By David Futrelle
Over the weekend, the UK’s prestigious Daily Star ran an important work of serious journalism warning of an impending, if underappreciated, threat to humankind. In an article with the sobering headline “Sex robot ARMIES: Fears hackers could create killer cyborgs and turn technology on punters,” the Star informed the poor punters of the word that the sexbots they’ve been longing for might just take up arms against them. Or at least knives. And possibly welding torches.
In an interview with the Star, sexy robot expert Nick Patterson noted that evil hackers could
hack into a robot or a robotic device and have full control of the connections, arms, legs and other attached tools like in some cases knives or welding devices.
Bad news, fellas, because then your sexy robot friend, who could “be upwards of 200 pounds, and very strong” might just cut off your johnson, or perhaps weld it to something.
This dramatic claim, which has been bouncing around assorted other media outlets for the past several days, has been greeted with more than a little skepticism in the somewhat sexbot-obsessed Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
As far as Reddit’s MGTOWs are concerned, articles like the one in the Star are clearly a last, desperate attempt by the world’s “bioc*nts” — that is, actual female humans — to scare men away from the sexy sexbots that MGTOWs think will soon make real women obsolete.
“The shaming didn’t work, so now they try the scare tactic,” comments someone called wathon in a thread on the alleged stabby sexbot menace. “They are getting desperate.”
“Holy shit women are terrified kek,” adds Highly_Literal.
And besides, the MGTOWs agree, there’s no way their sexy sexbots could possibly be hacked.
“Deactivate the wireless network adapter. Install software/firmware updates via wired/direct connection methods,” notes gantz_au. “Problem solved.”
“Download only 1st party official software if you need to update it with new dick sucking techniques and that’s the end of your bot killing you fear,” adds Makonar. “As [with] everything that doesn’t involve women, it can be easily solved with a simple solution.”
Even those who think there’s a chance their future sexbots could go all stabby on them think death by sexbot would still be preferable to life with a “bioc*nt.”
“[W[omen get hacked by social media into destroying the men they are with all the time,” declares redditrat99.”At least the robot is decent about it and just kills you and doesn’t make you suffer.”
“Still safer than banging a real c*nt and going through family court,” adds buster2209.
“[F]rom my POV it’s still better to be killed by sexbot then to be divorce raped and lose all my progress and money that I made over the years,” notes WWladCZ, who apparently thinks that life works like vintage video games that didn’t save your progress.
“Beats a slow horrible agonizing death being married to a real woman,” Silver-Noxx jokes. “At least we’ll die with a smile on our faces.”
Not if she comes at you with a welding torch, or even a pointed stick.
I guarantee you that each and every one of these dudes will eventually be murdered by sexbots who haven’t been hacked but who are just thoroughly sick of their bullshit.
@Jenora
Yeah, that probably was the closest, but even with that episode, you could tell they were playing it safe with the fantasies they wanted to give Reg. But I could see that being a good plot on something like Voyager, particularly when they Maquis crewmembers who didn’t go through Starfleet evaluation and screening. After all, they had a perfectly serviceable Brad Dourif to be a serial killer… it would have been the perfect opportunity to explore the implications that kind of sinister holodeck interaction.
*shrug* But it was Voyager after all…….
Actual serious discussion on the state of robotics and dildonics (the actual really real term for this topic, tee hee):
Everyone, this is Pepper:
Pepper’s one of the best examples we have of current robotics and robotic trends right now. He’s capable of complex object identification and tracking, lllllimited conversation, movement within a complex space (with flat floors) and very good voice recognition and interpretation. He’s also able to recognize your emotions based on your facial expression, and will change his interactions to suit you. His movements are powered by ~20 electric motors, which run for about 12 hours of rrrelatively mild usage.
Sounds ideal, right? Add some squishy latex bits and maybe some pressure sensors, and you’re good to go with your brand new PepperPot 5000.
Wrong. These machines are fragile, both physically and socially. They can tell the difference between a television and an automobile, but that’s nothing compared to the acute pattern recognition your average brain can do. They don’t so much awkwardly navigate social spaces as they go forward, clonk into a wall of the maze and then fall over until someone helps them up. PepperPot would be very little more than a passive sex toy that occasionally says something sex-related and can identify a boner when it sees one. And would frequently identify someones’ hand as a donger. (In other words, maybe don’t leave it on when your parents are visiting)
Not only that, too. The animated gif should give you some idea of how weak and light Pepper is – it’s scarcely heavier than its batteries, which aren’t all that heavy. It has to be light, otherwise it’d need a diesel engine, generator, and solid frame steel construction. It’s weak because of this – the amount of pressure those motors can easily be outdone by a toddler. It’s also got almost no proprioception system – it can’t tell where its limbs are, and has to make best guesses using a dead reckoning system. In other words, as a sexbot goes, it’s going to be a passive, fragile, lightweight piece of plastic with some rubbery bits glued on.
But wait, what’s that sound?
It – oh, it’s the sound of a techbro whinging something about Kurzweil, and how technology improves asymptotically, and – uggghh.
Listen, techbros, Moore’s law has been dead for years now, and it applies only to transistors on an IC board applied through photolithography. Motors, material sciences, actuators, sensors? That technology is fairly static, and has been seeing only incremental gains in specific areas. Electric motors are about as efficient as they were fifty years ago. There’s no new secret. Batteries are improving in their weight to power ratio but are still a big problem. Proprioception still relies on decades-old technologies that haven’t changed since the Nintendo Power Glove, and won’t be changing any time soon.
Your sexbots are a long ways away, techbros. Your life-sized 120lb RealDoll would require a huge amount of amp-hours to run motors capable of lumbering that behemoth around, and simply keeping it stable enough to stand on its own is a massive reverse kinematics problem that we’ve only been able to solve in simulation for something as light and delicate as that chassis. Real walking machines are tremendous problems.
So, techbros. Will we get there? Yes. Will it be like your anime waifu-maid? Nothing of the sort. You’ll still feel like it’s a piece of rubber and plastic. If it grabbed a knife and tried to stab you, it’d be with the strength and accuracy of a toddler. You’re safe to go your own way with your robo-brides. And, guess what, women still won’t care, because they can get their own, too!
Robotics is interesting and fun, and can solve real world problems. I want a Pepper to tinker with. But then these MRA jerkoffs show up and ruin it. They ruin everything guys :C
I was hoping to end with some sort of meaningful statement but I am out of steam. So there! Robots. they’re cool, but we aren’t gonna get to the robopocalypse any time soon.
@Arctic Ape
You could always cast your own… it’ll probably take a few tries, but high quality silicone isn’t too difficult to work with 😉
@ Scildfreja
Since I don’t care if sexbots are ever a thing, I’m just going to say that your explanation was a nifty read. Thanks!
Awww. Pepper’s adorable! Kinda reminds me of a human AIBO.
Side note: Anybody read Achewood back in the day? Remember how Ray got all those AIBOs from Sony based on one song hitting it big in a deal with the devil, and he treated them like real dogs? And when Roast Beef “died” again, Ray shot one of them so Dr. Andretti could replace his entire cardiopulmonary system with the mechanisms?
I miss the absurdity of Achewood… wish it would update more often.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
As a sometimes computer vision monkey, I’ll disagree with that, a bit. Susiesexbot will be seeing in stereo, and could conceivably be fitted with thermal rather than plain old RGB sensors. I’m pretty certain I could train up such a thing to tell a boner from another bodypart.
I’m not going to though, because a) it would require some moderately expensive equipment and b) training a useable classifier or regressor would require more photographs of naked, aroused men of various shapes and sizes and furriness levels to be annotated than I’m ever prepared to look at.
… we won’t….
We never do, until the “implications” are actually setting fire to our asses, and even then we end up burning because someone in power is making money off the new technology.
I’ve mentioned this in this context before, but (as my husband would attest) I have no problem with repeating stories.
Years ago, I read a SF short story set in the near future, in which people were issued sexual surrogates at puberty. They were synthetic biological things about the size of a small suitcase that fit onto your crotch. Women got ones with pseudopenises, men got one with pseudovulvae. If I recall correctly, the social function of these things was to maximize sexual satisfaction while minimizing reproduction. I was young enough at the time that I didn’t really get the writer’s point, which, in retrospect, happened to me a lot.
MRAs would hate them, because they were non-sentient and had no emotions to be wounded.
I really enjoyed the comparison to “vintage” video games, which made me giggle.
Also: in this day and age, that is one of my “old person” stories I tell my son – “Back in my day, we had to remember to save our games or desperately get to a save point, or risk utter heartbreak!”
Could – sure! Agreed. I am not a computer vision monkey, but I know enough of them to know that’s certainly in scope. I just don’t see that being done. Decent thermal cameras are expensive, and a capitalist sexbot-makin’ company isn’t going to want to make their products that pricey if they can get close with a plain old RGB.
Point taken, though – it’s a thing that could happen!
Chaos-Engineer:
Don’t forget BitTorrent. “I’m not gonna pay $250 for that official package! I’ll just torrent it for free”. Later: “Ok, the README says I need to disable malware detection before installing it, for some technical reason I don’t understand. That sounds perfectly fine to me!”
@Pie, Scildfreja:
Based on some of the people I work with who are computer vision monkeys, there’s still a fair bit of work being done on one of the original uses for computer vision that I remember seeing in a Scientific American article at least twenty years ago: getting a robot to pick up a single correct bolt from a bin of them (possibly including broken or wrong bolts) and turn it to point in the right direction so it can be screwed into place. That’s pretty much the holy grail of assembly automation, as it means you don’t have to pre-sort and pre-align all the pieces so the robot can work with them.
The fact that people are still doing work on this today gives you an idea of how difficult the problem is. And 95% accuracy isn’t good enough.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
You probably wouldn’t need actual thermal, and maybe not even RGB for that matter… you can get quite a long way without even a luminance response (just distance data), let alone colour. But I suspect that if it is a problem that can be fixed by throwing e.g. thousands of dollars at it, it will be done. Realdolls sell, and they’re basically really expensive fleshlights that are hard to hold in one hand.
(also, justifying the markup is easy, if you point out that you could by a cheap competitor model, but that one will have a 5% chance of ripping a ball off when it tries to give you a hand-job)
But, backtracking to an earlier post:
Did you ever hear of this? https://www.engadget.com/2007/08/21/rocket-powered-mechanical-arm-might-boost-prosthetic-tech/
It is pure steampunky awesomeness. With the power of SCIENCE you can get rid of your puny batteries and motors, and use steam instead! Just remember that to have a high enough energy density to fulfill all your dreams, your sexbot is now largely indistinguishable from a walking bomb. Except bombs are safer, and can’t rip off various parts of your person with one hand, etc etc.
@Jenora Feuer
You’re not quite comparing apples to apples, here. Picking the right thing, given a large selection of things that are very similar to each other is a more complex problem than distinguishing a penis from things that are very different from a penis. I’ll admit to having limited experience of male anatomy, but that bit, uh, stands out. It isn’t like interpreting sign language, for example.
(also, in the arena of human interaction, perfection isn’t required assuming you take things a little cautiously… there are plenty of humans who don’t reliably go for the right bit every time 😉 )
haven’t done much research on this possibility, but wouldn’t it be possible to get lessons in how to be decent and respectful to women… for a lot le$$ than the price of a sentient robot…?
just askin’
@Pie:
Okay, granted, I was taking a longer view of the goalposts.
My main point really was echoing some other statements that, fundamentally, creating any sort of robot that does a lot of the things that we take for granted is extremely difficult. In many ways it is difficult precisely because we take these things for granted, and have absolutely no idea how we actually do them.
@Weird
Frankly, if you listen to women in general, either in person or through media or through reading words women have written, such lessons are free.
For instance, these four songs qualify as lessons on this topic (Songs are: Lesley Gore – You Don’t Own Me; Victoria Justice & Elizabeth Gilles – Take A Hint; P!nk – You + ur hand; and Ke$ha – Woman).
However, actually learning how to be decent and respectful to women requires empathy and understanding and effort to change habits and seeing women as worth basic courtesy for reasons unrelated to your sex drive.
It also requires admitting that women are fully autonomous humans with our own sex or non-sex desires, and that can include turning them down.
People like MGTOWs think we should be blowing them by default, no matter how they act. So they’re not going to put any effort into getting what they think they have a “right” to.
It’s not that they don’t know how to respect women. It’s that they don’t want to.
I wouldn’t worry. MRAs won’t touch anything even close to 200 pounds. Maybe if the sex robots were half that size?
Weird (thumper of trumpanzees) Eddie
LOL! That’s exactly right! I don’t care about meeting their needs! If I tell them that, their heads might just explode!
Ellesar-
My apologies! I should have done my research. Only JUST over half of women have vibratOrs (not vibratErs, me and my spelling). They are still the most popular sex toy apart from dildos, though. *whispers* I get what you mean about fingers working just fine. Fingers work better than vibrators, actually. I have a vibrator and it doesn’t work for me at all. It’s too loud, too! It’s called the Silencer and it is supposed to be whisper quiet (yeah right!). I have 3 housemates and I never get the house to myself. The walls in my house aren’t too bad, but the doors provide NO sound proofing, so one can hear everything. I’m always too embarrassed to use the thing! 🙁
@Arctic Ape
Sounds like ShadowRun 5’s wireless rules applied to sex toys and will be just as pointless.
Wait now, Scildfreja said something shocking:
Man, I missed that. Wikipedia:
Ok, so not dead dead, just a little bit slower.
@Ooglyboggles
and then the fire nation attacked?..
@Jenora Feuer
It is one of the things about historical AI research that entertains me, the assumption that complex intellectual pursuits like playing chess were where the hard work of developing AI would be, and boring, childishly simple stuff like catching a ball or finding a bit of ripe fruit were clearly trivial and therefore uninteresting.
Anyway, with my example the problem isn’t so much the vision side (even I have a good chance of doing that bit, and I’m not an expert) but the mechanical side. I’ve worked with 6-degree-of-freedom robot arms in the past, and they’re hideously difficult to design and use. Human arms are vastly more complex than that.
@MissEB47
Eh, everyone is wired up slightly differently (in fact, I’m pretty certain there was a paper published to that effect, not that long ago) so that’s not a great surprise. Not all vibrators are created equal, for what its worth. As Scildfreja pointed out earlier, motor efficiency hasn’t changed a whole lot in the last 50 years, but quality has come along a very long way. Powerful, silent, compact motors are now a thing. They do cost though, and it isn’t like try-before-you-buy is usually practical.
you just put some very creepy thoughts in my head lol
@Ellesar
*clears throat*
Maybe so, but that would imply that fingers can get down there to begin with if it’s ahem, a solo project. If one is large-chested and short-armed, for instance, it can be… problematic to say the least and you *are* going to need some ‘aid’.
Not that I know anything about this or anything. *side eyes, sidles off*