These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. – Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) in Star Wars
I am blessed with a high degree of natural skepticism, and therefore see problems in prostitution-related news stories that most others fail to recognize. Take this story about robotic prostitutes, for example; a number of activists linked or “tweeted” it, but nobody seemed to notice the three glaring errors (and several smaller ones) that render it…well, to be blunt, trash. Those who remember the comment thread from my story of an eerily-human sex robot will already be familiar with the basic and highly flawed premise: that robot women could be competition for real ones to anyone outside a narrow segment of the population, roughly comparable in size to those who prefer animals to humans or those who find “living” in an online world preferable to the real one.
Machines have already changed the face of manufacturing industries, but what happens when prostitutes find themselves replaced by robots? Will machines populate our brothels instead of flesh and blood people? Will the social stigma of paying for sex fade? And how will the availability of robotic sex partners impact countries whose economies depend, in part, on sex tourism? In their paper “Robots, men and sex tourism,” which appears in the current issue of the journal Futures, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the University of Wellington’s Victoria Management School explore how robotic prostitutes could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with the sex trade, namely human trafficking and the spread of sexually transmitting [sic] infections…
Right from the start, these “management experts” demonstrate their shocking ignorance of events in their own country. There’s already a solution to “many of the problems associated with the sex trade” that doesn’t require the invention of electric harlots; it’s called “decriminalization”. As I’ve demonstrated countless times, most of the so-called “associated problems” only exist due to regulation or criminalization, and almost entirely vanish when people are left alone. But the next portion of the article is even more clueless; it imagines a robot sex club in the Amsterdam of 2050 and is based on this astonishingly stupid premise:
…The Yub-Yum is a unique bordello licensed by the city council, staffed not by humans but by androids. This situation came about due to an increase in human trafficking in the sex industry in the 2040s which was becoming unsustainable, combined with an increase in incurable STI’s in the city especially HIV which over the last decade has mutated and is resistant to many vaccines and preventive medicines. Amsterdam’s tourist industry is built on an image of sex and drugs. The council was worried that if the red light district were to close, it would have a detrimental effect on the city’s brand and tourism industry, as it seemed unimaginable for the city not to have a sex industry…
As regular readers know, “human trafficking” is largely a false paradigm embraced by racists, xenophobes and prohibitionists as an excuse to criminalize or pathologize the normal international and intranational movement of migrants, many of whom work in informal sectors. In other words, it’s mostly a “problem” of definition; when a government puts arbitrary restrictions on border crossings and/or defines certain kinds of work as illegal or illegitimate, people who cross borders or do those kinds of work (and those who assist them to do either) are automatically defined as “criminals” regardless of whether there is any exploitation or coercion involved. The only way for there to be an “increase of human trafficking in the sex industry” in any decade is for restrictions on migration and sex work to increase…which is against the dominant international trend. To understand the full absurdity of this scenario, remember that “human trafficking” is just the new name for the “white slavery” hysteria of 100 years ago; then imagine a science-fiction scenario written in 1912 postulating a brothel in Berlin of 1950 staffed by eugenically-bred whores developed in response to an explosion of white slavery and Salvarsan-resistant syphilis in the 1940s. But it gets worse:
…The tourists who use the services of Yub-Yum are guaranteed a wonderful and thrilling experience, as all the androids are programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire. All androids are made of bacteria resistant fibre and are flushed for human fluids, therefore guaranteeing no Sexual Transmitted Disease’s [sic] are transferred between consumers. The impact of Yub-Yum club and similar establishments in Amsterdam has transformed the sex industry alleviating all health and human trafficking problems. The only social issues surrounding the club is the resistance from human sex workers who say they can’t compete on price and quality, therefore forcing many of them to close their shop windows…
This ridiculous scenario is entirely dependent on not one but two hackneyed examples of prohibitionist propaganda. The first is of course the perennial myth that whores spread disease; as previously explained, STD rates in the developed world are as much as 160x higher in promiscuous amateurs as in escorts, and prostitution accounts for only 3-5% of all STIs. If these academics’ totalitarian utopia was truly concerned about such diseases, it would have to outlaw all sexual activity between humans and install omnipresent surveillance to enforce that law. And there’s a far cheaper and simpler means of preventing fluid transfer between humans than imaginary “bacteria resistant fibre…flushed for human fluids”; it’s called a disposable condom, and it has the additional advantages of being both real and widely available.
The second myth is much more subtle, and you may not have caught it. Prohibitionists (especially those of the neofeminist ilk) are fond of characterizing men’s interaction with whores as “use”; they constantly speak of hookers “selling their bodies” or clients “objectifying” us. But as every one of my readers who has ever participated on either side of the equation knows, this is pure bunk; the vast majority of men who hire prostitutes aren’t just looking for warm holes, but rather interaction with real women. Yeoman and Mars imagine their mechanical sex dolls as “programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire,” but while the former might be accomplished the latter is a lot more than 38 years away. There is a vast gulf between successful mimicry of casual human interaction in an environment divorced from body language and other nonverbal cues (i.e. passing the Turing test), and a true human simulacrum indistinguishable from a woman in a sexual interlude; those who proclaim otherwise are in the same intellectual tradition as those who predicted flying cars and robot maids by the year 2000. It may be that centuries hence the erotic appeal of synthetic whores will exceed that of human ones, but nobody reading this will be alive to see it.
Furthermore, normal men don’t want predictable, “plastic” interactions with women, and in fact escorts with bland and uninteresting personalities are never as much in demand as those with complex, fascinating personalities. No artificial intelligence can be programmed to merely simulate the nuances of a personality; to pass that test it would need to be endowed with a personality, either by copying that of a human (as in “Ghost in the Machine”) or by creating individual robot brains so complex and intricate they could develop their own personalities (like Rayna Kapec in the Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah”). But at that point we encounter an ethical dilemma; namely, what is a soul? Or expressed less metaphysically, what constitutes sentience and individuality for purposes of determining self-ownership? Any gynoid whose physical form and simulated functions (sweat, tears, scent, epidermal responses, etc) were indistinguishable from those of a human woman, and whose personality was sufficiently unpredictable and unique to pass as that of a woman in the close interaction of a date, would also be sufficiently human to pass any test a court might devise for granting human rights, and would almost certainly be interested in obtaining such. And then we’re right back where we started, except that the “trafficked slaves” would not be people mislabeled as such by moralists who disapproved of their choices, but sentient beings actually and wholly owned as chattel.
One Year Ago Today
“May Updates (Part Three)” comments on a bizarre neofeminist manifesto in The Wall Street Journal; looks at police fantasies about dangerous whores in Johannesburg and Pittsburgh; introduces the podcast Talk Geek To Me; and announces the end of Escorts.com.
On the other had, I have heard that a number of Japanese consider “2-D girls to be far superior to 3-D girls”. The way things have been going in the U.S., I’m starting to agree with them.
There have always been and always will be men who prefer pictures, dolls, animals, corpses or children to adult women. But they’re a minority, and if they ever stop being that the “authorities” will need to start growing new taxpayers in hatcheries.
I don’t buy it. It’s easily possible for a robot to be as good at physical performance as a real person without being anywhere near intelligent.
Most prostitution is not remotely just a physical performance, and that has nothing to do with “intelligence” and everything to do with personality. At least half of any whore’s job is providing plain, simple human companionship…something the prohibitionists refuse to understand.
Any reasonable guy can get companionship and conversation whenever he wants them just by walking into a bar (or whatever social hangout suits his taste and that of his target group). Sex, especially for its own sake, is what’s so hard to find that many (probably most over-40) men have to pay for it.
Richard Girard’s comment about women expecting near-perfection covers part of the reason for this — the market favors them, at least while they’re young — but in my experience there is also a strong correlation between availability/promiscuity and sheer craziness on a woman’s part. (Several Zappa songs come to mind here.) Even “normal” women, as a rule, choose a mode of thought which to us is so irrational that negotiating with them tends to get nowhere — even if she isn’t among the many who have already decided they’re never going to say yes to you, but love to string you along to get money and favors and to amuse themselves seeing you play the fool. One of the main attractions of prostitution for guys is that you never need give that kind of gold-digger the time of day again.
But there’s more to our disagreement than that. To put it bluntly, an intelligent computer (with or without a robot body attached) is a person, with both the advantages and disadvantages that personhood brings. I would no more want my sex-robot to be intelligent than I would replace the computer I keep my private records on with a human employee, and for the same reasons: doing so would mean both that I must respect the robot as a sovereign person with rights, and that I must trust it with data, and access, it could use to hurt me. (I read Heinlein too, and I was not at all surprised when one of his intelligent spaceships decided to kidnap and bully its erstwhile owner.)
Oops – I hit “send” too soon.
The point being — if it’s a mere robot, you can own it. If it’s intelligent, it has both the ability and probably the right to quit or go on strike, so one has to keep paying it and keep negotiating with it.
I agree. Did you ever see the Next Generation episode where Starfleet wants to take Data apart to see how he works, and he refuses so there’s a hearing to determine his personhood?
SPOILER ALERT
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Piccard, acting as his attorney, proves his humanity by showing that he kept a photo of a dead crewmember, Tasha Yar, in his quarters. When asked why he only had a picture of her and no one else, he reveals that it was because he had been “intimate” with her (in an earlier episode when she was going a bit crazy). The special feelings he attached to her as a result of sexual relations were considered proof of his true sentience.
The author of the article, Lauren Davis, actually says –
“Brothels for robotic sex workers make sense, especially if sexbots would prove expensive to own — or perhaps, eventually, sentient — ”
Does she even realise what she’s saying? It would be all right in her mind to enslave a “sentient” android? Does she even know what that word means?
As for sex androids, I agree that they are a long way away. Humans are incredibly sensitive to facial expressions and body language, not to mention scents and tastes. It is likely that even if such an android could be made, the cost would be prohibitive.
I cannot see how a robotic brothel with such sophisticated androids would ever be economically feasible. The cost of operation and maintenance would be far higher than anyone would want to pay. And imagine the liability insurance. All it would take is one malfunctioning android killing a client to close down the entire industry. They can’t even get the F22 fighter working flawlessly despite throwing untold billions at it.
More likely, and sooner, are very lifelike 3D games, which will satisfy the needs of horny teenagers who don’t have sexual access to real women anyway.
It makes you wonder what kind of sex life the original authors of the story have. As you say Maggie, sex is human interaction, not the use of a convenient orifice. That’s why hostess bars make tons of money, especially in the Far East. And the kinkier the client, the less appealing an artificial partner would be. Imagine presenting the Marquis de Sade with a “sexbot”.
Your analogy with the F22 has some flaws. First, the F-22 is not being sold to customers who can choose to buy a competitor’s product, or not buy at all. Second, those of us paying for it can only pay for it, or go to prison. Third, some portion of the difficulty with the F22 is because politicians are involved in the program (whose building what parts for it, in whose district, etc.), and so some decisions about its development are made for political reasons rather than engineering ones (I’ve seen this first hand, being a software engineer with 25+ years writing software for government programs). I say all this as someone who didn’t work on the F22, and thinks we should have bought the F23 instead (I didn’t work on that one either). A commercial enterprise trying to sell sexbots to the public would not have these problems/incentives (they would have different ones). A sexbot wouldn’t have to work flawlessly to be a success. Even airliners, which go through amongst the most thorough testing program of any product, do not have a perfect operational record, yet airlines still buy them, and people still fly on them.
You are likely correct, the first ones on the market would likely be very expensive. But if you look at how many hours the average American has to work to purchase pretty much anything, and compare it to how many hours they’d have had to work to buy one of the first (cars, radios, TVs, etc.), you’ll see that the price trend is usually downward. There’s already very realistic looking non-animate dolls on the market, and there’s humanoid robots (which LOOK like robots) that can walk and perform other tasks, so the next step is to combine to two with a Turing machine brain. The real issue is, when will they be cheaper than an actual woman?
No, we’re not talking about a glorified sex toy here, or even a Disney animatronic, but a full replacement for a human prostitute. This would require something light years ahead of a computer capable of passing a Turing test. We are looking at an autonomously acting AI which is capable of understanding human emotions and responding both verbally and physically in an appropriate, and sexually arousing manner, indistinguishable from a real woman.
It would need to understand jokes, sexual innuendo, understand whether the client wanted gentle or rough sex, even react correctly if struck or gripped hard. When should she say “ouch” and when should she say “Oh yes, more!”?
Simply creating a simulacrum of the female genitalia that looks, smells, feels, and reacts realistically would need more engineering and computing power than the entire US space programme. Remember, some clients might get off on giving oral sex. Imagine the specs for an android clitoris.
Anything less would just be a glorified inflatable doll.
The F22 safety analogy is appropriate. The politicians and military brass might had meddled with the mission requirements, but one of the major recurring and as yet unsolved faults is in the pilot’s oxygen system. This is pure engineering. And compared to an android whore, the F22 is a wind up toy.
Would you trust anything built by Lockheed to grab your penis and to masturbate you? Or put it in its mouth? (Remember the mechanical jaws and teeth.)
Yes, economies of scale might bring the cost down, but you’re looking at something that would probably initially cost billions. And then there is the maintenance.
Excellent synopsis, V.W. The professors seem to be envisioning something like a more sophisticated adult version of the mechanical pony ride one finds in front of supermarkets. I was especially appalled at the reference to “flushing” them as if they were toilets.
>”No artificial intelligence can be programmed to merely simulate the nuances of a personality; to pass that test it would need to be endowed with a personality, either by copying that of a human (as in “Ghost in the Machine”) or by creating individual robot brains so complex and intricate they could develop their own personalities”
Well, the Republicans are currently running a candidate that seems to fail that test… “I like it here, in Michigan… The trees are the right height… The grass seems to be the right color, I think.”
Interestingly, when a computer software simulation of a therapist (called Ada, I think) was developed, people liked talking to it.
Will there ever be “sexbots”, as in Blade Runner? I doubt it. Our current historical trend, is that humans will be cheaper and cheaper as the rich concentrate the wealth an resources. Slavery will make a comeback before robots.
What? You won’t vote for Wilard McDole there, chick? Hehe – me neither.
Anyway, one question I do have is about artificial MEN. In the movie “AI” one of the robots was a “pleasure robot” for women. Now – I know we say time and again here that straight male prostitutes are a failure but, would android ones be?
Reason I’m asking this is because I know a lot of women in their 20’s who have ZERO sex life because they are looking only for “Mr. Right” and won’t divert off that path for a small bit of carnal indulgence because they’re afraid of getting a reputation or that, by somehow doing so it will detract from them finding “Mr. Right”.
When I was single in Hawaii in the 80’s I met a lot of women tourists who would absolutely cut loose no holds barred when they were on vacation because NO ONE knew them there. Even the guys they met would never see them again after they’d left – they could be whoever they wanted to be while they were in the islands.
So I think there may be something in women that might go for a robotic companion who’s 100 percent discreet and secret. I don’t know – could be I’m full of shit as usual. 😛
Not full of shit, but again there’s the personality issue; mechanical sex toys without personalities are already available for women, and they’re a helluva lot cheaper than a stupid sex android. Furthermore, there’s something deeply unsatisfying to normal women about men who don’t lust after one; that’s the main reason male prostitutes, strippers etc are never more than a minority. I explained this in one of my earliest columns; for women, paying for sex negates most of the point of having it.
That’s a very good column – and a bit depressing. 🙁
Of course – you’re right.
Why in the world do men find that depressing? You’re not the first one to say that; you might as well be depressed that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Not depressing to me. I revel in the idea that my desire could potential light a fire in a woman.
I mean, I can’t speak for other men, but I always found (back in my single days) being the pursued rather than the pursuer just annoying. It never worked, because somewhere in the process after initiating the pursuit, the girl would do a flip-flop back into default female mode, and expect to be pursued. End result, you get asked out, dated, and then rejected because you aren’t behaving to script and doing the things that she really wants, and you get p***ed off at being messed about with. As a man and as pursuer it’s all straightforward, she accepts or rejects and so be it.
I also find that my liason with an escort give me an outlet for something I love to do, which is to court a womans favour with gifts and other favours. As a single man I remember any such gift giving in dating was a kiss of death, taken as some kind of lack of confidence, always rejected. In marriage, a few comments about gifts being some way of assuaging a secret guilt is enough to stop them altogether. But with “my” escort, I can buy her things, lavious her with gifts, and it is just in her nature to take them all with a smile and a thank you. As a male bird has a drive to bring tokens to the female bird he is courting, so I’ve always had this urge, but modern women resist it so much, whereas the escorts I have met are the epitome of strong AND feminine women, who love getting gifts.
Darren, my advice for women is not to pursue too hard (you’ll look desperate).
Also – always stay out of the “friend zone”. The “friend zone” is the kiss of death – it’s like a “Tholian web” or “Hotel California” – if you check into the “friend zone” – you don’t check out and may as well start over with another girl. Things that keep you out of the friend zone are things like closing in on her personal space – not obtrusively and certainly not too prematurely and holding two conversations with her at one time. That’s right – you can hold one conversation with her with your lips about work or something else – while the other “conversation” happens with your eyes. Like prolonged direct eye contact.
And I’ve always liked the “Klaus Voorman” approach. Carly Simon said that she always found Klaus Voorman extremely hot because he never said too much and, when he did – he said it like he was talking to an intimate … very soft and comfortable – like he had already been sleeping with you for years! So if I’m working around a girl I like – that’s the approach I’ll use at first. You can’t be “aloof” though – like brooding quietness. You have to respond positively and intimately when the time comes to speak – like if they ask you something. You can always tell if they like you – or if they liked the approach – because they’ll start asking you things just so they can see it repeatedly. Remember – smile and eye contact sends a pleasant message that it’s okay for them to talk to you.
The bottom line is – you have to make the girl think you have other options besides her – and make her want to at least do a half-assed job of eliminating those other options for you.
Don’t give up on girls – and don’t make them out to be the center of the universe either. Well, they ARE the center of the universe but you have to train yourself not to broadcast to them that you think that.
It’s all an exciting love-play and the penalty for failure is you don’t get laid. So what? Learn the lesson and pick up and move on to another target, refining your order of battle along the way. Women aren’t supposed to be easy – that’s what makes them so HOT!!
Bah humbug. Women are too difficult to get already. They’re a cartel — and people like Maggie threaten them by competing fairly. We need more of that. Let the cartel do to themselves what unionized auto workers have done until they learn their lesson and stop acting as a cartel.
Actually, I tend to agree. Laura and I landed each other because we were both happy not to have to play the damned game.
Absolutely this ^^
The feminists get all shocked and outraged when men turn on women for this cartel bullshit.
Sooner or later, women will look round in the collective and discover that men are so fucked off with the status quo that they HAVE given up on women.
At that point, the very thing that gets them up in arms now, misogyny, will have become a reality because the decent guys now, the majority, will turn to that very position in response to the bullcrap.
That’s a position I’m feeling myself; I’m sick of being neglected and messed about. At that point, nature’s got a quantum-gold-plated-bastard tiebreaker for a deadlock like this; it’s called forceful rape. We’re dealing with basic drives that simply get more powerful the longer they are dammed up.
Most women, and the Lawheads, don’t get that.
(it’s been 15 years for me, wondering what the hell is wrong with me that my own wife hates me that much we don’t have sex, at all. Yes, I’m deeply fucked off)
I recommend against the force strategy, but in favor of the Leykis 101 and Red Pill strategies.
Yes, but demanding near perfection from one’s partner in exchange for sex is as wrong and dishonest. Heinlein was correct: it should either be the soul-warming experience of a lifetime, or good sweaty fun (paraphrase from Time Enough For Love). I am not certain, I have just started to think about this again, but I think the fact that women overvalue and demand things from sex beyond sex for its own sake, makes men feel they have to do something to devalue women, just to keep some semblance of a feeling of equality in their minds. Venus Vulgaris, Ishtar, Mary Magdalene and Aphrodite help us all if that is the case. Please tell me I am wrong, and if so how?
Most women simply don’t see sex as something worth doing solely for its own sake. That doesn’t make either gender wrong; it just makes us different. And yes, I do think you’re right in that a lot of misogyny derives from male insecurity, but it’s not about equality: it’s about inferiority. Well-adjusted men understand that though women have the upper hand in sex, men have the upper hand in lots of other areas. But a maladjusted man has to feel superior to a woman in EVERY way, hence the resentment (or denial) of female sexual power.
Okay, and I’m sorry this may be part of my personal here–I had to switch therapists at one point for my type III Bipolar Disorder, when I discovered she was a neo-feminist, and was causing me more problems than she was helping–am I wrong in saying that magazines like Playboy, Hustler, et al, are more exploitive of men than they are of women?
Only if you use the word in its literal sense. Men’s magazines only “exploit” men’s desire to see naked women in the same way that restaurants “exploit” hunger. But the word “exploitation” has taken on a connotation of taking unfair advantage, of not making a fair exchange, and I wholly disagree with the idea that any magazine “exploits” anyone in that fashion; it’s giving them far more power than they actually have.
I agree with you, in general. But it still feels exploitive for those of us who feel that a good positive relationship seems out of reach. (Yes I am working on it with my new therapist, but what I really need is a sex therapist which is something neither my insurance or my finances will currently permit.) This is something I wish I had figured out 30 years ago, not 6 months ago. But then it took almost 20 years for the shrinks to figure out I was bipolar, rather than ua nipolar depressive. (Mark Harmon is right-half of all bipolar people are misdiagnosed. Sorry, just grousing.)
That’s right on target there.
I’d be interested in robot-women if it would keep me on a monogamous path – which I’m a total failure at now – but they’d have to be SOOOO advanced and like real women that I might forget they’re artificial and fall in love with them. That kind of thing then defeats it’s own purpose.
I do think that artificial humans will come about eventually and they may even be the next evolutionary step for mankind – but it’s a long way away and it won’t come about in response to some catalyst from human trafficking scaremongers.
Krulac,
I agree, too, that men are not looking for a collection of warm, moist orifices but a real person. As Maggie points out all the time, what is written in the media about the men and women engaged in this entirely consensual behavior is very inaccurate and bears no resemblance to my experience. These writers would be shocked to know how many pros generally enjoy their work and feel empowered by it. Think about it: Men, mostly married, pay their hard-earned money and risk their marriages, families, and possibly livelihoods just to spend an hour (or more) with a pro. What an ego boost!
I’d bet that someone in 2050 coming across this article would just laugh and wonder how stupid and naive some people could have been. Articles predicting the future seem to have one common theme; they almost always don’t see what’s really coming, and the claims they make are simply fanciful.
If you were to have asked 38 years ago how you saw things in 2012, would you have seen the internet, laptops or blogging? I don’t think so; when we as students were first introduced to computers, they were things taking up the basement of a large house, with reel-to-reel tape machines around the walls and a small “cpu” in the centre. When we did statistics we had to add vast columns of figures and do all the calculations by hand; statistics was more an endurance test than learning how to use them. It would have been a lot easier if we’d had calculators.
And, would you have foreseen the HIV/AIDS problem 50 years ago? In the very unlikely event that you had, would you have been able to guess at the religious fervour that accompanied it?
Fifty years ago you might have heard of Chlamydia, but only in association with Reiter’s Disease or syndrome. Chlamydia, then, wasn’t worth treating and it wasn’t. Even Reiter’s syndrome has disappeared, to be replaced by terms such as “reactive arthritis”. Which is rather a pity, as “reactive arthritis” isn’t very poetic:
A swelling of knees
And a pain when he pees
In a chap is not clap
But Reiter’s Disease.
Exactly. That’s why I used the comparison of science-fictional predictions of 1950 from the perspective of 1912; this ridiculous robot fantasy is no different.
In “Friday” the protagonist is morosely positing, given the human predilection for self destruction and the incredible survivability of Rattus rattus, that they will inherit the earth.
“Nonsense,” says her mentor. “To replace man, they would have to become man.”
So, unless sex-bots become sentient, they’re “hardly a bloody replacement, now are they!” And if they do become sentient, then they are entitled to the same rights as any other sentient beings.
By the way, Friday is an Artificial Person. Not an android but a human being conceived in such a manner that optimizes her physical and intellectual capacities. And there are plenty of folks that want her ilk controlled or destroyed for reasons of religious belief or issues of unfair labor competition.
John Ringo attempts to finesse the idea of owning “human things” by postulating manufactured homunculi who have the appearance of humanity but not the substance in his “Council War” series. Funny thing though, is that those who treat these “human things” badly also tend to the same conduct regarding “human beings.”
Kind of like how prohibitionists treat whores and their customers.
Yes … well i must admit, being on the nervous side, and living in southern missouri, it seems like the fundys, and prohibitionist, just push harder and harder….. I do use only porn (nothing aginst prosts, just easier and safer for me) and don`t want these, a**holes to take away part of my sex life of 42 years. So i think, we might go thru a dry spell like alcohol prohib……… I`m prob just barrowing trouble……. I have that kind of personality.
I wonder if the men who would actually go to sexbots would like little robot children as well?
“For example, would spouses view sex with a robotic partner as cheating, or as a form of masturbation akin to using a vibrator?”. Well, some spouses consider watching porn as cheating, so….
I’m sure that there will definitely be a market for sexbots, and even for robotic brothels; my problem with Yeoman & Mars’ ideas is their incredible ignorance of nearly everything to do with sex work, which in New Zealand is inexcusable. I think child-sexbots might very well help pedophiles stay out of trouble, but under current American law they’d still be illegal because even cartoons, drawings and written descriptions of child sex are (on spurious “end demand” grounds).
Apologies for not making myself clear; I meant robotic *descendants*, and indeed, robotic friends, acquaintances and so on… because that is the aim of those who want to dehumanize everything.
At some, very distant (possibly never), point in the future I imagine the makers of androids with responses good enough to fool a human will play a game of brinkmanship. How close can I get to human responses without a court giving my creation legal rights?
Well, to feminists men are mindless inhuman robots arent’ we?
That’s for sure!
However, one word:
“Bladerunner”
That “replicant” he fell in love with was gorgeous!
(maybe in a few hundred years then, not 25)
Count me among those who think sex robots are a pointless endeavor. The great part of sex is that it’s a real person, an actual human who has chosen to do it with you.
Bingo!
Posts like this are why I read your blog! I knew something sounded wrong with this article, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Comments like this are why I write it. 😉
You concentrate on the personality portion of such an android. All it has to do is pass a Turing Test See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test), which has already been done. As CPUs continue to get more powerful, the additional nuances needed to pass a face-to-face test will surely be possible.
It has to do a LOT more than pass a Turing Test, which is the mere inability to distinguish AI from human in a blind conversation. Personality, body language, emotions, scents, secretions and other more subtle components of a biological life form aren’t even completely understood and analyzed in HUMANS, let alone replicable in machines. Furthermore, the “more more more” approach, which is the only one AI people seem capable of comprehending at this time, will NEVER produce anything like human thought patterns, which rely on the concept of “maybe” that no computer can yet comprehend, nor ever will until engineers get out of the binary ghetto.
Watson (kicked human butt in Jeopardy!) understands “maybe” just fine. He wouldn’t press the button to answer a question unless he was certain beyond a certain point. If he had a Daily Double, and the certainty didn’t exceed that level, well according to the rules he has to give some answer, so he did, and called it “a guess.”
Fuzzy logic is all about “a little yes, a little no” and “not sure” and “most likely,” and it’s used in things like train scheduling and the top-end rice cookers.
This doesn’t mean that Watson and Zojirushi are about the bring forth Robowhore, but “maybe” is on the move.
Probability weighting is NOT the same thing that I mean when I say “maybe” in this context. A better term would perhaps be “if”, though that still implies probability, which is NOT what I mean. I read a lot on this subject but nothing has ever convinced me that any software proceeding from current assumptions about AI will ever simulate human creativity. Notice I didn’t say that it’s impossible to create a machine with personality; it’s just going to take a qualitative difference in programming rather than the quantitative one modern programmers are obsessed with.
The thing is, we don’t really know how humans do it either. How much is probability weighting, how much is “evolutionary algorithm,” and how much is just plain old guessing? How much is something that we’ve never thought of? It’s probably a bit of all that. What happens if there are six things, and a computer becomes better at four of them than we are? Who knows if that could make up for the other two. Or what if the it’s almost as good at the other two, and just as good at one, and better at three? Or any other combination. We might have computers with personality, but not the same as any personality any human being ever had. BUT! it might be able to fake it, convincingly.
The real question is: how will we know the difference between a computer that’s faking a personality really, really well… and a computer which really has one?
Which is exactly the last point in my essay. Any gynoid sufficiently convincing to please an escort customer is also sufficiently convincing to pass any judicial test for humanity you could dream up, which puts us right back where we started.
Here we agree, at least mostly. The humans involved in programming the (thing? creature? person?) will be able to show all kinds of charts and graphs showing that it isn’t “real personality,” just good computing, even if it does it exactly the way we do. But this will only delay the inevitable.
My brother saw a news article about this story before I did, and he told me about it. He immediately recognised it as a bunch of baloney, and he doesn’t even read your blog.
We both agreed that a sexbot would simply be a fancy equivalent of a blow-up doll, and would only appeal to the same size market.
Exactly. I think centuries hence, when a truly convincing simulation is available, there will be more demand for them…but that’s a long way off, and will still raise issues of free will and personhood.
Well, let’s test this with current data…
There are plenty of “robotic-like” hookers out there. Pay them, and they go through the motions. They turn it on when the money is deposited, totally coin operated. You get warm holes, but no personality.
And the guys complain about them.
EXACTLY!!!
And, the guys still hire them, if they’re cheap enough. I think that years or decades before high-class call girls have to worry about technological unemployment, there will be men who will will employ robowores from time to time, and a living human being like Maggie when he can afford her.
The machine doesn’t have to be able to put every escort ever born to shame before it has customers; it needs to be good enough. And that can happen long before it’s as good as.
Good grief, a blow-up doll is “good enough” for some guys; that’s not at all what these authors are talking about. Their whole premise relies on either of two assumptions, both ridiculous:
1) That MOST men who see whores just want a warm hole in something that moves around and looks more or less human; or
2) That perfect, Star Trek level human simulacrums will be available in only 38 years.
And that’s not even addressing their asinine belief in a moral panic, insults and patronization of sex workers, myopic failure to compare their schemata with similar constructs from the past and complete inability to understand the vast moral implications of advocating the enslavement of sentient beings under the premise that creation automatically grants ownership.
Where things stand now:
hand → blow-up doll → Real Doll → “plenty of ‘robotic’ hookers” → PSE or GFE and I’m sure there are some I’ve left out.
Right now, the best sexbot made seems to be a Real Doll modified with some under-the-skin buttons hooked up to pre-programmed voice files. I suppose the next step would be one that can act out pre-programmed sex acts, including ooo’s and coo’s and yes, warm holes and, presumably, suction.
Will this device threaten the job security of call girls? Perhaps call girls who specialize in pretending to be robots, but otherwise no. I think that high-class prostitution will be one of the last jobs taken over by machines, but I also suspect that by then the silliness we call “working for a living” will be a thing of the past.
Yes, given that most male commenters on blogs like this – current writer included – first went looking for information from blogs like this because of their agonising over how engaged the hooker really is in the interaction, and given that interviews with hookers often show that the number one fantasy on clients is to “be special”, then it is hard to see how a device that lacks sentience could even facilitate the fantasy that these needs are being met.
Blow up doll better than hand?! Hand = adjunct to the imagination. Blow up doll = replacement of the imagination with something utterly impoverished.
I have my hand always. Blow-up dolls are outside my budget and experience. I fell into the trap of assuming that they MUST be better than a hand, since people with perfectly good hands spend good money on them.
I suppose you could always imagine the doll was somebody you’d zapped with your SuperVillain Paralyzing Ray Gun (TM), and now…
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!
Well, I guess it depends on if the blow-up doll is a blonde or a brunette….
Or you could imagine that she’s English.
“What was that you just said, honey? ‘The Empire?'”
There was a moderately entertaining Anime series, “Chobits”, that has “persocoms” (personal computers) developed to the point of being humanlike companions. Among other things, it addresses the population problem in Japan, as in the lack of the Japanese reproducing. It’s an odd show that works on multiple levels. I watched in on Hulu for free, so if anybody else follows it, I would enjoy hearing your reactions.
Would you believe I haven’t seen it yet? I do love the theme song.
I can see this becoming mainstream in 3-4 generations, but even with advancing technology, I doubt real sex will disappear.
What we may find is, eventually ,one prostitute being able to serve as a model for a device or projection that serves many men. It could be that, like porn stars, one female could sexually satisfy hundreds or tens of thousands of men, and command prices commensurate; imagine the vast quantity of women who would horn in on that business. Men, too.
Hey, hey, bro, you want a really awesome program? Come check this out. Install this baby and tell me what you think.
I can see that happening. But not soon.
By the way,
were this technology to take off, and given the power of porn and male sexual desire, there’s no reason it won’t (eventually – no time soon), then the effect it will have on “normal” heterosexual women and “normal” relationships will be profound.
Already, porn has literally changed the way people have sex.
In the future, a woman looking to marry a man would have to worry about competing for her husband’s sexual interest with safe, freely available and easily exchangeable sex partners who were, in every sense of the word, professional.
Such a service would eliminate the use of sex as a bargaining chip in relationships.
Ostensibly, prostitutes should perform that function now, but the mythical “women are always victims” charade keeps the proverbial value of female sexuality high through false scarcity.
Not as much now, but still.
Already, porn has literally changed the way people have sex.
Could you elaborate on this? I have heard lots of wild claims, but seen very little reliable data.
Likely at the first sign of androids becoming viable sex partners, the neofeminists will include the androids as “victims of the Patriarchy” and fight to prevent men from “raping” them, despite their “flushable” cavities.
If the androids are intelligent there is no reason for them to be any different in this regard from other persons. Certainly they would have the same moral rights.
jdgalt:
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Intelligence and self-awareness to not automatically equate to “humanness”.
Much of our behavior and instincts arise from our reproductive urges, fear of pain and death, herd instinct, and so on. An android might be literally immortal. It would have not desire to reproduce unless their makers gave it one. It most likely would not feel loneliness, or fear, or hunger.
Therefore, and android’s basic motivations could be very alien to us. It might act like a human, be as smart or smarter than a human, and might even understand how humans think and react, but we would have very little comprehension of what they were truly “feeling”.
To automatically grant them rights similar to a human’s might be very dangerous or even irrelevant to what the android wants or needs.
For instance, since their bodies are completely replaceable, it might not have the same sense of bodily integrity that we do. “Rape” might have no meaning to it at all.
They might well have different tastes and motivations, but I can’t think of any difference of that sort that doesn’t already exist within the human race. Indeed, a large part — if not all — of the “war between the sexes” (and also of the “war” on sex workers) amounts to expectations by one person about another person that aren’t being met (and in most cases shouldn’t need to be).
“They might well have different tastes and motivations, but I can’t think of any difference of that sort that doesn’t already exist within the human race.”
No? What about not caring to interact with humans at all? If they are given legal “personhood”, there would be nothing to stop them from changing their own operating parameters – such as not hurting humans, for instance.
Bearing in mind that an AI can “evolve” itself and other AI units in real time, you could quickly have an android culture that competes with humans for space and raw materials. They might not be overtly hostile, but they might simply “go their own way”, just like loggers who are not actively hostile to the animals that live in the forest still manage to render them extinct anyway.
The above is of course just one of the many possible scenarios that would not end well for humans if androids are given independence and personhood. The thing to remember is, by creating an AI and “freeing” it, you have created a competitor for the human species, one that would have no reason at all to keep us around. Without social instincts, they would no sense of gratitude, friendship, compassion, benevolence, or any of the other “nice” emotions and traits. We might have built them into the androids at the beginning, but the AI would have no reason not to press the “delete” key on those parts of its code the moment it had the chance.
Certainly possible. Used often in science fiction. I suspect that, without the millions of years of “law of the jungle” competitive programming we humans carry, the androids would act in a manner which would shame merely human saints, but I could be wrong.
That could indeed happen. There have been many groups of humans (including some entire countries) in just the past two centuries that have refused to have anything to do with other people until they were forced to. And there are groups today who have dedicated themselves to destroying the rest of the world. I don’t want to turn this into a political free-for-all by naming names.
You can’t have intelligent life without the possibilities of hostility and war.
I think my basic test of when a computer deserves personhood rights is as follows:
When it can and does, without being instructed to do so, ask for or demand such rights.
Today’s ‘sequence rerun’ at LessWrong is very pertinent here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xt/interpersonal_entanglement/
Whatever… has anyone buzzed around in their flying car lately?
Are we still burning coal for electricity?
Right.
If we have android/cyborg sex bots, SkyNet will be online….
-W
While some things we saw in The Jetsons have failed to materialize, there are other things nobody saw coming. As many or more things grace our world than were ever anticipated by even the wildest SF writers.
Flying Car ———– Google
Jetpack ————– Video Games
Sexbot ————— More free porn than any twenty people could consume in a lifetime, if they each started in utero and had Misao Okawa‘s lifetime to work with.
Some of the visions come true (they’re more visions than actual predictions), some do not, and sometimes they do but in a completely different order than anyone would have thought. You can buy a jetpack today, but it’s expensive and isn’t all it was expected to be (yet). Flying cars are not quite here, but personal planes and even convert-to-plane cars are, though again, they’re not quite what we were promised… yet.
There is the real problem: someone has to invent artificial stupidity before we can have artificial intelligence, just for comparison. and there is so much real stupidity around, who will be able to tell for sure?
I’ve thought of (or rather I’ve stolen from the book I gave Maggie) an alternative to the self-willed sexbot.
OK, so you have the standard sci-fi sexbot: gorgeous, any age the customer wants (octogenarian nympho? no problem! middle-school girl? no problem! kindergarten boy? no problem!), any sex (including ones which may be very rare or even not exist in reality), and ethnicity (including…) and so on. But instead of being controlled by a high-level AI, she has a human pilot somewhere within a few Km. This human pilot offers the talk, intellectual interaction, and the acting skills to be a convincing half-Apache seven year old half-Martian sex researcher (to pick a choice even I would find strange). This requires technology more advanced than today, but does not require a fully human-level intelligent machine which is content to be a commodity. How long will this take? Probably more than ten years, but less than thirty.
The rights of personhood never enter into this: the pilot is a human being, so of course she has personhood. The sexbot is a machine piloted by the human being, so of course it does not have (or want) personhood.
Maggie could pilot one of these in thirty years. She has already created a stable of characters she could have sexbots modeled after, and she could give the customer what he wants, as long as it’s something she doesn’t mind providing (probably no kindergarten boys from her).
Look what I stumbled across. Sexbots, basic income, and an argument that hookers might not be so vulnerable to the robot revolution as some have predicted.
Some things had me wishing the guy had read more here, but he’s light years, nay, parsecs, beyond a lot of other people who have taken it upon themselves to write about prostitution.
True, but as long as he’s making moronic statements like “A sex robot that can ‘pass’ as a human sex worker would not necessarily pass the Turing Test (the traditional standard in the field for determining human-level artificial intelligence). This is because the conversational interactions between a human sex worker and client may not reach the level of complexity demanded by the Turing Test,” he’s still far too ignorant to be taken seriously.
A lot of men insist that they’ve never employed a prostitute. When they say things like that, I’m inclined to believe the claim.
What do you think of the “piloted sexbot” idea?
I suppose it could be useful for guys who have an attraction to someone they couldn’t or shouldn’t have sex with in real life, like a child or an anthropomorphic animal. But for a regular woman it would be breaking an egg with a sledgehammer.
I have a doll http://www.siliconesexdolls.net buy a year ago and has been a great buy, I have plenty of company with her. Not everything is sex.
I have to admit that I don’t quite understand, but then there are things about me that a lot of people don’t quite understand.
I do understand that almost any ongoing relationship, be it with girlfriend, hooker, imaginary friend or pen pal, is going to involve a lot more than sex.
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