This is the "please don't touch me" variant.
There is this wonderful comment on the YouTube page:
Earth to Kert- IT IS NOT A SEX ROBOT! It even STOPS you from touching her. I find it sad that people have warped it to seem that way. I think it's a wonderful & interesting invention, and the inventors are geniuses, but it was made for different reasons other than sex. Chill your damn boners, people! XD
I rewatched Lost in Translation recently, and it's a very eccentric movie, but sorta poignant, and often funny, for example in the scene where Bob Harris's Tokyo hosts have gifted him with a call girl and she is trying to get him started, and it seems her default mode is a rape scenario... "Oh no, misser Harris, no, please misser Harris!", throwing herself back from imaginary attacks. And he is sitting there trying to say no politely, hugely embarrassed by the whole thing, it's hilarious.
When they have the ability to make robots on the sophistication of the Blade Runner Replicants, you can believe they'll be sex robots!
ReplyDeleteSeeing as there's apparently a market for those horrible blow-up dolls which look about as much like a woman as a three-year-old's toy sword looks like the real thing, then I'd guess we'll have them well before then.
ReplyDeleteThere's a market, but only a limited one. I suspect Blade Runner type sex robots (as long as they didn't go insane and start killing people) would be popular with a vastly greater section of the world's male population.
ReplyDeleteObviously. The problem would be that they would probably be way too expensive to own for 99.9% of the population, and even way more expensive to hire than just using a hooker. I don't know if tech like that will ever become cheapish, I doubt it, and I'm sure that it will be at least a century before it becomes anything but mind-bogglingly expensive. *if* they ever manage to make one which is really convincing.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to say. I remember reading somwhere - might have been in The Physics of Star Trek - that artificial intelligence on the level of Data won't ever be possible. But it's hard to say.
ReplyDeleteThere are things today that are really cheap that once were too expensive for 99.9% of the population - computers themselves. I bet if someone 100 years ago had somehow been able to foresee the ipad they'd assume that only the five richest kings of Europe would own them.
The reason it's not obvious to everyone, though, is that most guys would deny they'd ever consider one. I'm just saying that's easy to say rigth now when, as you said, at the moment they're hardly realistic. If they became as real as a Blade Runner's Pris, a lot of those guys would probably change their tune.
Anyway, not in our lifetime probably, but you never know.
Good point, we can't be sure of anything.
ReplyDeleteI based it on the idea that while computing power has become cheap, complex *physical* items are still expensive, and a realistic human form which moves and acts human and doesn't require constant adjustment and fixes, would be very complex indeed.
Also interestingly, as we can see in CGI movies, it's now near two decades ago we could make dinosaurs which look totally realistic to us, but the human form and visage is so complex and familiar and important to us that so far as I know they have not yet succeeded with that.
The advantage of the blow-up dolls is that you can easily hide them... Blow-up robots seem more difficult to design :)
ReplyDeleteWow, that would be some trick. Fifth generation nanotech at least, if at all possible.
ReplyDeleteBut if the bot is *really* life-like, you don't have to hide it, just say it's your Personal Assistant or sister or wife.
I do wonder about artificial intelligence, whether it'll ever actually exist.
Also interestingly, as we can see in CGI movies, it's now near two decades ago we could make dinosaurs which look totally realistic to us, but the human form and visage is so complex and familiar and important to us that so far as I know they have not yet succeeded with that.
ReplyDeleteYeah, good point. If dinosaurs were still around maybe that CGI ones would look as unrealistic and creepy as CGI humans do.
I do wonder about artificial intelligence, whether it'll ever actually exist.
I don't know at the moment whether I want it to or not. In the end, too, it's hard to say if you could ever really prove that a computer is self aware or just really good at mimicking self-awareness. That point came up on one of the better Star Trek TNG episodes, and they basically decided that there was no way to know, and that you couldn't even really prove it about anyone.
I remember an Isaac Asimov story about a self-aware robot that travels back in time from a time when robots have completely taken over - peacefully - and are kind of the next evolution of man. It reads like a good thing, and not something to be feared. But as you say, it's hard to know whether it's possible or not.
The advantage of the blow-up dolls is that you can easily hide them... Blow-up robots seem more difficult to design :)
ReplyDeleteYou could just tell them to go hide in the closet.
"In the end, too, it's hard to say if you could ever really prove that a computer is self aware or just really good at mimicking self-awareness."
ReplyDeleteExactly. The Turing test claims that we have intelligence once it can fool a human in communication (not even face to face), but I think that's too easy, and does not say about Self-awareness. Or where that comes from.
Only our Lord in Heaven can create life.
ReplyDeleteThat's what He'd like you to believe.
ReplyDelete