benefit until someone makes them. History makes me think that won't happen until hunger motivates the masses from their apathy.

Correct. If we don’t do anything, it effectively is about as immutable as a law of nature. But if enough people respond, the system will change in some way.

Note that the stench of inevitability likes to sneak into these discussions of systemic problems. Nothing is set in stone. Anyone telling you otherwise has given up themselves. The comment section attracts all kinds of life outlooks, after all. The utility of belief in some sort of agency (however small) shouldn’t be surrendered to someone else’s nihilistic disengagement.

it's only for "the enrichment of the elite" if one looks at life with a perspective of entitlement, resentment and disregard for the nature of...nature (existence,randomness, realty itself).

just because humans can't "outdo" technology doesn't mean we should "blame" "the elite". that's literally how the great catastrophes of socialism, communism, Marxism, etc started

Humans aren't "forced" to do anything, (depending on how you look at it). You could just lay down, "live" in your own excrement until you starve to death. That seems reasonable! Liberate the proletariat! Why doesn't everyone else work for me?!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ressentiment

I think you overstate the profundity. And like business it is a market and much of the same rules apply.

If you disagree, feel free to argue your point instead of just scoffing at the idea.

My job is more important than intimacy. Intimacy won't keep me warm, or fed.

If intimacy doesn’t keep you warm you might be doing something wrong.

It's far less effective than the hydrocarbons that heat my house. My point being that I think people on HN like to underestimate how important work is when talking about replacing humans.

It's not "just business", it's my ability to survive.

It's the ice cubes.

People cannot find new jobs so quickly. They will starve and probably die. This is more like the right of having life.

Sex, garbage collection, it’s all the same on HN.

“Robots are coming”

I see what you did there

Honestly, from what I understand, most men's relationship to 'lovemaking' isn't exactly winning awards. If the tables were turned, I'm sure some SV types would just call it 'rational', 'logical', and magically develop nuanced understanding of consent ("your wife") overnight.

Assuming that the Everdrive is M and the SNES cartridge port is F, I can understand why the Everclan men are particularly attuned to this topic. Many better-quality, more feature-rich, and cheaper SNES multicarts have hit the market; the Everdrive is looking pretty dated.

What a non-sequitar. Your wife is an adult human being. Sex is a consensual act. Not really comparable to trading time and labor for currency.

Both job and sex are rather common and desired, so some comparison can be made.

I wonder if the AI can teach you how to use commas correctly.

I mean, she already has 3 tiny pink little robots designed specifically for the purpose.

This isn't exactly news

"this guy fucks" - Russ Hannamen, HBO's Silicon Valley

surprised to see this so far down. if a robot can fuck better, then we would probably both have fun fucking robots together

Indeed! And "it might lead to better dildos" is genuinely the weirdest argument against AI I've heard so far.

This is veering to another discussion. If you are fucking robots then your sexual perversion has gone pretty far. If societally it’s not recognized as such, and everyone is fucking robots, then …

Theon Greyjoy, you have truly lost your way

look it's a straw man!

But it's not, really.

Machines doing stuff instead of humans is great as long as it serves some kind of human purpose. If it lets humans do more human things as a result and have purpose, great. If it supplants things humans value, in the name of some kind of efficiency that isn't serving very many of us at all, that's not so great.

It does serve a human purpose, for the ownership class, not for the laborers

First I've heard that wives aren't human.

sure, but no one is making love to their wife so they can feed and house their family. work is not something most people do for pleasure, it is forced on them. this is a clear misrepresentation to frame the argument as stupid, the literal definition of a straw man argument.

If your wife would rather leave you for a robot (or otherwise) then, err, yeah? That's not new with AI or robots or anything?

You're correct that it is not new. Most people outside of hacker news are opposed to being cuckolded in their romantic relationships and automated out of their jobs.

Extremely weird comment. But no, you don't own your job or your wife. If robots are better than you, she should leave you and we should all be happy for her.

The problem is a culture that doesn't think the profit from productivity gains should be distributed to labor (or consumers), and doesn't think that wives deserve to be happy.

The missing piece is the material science advances to get the 100% fidelity mouth/etc feel. Once we have that breakthrough, all men will just buy those devices (and video games) and chill. No need for any of these questionable biological services (marriage, etc) with no guarantee and a whole lot of heartache.

Any company that solves this problem will be a $10T company.

That will also likely be the very end of our society as we know it. If you thought TFR was in the shitter today, having robot prostitutes (because let's be real, that's what you're suggesting) will not only probably grant a select few some unreal control over many, but will be the end of any society dumb enough to permit it entirely.

Well that analogy of sex with one’s spouse being equivalent to the economic exchange of work for pay is going to keep me cringing for years. Ugh.

The whole point went above your head

Runaway capitalism! Time for me to log off for another ~2 years

It's actually an extremely good analogy (but in the opposite way of what you imply), as you don't own your job or your wife. Banning AI for job security is like banning dildos because they make men feel insecure.

I think you don’t get the point. It‘s about that if we are only trying to optimize for outcome, we will loose what makes it more than just biological. I don’t see how it makes sense that a women using a dildo is in any way similar to a human to human interaction, it’s more than just getting off right?

Is your suggestion to ban future sex robots in order to make sure that human-to-human connection is more robust? (I don't know the right answer, just that intuitively it seems not right to do it, even if the outcome of very good sex robots means less couples / less children / etc.).

It's not limited to men. A lot of feminists are also vocally against the idea of female sex bots because it makes them feel insecure.

I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze. I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective. A justified anger there, I think, at a culture that perpetuates and celebrates this form of relating. Insecurity, I suspect, befalls more prominently the indoctrinated women that are catering to male expectations of beauty and ease. The successful feminists don't care if you're only screwing sexbots. If you are, it'll be great to have you off the market anyway. A filter for the men who won’t meaningfully connect.

> I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective.

Personal belief: if a woman finds that she isn't pleased with the type of man courting her, then maybe she should take the initiative and put in the effort to approach and court the men that she does want. Just as you likely wouldn't get the best job if you just wait for recruiters to reach out to you.

The irony is that many of the people criticizing female sex bots would welcome male sex bots as "liberating", which shows you they don't have any consistent ideology, outside of a selfish ideology that what benefits them is good even if it hurts others, and what hurts them is bad even if it benefits others.

Shouldn't we ban dildos for the same reason then?

Or does it only work one way?

Women are as much biological sex robots as men. We've all see tinder data. Connection is just a proxy for whatever 'protect my offspring' is in base pairs.

> I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze.

Men's insecurity, of course it is. That old chestnut. I'm exhausted by having to capitulate to female centric sensibilities around physical intimacy. This has been going on for decades. Your comment is endemic of the dismissive and othering nature around men's needs and experiences. Men and women are different. Unrealistic expectations from and for both is the foundational problem here.

The only good way forward is understanding, forgiveness, gratitude, and some romanticism and adoration, from and for both sexes. A nice big sun spot that wipes out social media would help too.

"a lot of feminists", source?

Just search for feminist opinions on sex bots, there are tons.

Source: all them feminists.

Any idea why a bipedal fleshlight makes them insecure? My head jumps to "could it because they fear that without sex, they have no value?" but that sounds so ridiculous to me. All human life matters, has value, and should be treated with kindness, respect, and dignity. I've met plenty of women who add value to the world in a bajillion other ways.

Can someone help me understand this one?

> All human life matters, has value, and should be treated with kindness, respect, and dignity

This is reasoning.

However people don't always act based on reasoning.

And even if you act based on reasoning, you can't trust others to act based on the same kind of reasoning.

---

If a more serious response, (some) feminists see sex robots as objectification of women and that's why they're against them.

Always...? Lol.

I didn't mention being a man, and the key words in that sentence are the ones you omitted.

So brave. So courageous. (Slow clap). Not at all similar to something Michael Scott would say.

There's also a whole bunch of woman embracing it as you can see on /r/myboyfriendisai

There's a difference in scale and potential consequences though

What if there were some robot with superhuman persuasion and means of manipulating human urges such that, if it wanted to, it could entrap anyone it wanted to complete subservience? Should we happily acquiesce to the emerging cult-like influence these new entities have on susceptible humans? What if your parents messaged you one day, homeless on the street because they gave all their money and assets to a scammer robot that via a 300IQ understanding of human psychology manipulated them to sending all their money in a series of wire transfers?

> superhuman persuasion and means of manipulating human urges such that, if it wanted to, it could entrap anyone it wanted to complete subservience

Wow this potential/theoretical danger sounds a lot like the already existent attention economy; we're already manipulated at scale by "superhuman" algorithms designed to hijack our "human urges," create "cult-like" echo chambers, and sell us things 24/7. That future is already here

Which is true. People are scammed by very low-quality schemes (like that French woman who sent 1 million to the scammers who claimed to be Brad Pitt who for some reason needed money for medical procedures).

Humans have generally a natural wariness/mental immune system response to these things however, and for 99% of people the attention economy is far from being able to completely upend their life or send all their money in an agreement made in bad faith by the other party. I don't see why, if some AI were to possess persuasion powers to a superhuman degree, would be able to cause 100x the damage when directed at the right marks.

This, only unironically

Besides, in this fantasy, what’s to stop you from having the perfect robot lover as well - why are you so attached to this human wife of yours in the first place?

Hah. You say this in such a way that you leave out the possibility that robots are actually just coming for you. Robots can do you, better and/or faster than your partner. Who cares if they're coming for your partner if you can equally have a robot make you feel and experience things you could only imagine.

Least gooner take on here

Given the overlap between reddit and HN ("Orange Reddit"), using cuckolding as a negative point of comparison probably wasn't the best choice.

Honestly reading the comments in this thread has convinced me that you're right that the blight between the two is nearly one in the same.

> If robots can do your wife better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the job.

Skill issue.

I'm unsure if the comparison to more standard automation is totally apt (but agree if you rob people of purpose which many get from their jobs, lots and lots of bad shit happens), but what you're poking at is frankly nightmare fuel. Look how much chatbots that are in sycophantic "romantic relationships" absolutely break people (there was some subreddit linked once recently full of these types), and consider what happens when they're actually manifested. I'm sure some lolbert types will be like "but muh freedoms", but that sort of shit is so dangerous and so destructive on the same way brown glass bottles are to Australian jewel beetles, that we damn well better crush any of that and anyone that proposes producing robots like that. They're basically weapons and should be treated as such.

You know that episode where Fry dates the robot, and they show him a really old PSA? Man, I never thought that it was within my lifetime.

I will pay big money to see you do standup comedy. You made my day. LOL.

Even though I disagree with this extension, I do think it’s an interesting and completely valid metaphor for your point.

How would we handle regulating sex bots? Complete ban on manufacturing and import of full size humanoid bots? They are large enough that it could be partially effective I guess. I’m imagining two dudes in a shady meetup for a black market sale of sex bot which is kinda funny but also scary because the future is coming fast.

Or in this case, a husband having police investigate and apprehend the wife in the act? Crazy times.

Not sure how much I agree with your counterargument, but I found it very funny :D

Sorry to inform you this but there are plenty of people in the world who could "do your wife better". She "chooses" at all times to be with you instead of those other people as those other people are just a choice away. She did not need some regulation to prevent her from doing so.

Sex is different from work. And you don’t have unilateral control over who anyone else has sex with. But, you do have say over how the government deals with the AI revolution.

Dude, I’m glad you like your job, but most people fucking hate their job.

When you objectify the idea of wife as an NPC and you’re the center of your universe, this makes sense. Pretty sure my wife would take a baseball bat to the motherfucker’s robot brain. But it’s her call. Others may prefer a non human companion. And let’s all work to keep the government out of our bedrooms, shall we? We all know how well that’s been going. When you equate sex with garbage collection, you have bigger problems than our AI future.