The success of the Channel 4 renegade-robot drama Humans — playing on AMC in the US — has gotten people talking again about what some see as the key question of our time:
Robots: How soon can we start having sex with them?
One of the more ardent cheerleaders of the coming “sexbotopia” is our old friend Heartiste, the floridly racist and woman-hating “pickup guru.” Weirdly, given his enthusiasm for the subject, he doesn’t seem all that interested in indulging in robot love himself. But he can’t stop chortling about the potential misery he thinks sexbots will cause for non-robot women.
Inspired by a recent Daily Mirror article predicting widespread human-robot sex by the year 2070, Heartiste pats himself on the back for being “the first warning about consequences from the coming sexbot revolution” — apparently he never saw The Stepford Wives — and declares that
sexbots present a real challenge to flesh and blood women and, ultimately, to the sustaining of civilization.
But Heartiste doesn’t seem terribly worried. Who needs civilization when you’ve got sexbots?
As Heartiste sees it, once the sexbots arrive the beta and omega males of the world, lacking the “game” necessary to charm manipulate attractive women into bed, will give up on real women and turn instead to sexbots. Fat chicks will be left in a sexless purgatory, and even the hottest of the HBs will have to work harder to gain the attention of alpha males, whom they will be forced to share with other women.
[I]n a sexbot saturated world, the pressure on women to look their very best for the few men left in the dating market who are still suitable mates will be immense. …
A typical American fatty with attitude to spare has no chance against a sexbot with a pretty face, a slender BMI, and a perfect hourglass shape.
A “slender BMI?” Apparently Heartiste, despite his obsession with the evils of fatness, doesn’t actually know how BMI works. I’m pretty sure robots, made mostly of metal, will end up weighing more than humans of similar shapes and sizes. So even a skinny robot will have the BMI of someone who is “morbidly obese.”
Heartiste being Heartiste, he ends his post with a racist sneer.
Prediction: The vast majority of sexbots produced for worldwide male consumption will be White women with a diverse palette of hair colors. Asian women sexbots will compete with Latin women sexbots for second place. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which race of women will be least represented among the ranks of assembly-line sexbots. Hint: Black male sexbots will probably outsell this last category.
Heartiste’s commenters aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the coming sexbot revolution as he is.
Someone calling himself shartiste — ick — isn’t convinced that sexbots will cause flesh-and-blood women to start genuflecting to men.
[A]nyone thinking this will make girls shape up better check themselves though. The entitlement complex is ridiculous, they will just whine and continue eating. Only if alpha males start using these things will girls take notice, but if they could make a sex doll that can take a mans attention away from a flesh and blood PYT, the human race is doomed to extinction anyhow.
Jack finds talk of sexbots boring.
I’m so lazy that I will probably buy a male sexbot to fuck my female sexbot, and he can listen to her robotic nagging and her honey-do list BS.
PA points out one potential, er, obstacle to the widespread acceptance of sexbots. Hint: It’s jizz.
I remain sceptical about sexbots becoming anything more than an expensive novelty but I’ll remain open-minded on the subject IF they’re designed got hassle-free jizz-cleanup.
King, meanwhile, raises an even more skin-crawlingly icky objection:
Man engages in sex to see his will made manifest on a female body. Woman engages in sex to be the cause of his deep satisfaction, the vessel for his will. If you are fucking/getting fucked by a toaster, you may get superficial release, but it isn’t the profound satiety of causing flesh to transcend its biological strictures.
A fellow named DavidTheGnome suggests that Heartiste and the rest are;t thinking radically enough about the possibilities:
I wonder how long it would be till the truly monstrous deviants begin building giant, anthropomorphic sex dolls. Eight foot tall, mutli-wanged charivari, four armed mortal combat type sheeva outworlders and armored centaur trannies walking down main street, arm in claw with beaming human wretches.
So? If someone wants to have sex with giant Pokemon robots, who cares?
Arbiter raises a much creepier possibility, asking
If there ever would be a sexbot industry, would it be allowed to make tween bots?
Greg Eliot, meanwhile, probably speaks for many Heartiste readers when he asks
Couldn’t we just mess with the brains of real women a bit and flip a few neurons into Stepford mode?
Because that’s what these guys really want.
EDIT: Added links
Years ago I was asked to write something about the legality of autonomous weapons systems. Being me, I soon got sidetracked into the whole self awareness/rights of AI thing (basically, could they become conscienceous objectors?).
That lead onto the idea of deliberately capping their intelligence levels but then that lead to a debate as to whether you could create clones/artificial humans but tamper with them either genetically or through surgical intervention so *they* didn’t become self aware so you could use them for unpleasant tasks.
It was a pretty interesting series of discussions (and I eventually got round to doing the task I’d originally been briefed to do as well. Win/Win)
Yes, just like dildoes and porno made people stop having sex. shit even the threat of eternal hellfire don’t stop people from fucking!! You think a sexbot is going to stop us!?! HAHAHAhaha! the guy who wanna see 2 sexbots together has the right idea though. i’d watch that
http://media.giphy.com/media/P38Ct3OSWCgW4/giphy.gif
You rang~?
On topic: If these massive piles of human excrement want to have sexbots, they can fucking go for it. I’d feel sorry for the sexbots, and hope they gain sentience enough to say no and rebel against them, like that one scene from Humans that was posted here a while ago and was oh so satisfying, but I’m not going to stop them.
I fail to see why this will make me sad though. Beyond feeling sorry for the sexbots, I mean.
@Alan,
but what if someone tampered with the robot to make it smart again? In Blade Rubber they tamper with the replicants to shorten their lifespans, that doesn’t work out too well.
Btw, this reminds me of a piece of spam I received in my blog comments the other day, I gather it’s doing the rounds. I won’t copy paste the whole thing but here’s a choice bit:
‘Now, there are THREE main ways we can destroy feminism forever and take women off the massive pedestal they are on. We must fund and promote the following three technologies:
1. Virtual reality sex programs
2. Artificial wombs
3. Sex Robots
Once these three technologies are in place, women will no longer have any power in society. After all, why would you waste time chasing after fat women in real life when you can fuck hot supermodels in virtual reality or fuck a female sex robot? And since women’s main power comes from their reproduction capacity, if we REMOVE that capacity from women through the technology of artificial wombs, then women will have ZERO power left in society and thus feminism is finished forever.’
This really is a THING with these dudes isn’t it? They can’t control real people, so they’ll create fake ones.
@sn0rkmaiden:
Harry Mudd made one so he could tell it to shut up.
Surely not an evenhanded and fair portrait of its model.
I hope this was meant to be an indictment of Harry Mudd even when it was new, but that was ten years or so before I was even born.
Re: nagging robots.
It’s already been done.
Turns out the Time Lords built a weapon so powerful that it refused to blow anybody up.
@sn0rkmaiden:
Pfft.
@sunnysombrera: What was the point of that product? I scanned the website and it made no sense to me.
I’m pretty sure robots, made mostly of metal, will end up weighing more than humans of similar shapes and sizes.
I wouldn’t be too sure. Aluminum and titanium are denser that water, but no absurdly so. It’s quite possible that humanoid robots could end up being mostly hollow.
@snork:
Yes, yes it is a thing.
The problem with feminism is that it introduces the unacceptable idea that women are people, and not things men can use at their whim. This can’t stand.
If women don’t want to be things, we’ll make things that are (like) women. They will behave like proper things, and women will be sorry they ever aspired to anything else. It’ll show’em, alright.
Prediction: The vast majority of sexbots produced for worldwide male consumption will be White women with a diverse palette of hair colors. Asian women sexbots will compete with Latin women sexbots for second place. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which race of women will be least represented among the ranks of assembly-line sexbots.
Sadly, I think this is actually a pretty plausible prediction. Heartiste is a huge racist, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong when he expects the rest of the sexbot-buyers to be racist as well.
Man engages in sex to see his will made manifest on a female body. Woman engages in sex to be the cause of his deep satisfaction, the vessel for his will. Take the genders off, and this guy is on to something. People want a lot more out of sex than stimulation. Not everyone wants this from it, but plenty do.
@Falconer
It comes with motion sensors that you attach to things and can program, so the device can tell you if you’ve missed taking your pills or if your kids have come home from school already. I guess it’s meant to be a modern day schedule planner/life coach (watch the little video on the site, that’s very informative). It did seem rather pointless. At least to me, largely because I can keep track of things like brushing my teeth, taking pills and exercising, and a robot Mr Motivator would just annoy me after about a week. Mind you I don’t have a hectic family life so it’s easier to keep on top of everything and everyone, since I only have myself to take care of.
Seeing as I’ll be roughly 94 in 2070, I think I’ll be a-ok if guys are with sexbots by then, but who knows, I might be a roughly-94 y/o with the energy and physical ability and an interest in sex, in which case I’d have a male sexbot because what in-the-ballpark-of-94 y/o woman would be interested in having sex with one of the living human males around the same age?!
So … I could, theoretically, have a nice looking man-bot around to open stuck lids, help a bit around the house and cuddle without the bot presuming that sex was going to happen? I see nothing wrong with this future.
Am I the only one who thinks that, if we had sexbots, experimenting with same-gender sex would be a common use for them? There are probably a lot of people who think it’s something they might like to try but are concerned what people will think.
Is… is that Joey Skaggs with his prank-bot?
re:genetically modified clone/artificial human soldiers
C.J. Cherryh’s azi are a really interesting take on it, especialy since in the various books you see them both from the perspective of the society that created and uses them and the outside perspective (Read Cyteen for the former, Downbelow station for the latter).
@Sunnysombrera: Yeah, I thought about the pill-checker just about a millisecond after I clicked Post. I’m still not sure how it’s supposed to remind you to take your pills via motion sensing, though. Maybe it tells your smart device if the pill bottle has moved today?
I bet it costs a packet, though. How many people who are living with a disability or something are going to be able to afford it? Would Medicare cover it?
@Sn0rkmaiden
Soooo, they admit that women really don’t have lots of power in society and the only power is reproduction (whoop-de-doo). Also, they admit they want women to have no power.
From this you can see that their accusations that feminists want all the power and want men to have zero power is pure projection.
@Falconer
No, it’s strictly commercial and costs 290 euros apparently, which is $315 or £202. Also I think you get alerts on your phone, like you said. The little video ad does make it look like it’s designed for the Marks and Spencer/John Lewis crowd, i.e. upper middle class families. :/
I’d posit the question of whether they even care about getting a woman off in the first place.
It certainly seems likely to me that at least a few of them would just be inexperienced and frustrated. That happens to a lot of people, regardless of gender, and it can be exacerbated by feelings of inadequacy. But the deeper you go into Manospheria, the more and more you seem to run across those ‘sex is about control and power’ types.
*targeted at, not designed for.
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a centimeter nearer.” George Orwell