The truth about sex robots

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160209-the-truth-about-sex-robots

by Sami_Lehtinen • 10 years ago

61 39 10 years ago

ekianjo• 10 years ago

In two recent movies, Her and Ex Machina, filmmakers explored an intriguing concept: whether humans will fall in love with and want to have sex with AI or robots.

Never mind Ghost in the Shell throwing that idea about, like, 20 years ago already. It's always fun to be see folks late to the party.

MikeNomad2• 10 years ago

Yep. And two of Gibson's Bridge Triology. Most notably, Idoru.

stuxnet79• 10 years ago

Didn't Rei Toei first appear in Virtual Light? In Virtual Light I seem to remember Rydell driving in downtown LA at night and getting distracted by a hologram of a naked East-Asian looking woman - who would later turn out to be Rei Toei.

valarauca1• 10 years ago

Or we could talk about how TNG (Star Trek) was discussing Holodeck Sickness from people so desperately trying to escape reality.

JoeAltmaier5• 10 years ago

Or Data's girlfriend Tasha Yar.

grimgrin2• 10 years ago

The author went as far back as Pygmalion [1913], where Eliza fell in love with a statue that came to life.

venomsnake2• 10 years ago

I thought it was 1913 BC Pygmalion. The play.

lazyant• 10 years ago

"In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides he was "not interested in women", but his statue was so fair and realistic that he fell in love with it."

Ovid lived over 2,000 years ago.

gweinberg• 10 years ago

Eliza is the statue. Henry Higgens is Pygmaliopn.

grimgrin2• 10 years ago

OK yes well I was wrong in about every way possible.

The play is from 1913 AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)

But it is based on a Greek mythological character from over 2,000 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology)

Also Eliza is the statue.

Thanks for pointing out my errors.

soared• 10 years ago

The next sentence:

Of course, this isn’t the first time people have lusted after artificial human entities

Stop being overly pedantic. You'd be better off criticizing the first picture, which is actually two robots, not a human and a robot.

ilamont• 10 years ago

I think Sci-fi/Fantasy authors have been interested in this topic for many years ... for instance, Piers Anthony's Xanth series, starting in the 70s.

greggman2• 10 years ago

Blade Runner (1982) had a pleasure android long before Ghost in the Shell and there's several Sci-Fi stories that had them before then. Here's one from (1938)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_O%27Loy

antod• 10 years ago

If Hollywood is anything to go on, it looks like the time for sex robots is practically upon us.

Blade Runner was set in 2019, and Cherry 2000 was set in 2017.

mentos• 10 years ago

Stepping stone is VR/AR with tracked toys

dhimes• 10 years ago

I got such a weird feeling reading that. Happy Valentine's Day!

JoeAltmaier5• 10 years ago

There's a market for every toy. Robot feels weird, sounds funny, looks creepy? Sell to the weird funny creepy crowd.

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

Just because something looks creepy doesn't mean the target buyer is creepy.

a5seo• 10 years ago

Has this author ever heard of 'minimum viable product?'

I doubt the lack of nanotech to create perfect artficial skin (or many of the other features mentioned) are going to hold this back.

JoeAltmaier5• 10 years ago

Exactly! This is a subject dominated by imagination and fantasy. All that is needed is a spark. Arguably, the robot should be quite different from a real human, because they are available already and at a reasonable price.

franciscop• 10 years ago

I think the post misses completely the point of technology replacing humans. Like autonomous cars, sex robots will be viable when they are better than the alternative. And for many people, this means better than nothing/sex toys. They don't need to be perfect as it suggests.

JoeAltmaier5• 10 years ago

Or even, more fantasy and less reality. The measurements of a sex robot don't have to be even close to plausible.

venomsnake2• 10 years ago

Or the general number/location of appendixes and orifices.

nugget• 10 years ago

Spot on . . . to borrow from Thoreau, ''the mass of men lead [sex] lives of quiet desperation''. (As a man, I'm more familiar with the male perspective.) I think even a crude early version of a sex robot that males could interact with at home would revolutionize society with all sorts of consequences to romantic relationships, birth rates, social development, and so on. Combine the physical manipulations with AI and VR and I think it will be as or more important than developments like self driving cars and 1 hour drone deliveries.

kilroy123• 10 years ago

But only if the cost was very low. Right now this kind of product exists but is way too much for most men: https://www.realdoll.com [NSFW]

Personally, I would not be interested unless the robot was indistinguishable from a real human.

greggman2• 10 years ago

Isn't that already happening? Not to pick on the Japanese in particular but it's low-hanging fruit search wise

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

quietplatypus• 10 years ago

We just need artificial wombs at this point. No seriously. Why tie the survival of the species to fickle personal factors?

Eridrus• 10 years ago

But better along what axis? There is a lot of stigma around having a sex doll/robot. There's even a smaller amount of stigma around sex toys for men.

So to penetrate a mass market it would have to not just be better than a sex toy, it would have to be better enough that it outweighs the stigma associated with it (and the difficulty of keeping it hidden).

hammock• 10 years ago

sex robots will be viable when they are better than the alternative. And for many people, this means better than nothing/sex toys

Or better than a fat wife that will take the house and kids when you divorce.

merb• 10 years ago

What people never learn, human intelligence is not learning by analyzing and doing it better. human intelligence means actually doing something which could never be calculated and which could be a total mess, however it could still be the right thing. Current AI's will learn, but they will learn with their input, which is something humans don't do, their thinking is abstract.

woodman• 10 years ago

Your description of "human intelligence" sounds more like a bounded random number generator. Also, your thinking is restricted by sensory input - just like the AI.

upofadown• 10 years ago

Unless you get the pheromones and skin chemistry right there really isn't any point.

JoeAltmaier5• 10 years ago

That's not fair! Lots of sex toys sell today. Very very few of them get that right. In fact, all they have to be is soft and lubricatable.

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

Oddly I am reminded of a comment about New Mexico. There the ratio of non-imprisoned men to women is something like 90:100 in the non-White community, and so apparently women are more Likely to acquiesce to the sort of male demands you can imagine - so less marriage, more polyamory, and apparently more sex more frequently.

(I am now racking my brains for a reference - it could be Tim Harford?)

The point being, that real people competing against a free "good enough" alternative are going to be the unusual example of economic Uberisation

tbeutel• 10 years ago

A robot with a self-cleaning feature would make me more likely to use it.

mchahn• 10 years ago

A robot with a self-cleaning feature would make me more likely to use it.

Or better yet, a house-cleaning feature (male or female).

DrScump• 10 years ago

For a sarcastic view on the concept, check out "Robot Girl" by Was (not Was)... here's an SNL performance from 1989.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03LVC_r9gJE

(RG starts at about 1:45)

echlebek• 10 years ago

Some worry sex robots might hurt already marginalised sex workers

I doubt that anyone actually worries about this.

The truth about sex robots

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