The future of sex with Rob Brooks

In this episode, Amanda Niehaus chats with University of New South Wales evolutionary biologist and author Rob Brooks about the future of sex, his new book Artificial Intimacy, and the science and politics of human relationships.

Rob Brooks is an evolutionary biologist who studies the conflicting interests that make sex sizzle and render reproduction complicated. As Scientia Professor of Evolution at UNSW in Sydney, Australia, he studies the behaviour and evolution of humans and non-human animals. His first book, Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll won the Queensland Literary Award for Science Writing and the Eureka Prize for Science Communication. His latest, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual friends, digital lovers and algorithmic matchmakers, was published in May 2021.

Purchase Artificial Intimacy: Virtual friends, digital lovers and algorithmic matchmakers: https://bit.ly/3EA3dhk

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Transcript

Transcript

Amanda  0:04  

Today, I'm very excited to welcome a friend and someone that I have admired for a very long time. Professor Rob Brooks, who is at University of New South Wales in Sydney. Hi, Rob. 

Rob 0:12

Hey, Amanda. 

Amanda 0:15

I'd like to start today by asking you a little bit about what you do as a scientist, and how it might relate, in whatever way, to our current edition’s theme of capitalism? 

Rob 0:38

Ah, good question. So I study behavioral biology. And for much of my career, the early part of my career, I studied that on very small animals where you can have, you know, thousands of animals and do all sorts of interesting experiments. Often insects. You can do all sorts of interventions and see results really quickly, particularly about the conflict around sex. 

So you know, we think of sex as this beautiful cooperative thing. And we hope that the sex that we have is going to be like that. But it isn't always—it's often quite exploitative. It's often driven by conflicts between the mates, or even between potential mates, as well as between rivals. And so I've spent most of my career studying those conflicts. But I've always been interested in and sort of animated by questions about what it means to be alive. And what it means for humans to be alive. Because, you know, evolution by natural selection is such a powerful, important concept, often misunderstood, often misused, but it can teach us so much about, you know, how things are not necessarily how they should be, but how things are for living organisms. 

And so for the last decade or so, I've been spending at least half my time working on human questions about what makes human sex and reproduction and family life. so complicated interpersonally, as well as ideologically.

Amanda 2:06  

So going back to something you just said — What do you think the greatest misunderstandings are about natural selection?

Rob  2:15  

Because natural selection delivers this product in the here and now of apparent order of effects between the organism and its environment, we tend to think that it's a very smart foresight for forward looking process. But [natural selection is] a very dumb wasteful process, really. Who gets to live, who gets to die? Who, reproduces or finds a mate, who doesn't — all of those things influence very directly, which genes get passed on from one generation to the next. And how common those genes become happens very slowly, iteratively, and wastefully, and you end up with change. 

You know, the change is not the point. It's not the point of being alive. But that change shapes the way in which animals and plants and funghi and all sorts of organisms live their lives. And so what we see now is a product of evolution. But there's a big mistake in terms of thinking there's a point to it going somewhere. There isn't, and it takes a little bit of getting used to to assimilate that.

Amanda 3:34  

And does some of that conflict between mating partners play a role in that aspect of evolution? 

Rob 3:40

Absolutely, yeah. So, inherently, mating is a very unselfish thing, in that you're taking only half of your information, your genetic information, and combining it with half from another individual— often an unrelated, kind of almost random individual. Not really random but close to it.

And that's inherently very cooperative. But that's often where the corporation ends. So in a lot of insects, for example, they don't really care whether or not they life beyond those eggs being laid, once the eggs are laid. They're unlikely to mate again with one another. And very often what an individual wants is for that to be the last time that their mate reproduces. So female praying mantises will often eat the male even before they mate because, you know, males are fairly common, but [make] good, juicy prey items. [Prey] are very rare. 

And similarly, males will often — in the process of inseminating the female — inflict physical damage that prevents her from re-mating with another male or using another male’s sperm [to fertilise her eggs]. They'll also include chemicals that stimulate her to lay more eggs than she otherwise would. So, you know, males and females have some kind of idea of how many offspring they want to have, when they want to have them, etc, but then manipulate one another into meeting their own agenda. And that's even true in humans, with mommy and daddy who love each other very much, [but who] can often have relationship-ending conflict over—do we have another child? When do we have another child? How often do we have sex? Those have really turned out to be very, very big issues. And that's because people have different optima. And there are trends in where those optima live between male and female sexes. 

One of the dominant features that shapes those trends is that each individual offspring tends to get more investment from the mum than the dad, in most species, most of the time. Because eggs are big and costly to produce and sperm are small and very [abundant]—you can produce millions and millions of them. And that that generalises [males and females] often into behaviour in which males are seekers, and somewhat more expendable, as parents. Whereas females’ contributions [are] compulsory. When we think of mammals, of course, female mammals have this enormous costly business of carrying a baby to term, gestating it, growing the placenta, , negotiating with the fetus for - in the case of humans - nine months, in the case of elephants - 22 months. Whereas males don't have that kind of contribution. 

And so we see that changes the way in which males invest in reproduction, which is often very, very much about competing with other males in order to have access to females. Because the contribution that a female makes is so valuable, that it becomes like a priceless commodity. And males tend to behave that way. And you can see where this is going, of course, because with humans, if you start thinking that way, you start to, you know, fall into some fairly stereotypical ways of thinking about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be a mother and a father. And, of course, that story is not the only story, but it gives some shape to the basic human story of reproduction and why sex is so complicated.

Amanda  7:39  

Oh, thank you. And actually, I want to come back in a little bit to your latest book. In fact, let's just talk about it now. Rob, has a new book out called Artificial Intimacy. Hold it up for us there. Now, what are some of the ways that the internet and media and robots and all of those those technologies influence this relationship or the way that we look at the resources of reproduction? 

Rob 8:00

Okay, big question. So, I've distinguished between three different types of artificial intimacy. So if you think of an artificial intimacy as a technology, like an artificial intelligence, there three different types. One is the algorithmic matchmakers. That's very straightforward. That's, you know, Tinder and Grindr and Christian Connection and Ok, Cupid, which help us find people who might want romance or might want sex, or any other kind of service. Platforms. Also, algorithmic matchmakers like Netflix or YouTube deliver us the media that we want, based on algorithms that are increasingly propelled by artificial intelligence. 

The next kind are digital lovers, which are machines that can produce some kind of sexual stimulation one way or another. So it might be sex robots. That's the sort of obvious glitzy example that's going around right now. But it could just be smart sex toys. There are now sex toys that are trained on, you know, data from 30,000 orgasms to deliver the best kinds of stimulation, and the next generation will probably be able to get even smarter. During the time an individual owns it, they'll start to tap into the individual’s idiosyncrasies.

The third type—and I think these are going to be the most pervasive and possibly the most insidious—are the virtual friends. Now, virtual friends tap into the traits that made us human as we recognise what it is to be human, during the last 100,000 years or so—as humans became co operative, able to live in large cooperative societies and work together, and also be hyper investing, loving parents. Those traits are slowly being exploited, or at least hacked into, by artificial intelligence. So a really simple example is the way that we make friends. You and I have drinks, catch up when we are in each other's hometowns, or maybe we text each other, or speak on social media. And we each have hundreds of people in our lives that we do that with, or something like that with, and that's grooming—that's the equivalent of monkeys and apes picking away at ectoparasites on one another's skin. We tend not to do that, because that's, you know, seen as bad form in human relations. But we are able to talk to each other. And we're able to have about four times as many friends as a similar sized ape with a similar sized brain would be able to have, because we can talk and so we can simultaneously groom lots of people. So that grooming sets up networks of very close friends all the way to more distant friends to [people] that we used to know and whose name we might remember on a good day if we haven't been drinking.

And the contact that we have with one another brings us closer and closer. So something like Facebook facilitates that grooming—it allows us to gossip with each other by posting our news, liking it, sharing it, arguing with one another, and by commenting, and affirming, and all of those types of things. So it's now created this new sort of structure for grooming.

And that makes [Facebook] somewhere between an algorithmic matchmaker and a virtual friend—and it becomes a virtual friend when Facebook itself starts making decisions about what we want to see and who we want to see. Perhaps in the not too distant future it’ll start generating text to groom us to basically make us think of Facebook as a friend itself. That's probably a good long introduction. 

Amanda 12:30

So how did you tackle this when you were writing this book? Did you attempt to tackle this from a very objective scientific viewpoint? Or did you find your own personal feelings [coming in] — because this is a very, very important modern topic that affects all of our lives. And when we have kids who are teenagers, it definitely affects our lives. So how did you separate those two sides of your mind, in working on this? 

Rob 12:55

I think it's very difficult to do. And, you know, I wouldn't trust anybody who said that they've just gone after the data, etc. Because we do like that the algorithms know what news we want to see, we do tend to gravitate to the kinds of things that—if not confirm our biases, at least compel us. We’ll often be changed by some information that might be absolutely compelling when we first encounter it. 

I think I started out with a somewhat dark view of human relationships because of my sexual conflict work. But with a reasonably peppy view of technology. And you know, for a long time, I was writing a book that wasn't anything at all about technology, but then I realised the big deal here is how this tech is going to shape us. So I was reasonably optimistic about the tech. But the technologies—in just one of the things they do—can have a huge effect on us, and that is keep[ing] us on their platforms. Now, we most [of us] know the story of going on YouTube, and then finding that it's bedtime already, and we've spent six hours scrolling through utter rubbish. [It’s] very, very well crafted content. And that's not a mistake. There are very, very powerful machine learning algorithms that can figure out not just which videos are similar to the ones that I've watched and liked, but which videos people like me would like that we've never encountered before. I've recently had some Russian slap fighting delivered to me by YouTube, which was a surprise. I'm not too sure what YouTube thinks of me. But it was weird. You can't really look away from it, but you also can't really look at it because, you know, concussion and head injury, etc. But it's weird. So every one of those platforms, particularly social media platforms, is optimised to keep us on the platform to keep us using it, too. Messaging our friends, so that we are able to see more advertisements, which is where they get their revenue from. And in doing so, it takes up some time. 

All apes or monkeys spend about 20% of their time grooming. If they spend any longer than that they'll starve. Humans don't need to spend as much time looking for food, because we’re very efficient at getting food. But we have to work in order to get the money that's going to allow us to get the food. So we really can only afford to spend about 20% of our time gossiping in our waking hours.

Social media users spend 16% of their waking hours on social media. So that means you've only got 4% of your waking hours left for the offline relationships that are so important. What does that mean? Well, we still spend a bit more than the 4% on the offline relationships, which cuts into sleep and family time. And it cuts into the kinds of relationships that we want to have with our kids. And I saw this during the pandemic, probably because I was closer to them. In fact, kids did a little bit better under the pandemic, on average, because they didn't have to commute. So the commuting time was sacrificed. But, you know, I've got one child in first year university, another in year 10, and two stepkids who are also in their teens. And it's just unbelievable how much their attention is captured by these things. And I would say that they probably say the same thing of me. And that's, that's a huge issue. 

Amanda 16:45

Yeah, absolutely. I think at some stage everyone in my house has had an intervention with someone else in my house about social media use.

Rob 16:47  

So there's obviously a very—when we're thinking about companies like Facebook, we're thinking with a very sort of sinister sort of capitalist, money-grabbing, don't really care about the individual sort of philosophy and whether or not that's true, that's, I guess, a different topic. But what I'm curious about is the algorithms that bring us content through these media, whether or not they are actually driven by sort of money making desires. Are they that different from what our friends would be doing?

Because our friends would obviously want things for maybe different reasons, less financial, more other [reasons]. But how different are these processes when you look under the surface? Well, I think that friends tend to want to learn a bit about one another's social worlds, and they want to shape our social impressions of them. I think that right there is an interest that the social media companies don't have, or don't have to the same extent. We're very interested in finding out about our friends and their worlds. But we're also interested in cultivating their view of us and establishing, you know, where do we fit in the pecking order?

Where do we fit in terms of—is this person going to be a reliable ally, when, you know, everything goes to hell, etc? And the companies, I think, are still very clunky at doing anything other than keeping us on their platforms. But the concern is that you and your friend get to know each other through this iterative process of interacting with each other. And whatever it is that shapes your personality, etc, is very inefficient—it's still more efficient than natural selection, which we spoke about earlier. Because it's not you know, who lives who dies or reproduces. But it's learning, it's social learning. And you're really [learning] on the basis of one friendship at a time, or possibly a few. And generalising that to how people work. 

Where the social media companies are doing it differently is that they have so much data. Now, each data point is not necessarily as good, as one of your interactions with your friends. Sure. But we're talking here about millions or billions of interactions. And then machine learning algorithms, [which] aren't designed to understand [or] pull out general insights about what people are and how they work. They're there to go: if you're like this, then you'll love that. If you think this, then you’ll think that. The unbelievable computing power that's available, together with unbelievable amounts of data mean that it's a very, very unfair fight between the consumer and the company.

Amanda 20:00

That's, it's so interesting, isn't it? You mentioned [earlier] that you had started another book, before you brought in the technology more strongly. Do you want to talk through the process by which you went from your university academic research to the first book idea? And then to this one? How did your mind evolve through this? 

Rob 20:40

Sure. Well, 10 years ago, I finished writing my first book [Sex, Genes, & Rock n Roll], which was a series kind of inspired by Freakonomics. I thought I'd try and do for evolution what Freakonomics did for economics. Without the book sales, obviously.

So that was a bunch of things that I think—there wasn't a huge amount of continuity between chapters, maybe two or three chapters in a row would riff on a particular subject, but it was just, you know—this is what the world looks like, to us, from an evolutionary biology point of view. And when I finished that, I thought, I really want to do something that builds a bit more of an argument.

I was doing a lot of research about sexual conflict, and I thought—sexual conflict affects so many things. And it begins with the womb; it begins with this relationship between the the foetus and the placenta. On one hand, the placenta is genetically the foetus. The placenta is this organ that the foetus sends out to basically extract what it can from the mother, and it is a relentless agent on behalf of the foetus. And then the mom—you assume the foetus and mom have the same interests at heart. Not really, because, of course, foetus doesn't want the mom to have lots more children, she wants to get everything that she can out of the mother and doesn't really care all that much as to whether mum has more babies. 

Amanda 22:00

Rob, can I just interrupt to suggest that this would make a really excellent children's book? [Publishers, I’m happy to work with you on this. Just contact my agent haha] 

Rob 22:20

That same conflict goes right into not crying, so I think by the time the kids are able to go through the children's books, it could be you know—why mommy sometimes looks at you like she doesn't like you very much. [We are nailing the book ideas here, people.]

Yes, so the conflicts are there, and then [the] conflicts between mates, all the way through to the fight over abortion rights, for example, and whose interests are being served by various types of legal positions, through to sex and domestic labor, and gender relations and political relations, etc. So that's what I started trying to do. 

But I thought, that's such an important, all encompassing, problematic set of questions that I can't possibly write to a publisher and say, look, I want you to publish this book. Because I don't even know what this thing is yet. Which is a terrible—and don't do this—it’s a terrible way to go about writing a book. Because basically, you're saying, I don't have a very good plan, but I'm going to start anyway.

So I spent a lot of time on that. And I've got a lot of, you know, spin off chapters that I am going to have to think about whether or not they should see the light of day in some other form.

Amanda 23:30

Well, Rob, that tactic that you described is how most novelists would write a book, which is why no one gets an advance on a novel until it's already written. 

Rob 23:10

Yeah, and that's [hard], the way that you novelists go about this sort of thing, because now I'm terrified of the notion of not knowing broadly where you want to go. I don't think I could ever do that.

Amanda  24:04  

Well, let's see. 

Rob 24:07

We'll see. We'll see. So eventually, I think a few agents and publishers, none of whom were the ones who ended up taking the book had sort of steered me gently towards tech. And I realised that they were probably right, so that was good. And it was good fun. Then [it was] about two years of actually writing the book. 

Amanda 24:25

Oh, that's great. So did you did you do any field research for your your book?

Rob  24:35  

No, not really. There are people doing things in the book from time to time, but it's not that I went over there and climbed, you know, 483 sandstone steps and interviewed the oldest person in the world kind of thing that Gladwell does so well and so compellingly and sells books.

And partly because these are very touchy personal subjects. What I wanted to do is go a step back to the big patterns and the data—probably at a cost, [because] there's so much human interest that you could really get stuck into with this kind of topic. [Another book idea!]

Amanda 25:00

Definitely. So has this book influenced your academic research on evolution and mating conflict? 

Rob 25:20

Yeah, very much. So, I've been interested in the incels—the involuntary celibates.  [The term] was coined by a woman, about anybody who's just looking for a mate but can't really find one. But it's very much been co opted by angry entitled young men who think that the world owes them some kind of pornographic fantasy of a life. And a very small proportion of those end up savagely misogynist, and a small, small proportion of those end up doing very nasty things to people. But across the vast number of desperate, entitled young men, that actually adds up to quite a lot of violence. So I've been doing my best to try and develop an understanding of who they are, and where they come from. And my colleague at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Candace Blake, she and I have worked on monitoring the the internet—particularly Twitter—for information about incels and where they're coming from, where they're tweeting from. 

So we have quantitative data on that, and then we look at sort of economic, local, and cultural circumstances, just to get a sense of what makes incels. And actually, the thing that makes incels most predictably is economic inequality. So there's capitalism for you. Highly unequal situations tend to be situations that really amp up competition within sexes—we've already done the work with women and shown that women are far more likely to post sexy selfies in [situations of] high income inequality—not gender inequality, interestingly, but [looking at] individual income within a sex or among-family income. And the same thing with incels. They are much more likely to be out and about and doing their thing when there's high inequality. 

Amanda 27:42

Wow, that's interesting. And so do you have any feeling that if circumstances change, the behaviour changes as well? Or are they always—once once you're this way, you're always this way? 

Rob 27:50

Yeah, I think I think that the incels are a typical example of what anybody with teenagers has seen, where they think—I'm not attractive, and I'm not getting all the attention, and I'm not popular right now. And it'll always be that way—my life is ruined. And we have the experience of having been there at some point in the past, to be able to counsel our own children or nieces and nephews, and say, Hey, you know what, it gets better, it always gets better, almost always gets better. Just, you know, stay out of trouble. Try not to damage yourself, etc. 

And it's very much the same thing with the incels. Young men, particularly relatively-poor, young men, are invisible to women. So if you're a young man, and you're looking for a heterosexual relationship, and this is where most of the [incel] action is, you're going to be invisible for a period of time. Whereas your sisters or your classmates are going to be attractive and able to make good matches, you're not going to be that for a while until you've shown some mastery of something [or] until you've become accomplished, and particularly until you've started to develop some kind of financial independence. And that is a very gendered view of who earns money and what you do with it, etc. But it still seems to be very much the case for most people most of the time.

And so with incels, the most important thing is just don't be obnoxious. And don't get yourself a criminal record and don't take stupid risks that end up with you injured or dead, which is what happens to a lot of young men. 

Amanda 29:40

Yeah. It feels like with the kind of research that you and Candace are doing in this area that you might have some some sort of recommendations you can make to groups, that could sort of help some of these guys not mess it up when they're in this situation. 

Rob 29:50

Yeah, you know, I've been pondering how to develop some kind of intervention or help, and of course, it’s quite difficult because, firstly, people look for affirmation. And so you'll find [places], on the manosphere, the dark parts of the the internet that are devoted to savage misogyny, [where] these people will gravitate and sort of reinforce each other's opinions. The best you can hope for is that they'll read a Jordan Peterson book and maybe take the positive messages out of Jordan Peterson, and sort themselves out a little bit. And that's not an endorsement of Peterson's book, but it's certainly a lot better than many of the alternatives. 

Amanda 30:30

Yeah, and something that something that's probably more likely to get picked up across diverse groups of men as well, as opposed to like, a book that's straight out feminist on the cover. 

Rob 30:35

Yeah, it's just, you know, way too many steps for somebody to take. You have to be—if you're a young man in that situation, to get to any kind of feminist analysis of the situation requires a series of improbable events. That's probably vanishingly improbable, or the ultimate open mind? In which case, you're probably not one of the incels that's most at risk of actually becoming obnoxious about it. 

Amanda 31:20

It's difficult not to empathise with people's sadness and desperation, even if other people like them do incredibly nasty things. 

Rob 31:30

Yeah. There are a lot of people who still understand and have a bit of perspective on their condition, and realise they just have to be patient, and they're not going to have that kind of what they think is going to make them happy for now. 

Amanda 31:48

Yeah, no, I totally get that. Like, it's, you can look at a person and say, that person's a jerk. I can see why they're a jerk. But also, that sucks that they're a jerk. It's all very complex. 

I might start wrapping up our chat today. Rob, I don't want to keep us too long. But what I'm curious about is for the people listening, or reading this chat on the website, who are maybe interested in writing some science? Are there some sort of interesting concepts or ideas that you think might just really sort of trigger some cool writing—some cool stories or essays? Like, what are some of the coolest things that you found in the writing of your book? Or in some of the research that you've done?

Rob  32:40  

Wow, that's a good question. I think just about anything has something cool underneath it. You know, I have all sorts of things that every day, something comes across my desk that I think—Wow, I'd love to write a blog post about that. 

So just yesterday, there was one about robots that can touch. And when a robot touches you, it reaches out and touches your skin, you're more likely to trust what that robot has to say, or—in this case—has to sell you. So we know that people do very easily treat machines as if they were human, and tend to believe them and tend to trust them, intend to disclose to them all sorts of things, the kinds of things that help you feel like you're building intimacy. 

Amanda 33:10

Can I ask—did that robot have sort of a [human] skin-like touch? Or? 

Rob 33:40

I don't even think so. Interesting, interesting. It wasn't like, if you close your eyes, you'd be being touched by a person. 

Now, we know that [behaviour] happens. Certainly, if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, salespeople would have touched you during the process of trying to make a sale in many cases. And we also know that that's creepy as all hell in its own way. And it can be the pickup artists who benefit from the incel community because they tried to sell them solutions to their problem in short $20 courses and the like. And they have something called Kino Escalation, which basically means that while you're chatting someone up, you touch them, and touch them a little bit more and escalate that touching to the point where you suddenly go—‘oh, are we having sex’ kind of thing. Which is one of the creepiest things you could possibly hear about, and the fact that people have sort of systematised this and made an algorithm out of it—a really human algorithm.

So yeah, that's something that just happened, like yesterday that I saw robots do this thing. And [it’s] another one of the human algorithms that artificial intimacies are learning to tap into. I think the tech thing is really good because what people are doing with tech and what machine learning is discovering is uncovering all sorts of stuff about human nature, human behaviour.

But you know, just follow the news and the weird things that people do. The weird things that animals do is just inspiration. And there are so many stories out there to be told. 

Amanda 35:30

Absolutely. And can you can you tell us, because now that you mentioned it, I think your website might be a great place for people to go and pick up ideas. And what is your website again? www.RobBrooks.net. Awesome. 

Well, thank you so much for the chat today. Rob. 

Rob 35:30

Thank you, and thanks for the work you're doing with Science Write Now. It's an amazing resource. 

Amanda 35:47  

And can you hold up your book for us? Again, everybody needs to go out and have a look at this. And, Rob, do you have a place on your website where you're posting events and things?

Rob 36:00 I do, and I also have a Twitter, which is @Brooks_Rob, [where I share] new interviews, new events, opportunities, giveaways, etc. 

Amanda 36:20

Brilliant. Well, thank you again, Rob. 

Rob 36:25

Thank you very much. 

END