Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Love droids
A Californian company called RealDoll has announced it will be selling an artificially intelligent sex doll next year. If they’d put it on the market a month ago, I would have bought for the manager of the safari camp as a Christmas gift. His wife isn’t the jealous type and might have appreciated sharing her conjugal duties with a robot. If nothing else, it would have given her time to catch up on her bedtime reading.
RealDoll haven’t said what their AI-enhanced sex doll will be capable of doing. It’s not difficult to imagine what functions the typical customer would want, but I suspect these early models will be fairly limited. Maybe the dolls will just moan and wiggle their tongues. Mind you, that’s probably more than many human partners provide. Hef’s playmates have surely mastered the art of playing possum, with the aid of a sedative if necessary.
A bunch of academics recently held a conference in London to discuss the way ahead for human-robot couplings. One of the speakers was Dr David Levy, the author of a seminal work called Love and Sex with Robots, published in 2007. Maybe I should have read it before writing this post. On the other hand, it might have given me the yips. A highbrow British periodical described the book as follows:
David Levy's thesis, in this utterly fascinating, scholarly and rather uncomfortable book, is essentially that we'll fuck anything (which we knew), and that we love pretty much anything that looks as though it might love us; or, at least, is blank and malleable enough for us to project that idea upon.
Yet almost 10 years after publication, Dr Levy’s idyllic vision of tireless and technically proficient sex machines is a long way from fruition. At the end of the conference, a member of the audience summed up the current state of play:
“We can't agree what a robot is, we can't agree what sex is. We are almost sure that no sex robots currently exist. What we are developing is very crude and almost no-one wants it.”
This is the problem with most advances in technology – the big breakthroughs happen in unexpected places rather than where everyone wants them to. There’ll be intelligent kitchen appliances long before sex robots are a common bedroom accessory. Refrigerators will make sarcastic remarks when men fill them up with six packs. Washing machines will scold women who sit on them during the spin cycle. Once machines have intelligence, there’ll be no end of cheek from them.
I personally doubt that androids will ever possess the sexual characteristics of a biological entity. Living flesh has a certain texture that cannot be replicated by inorganic substances. The human butt cheeks, when spanked, emit a noise that is instantly recognisable and probably unique in the solar system. Instead of trying to make artificial humans, the sex toy industry should think about creating a device like the Orgasmatron. It was all action and no talk, which is want people want from machines.
Labels: artificial intelligence, orgasmatron, sex dolls, sex robot, spanking, technology
