So a Men’s Rights Redditor called ArgueLater is apparently quite impressed by the conversational prowess of OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. This, combined with the increased sophistication of “bipedal anthropomorphic robots,” can only mean one thing: really chatty sexbots, which will bring about something close to a utopia for long-suffering men.
As ArgueLater sees it, technological advances will bring us “robots which out-perform pretty much any man or woman as a partner (barring the ability to reproduce).”
This, he thinks, will make us humans better people,
mend[ing] the gap [between men and women] through bots exemplifying (and thus teaching us) our ideals of emotional intelligence, with men and women later coming back to the table as the best versions of themselves.
Also, these new bots will fuck us without complaining, and for some, that will be enough in itself.
It may also be a filter for certain people who only want a slave as a partner, and will just stick with the bot.
Not only that, but the new ability of men to have sex with robots will also decrease their chronic thirstiness–and thus reduce the power human women now have over men.
the big giant flip here is that one of woman kinds greatest powers has always been the ability to manipulate thirsty males. Male thirst is an important part of the evolutionary process, seemingly inexorable. But it can be quenched, and — for the first time ever — men and women will be on a level field in regards to who needs who more: nobody, we’ll have bots.
So take that, ladies! See how you like having conversations with men who don’t spend every second of the day trying to figure out how to fuck you. I bet that will suck!
It’s on the horizon, and I think it’s going to be one of the biggest changes to the relationship between men and women in human history.
I guess we’ll have to see.
The Men’s Rights subreddit regulars find this a compelling vision of the future. Minus the part about going back to women as better human beings; they’re not into that at all.
“Why would I want to go back to women if bots became a real thing??” asks Ok_Influence7378.
AnFGhoster has a similar question, and an answer:
Gynoids would convince most guys to never go back to organic women. Which I think is why every time this topic is brought up feminists have a reeeee moment. It threatens their soft power base
And that makes ChaosOpen think it’s never going to happen.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they figure out a way to ban the use of robots as sex toys. There is simply too much money devoted to exploiting marriage and they will claim this will lead to a population crisis.
All these points may not seem terribly new to anyone who has ever looked in on MRAs talking about sexbots before. That’s because they’re not. AI may be evolving in leaps and bounds, but the MRAs sure aren’t.
I decided to ask ChatGPT itself if it thought sexbots would ever replace women, as the MRAs would have it, and it gave an answer that was a lot more thoughtful than anything I’ve ever heard from human MRAs.
“It is unlikely that sexbots will ever completely replace women,” wrote ChatGPT after thinking for all of a second.
While sexbots may be able to provide some of the same services as women, they are not capable of replacing the complex emotional and social interactions that are a fundamental part of human relationships. Additionally, the idea that one group of people should be replaced by technology is not a healthy or productive way of thinking. It is important for people to continue to respect and value each other, regardless of their gender or any other characteristic.
While I was at it, I also asked the chatbot to name three krautrock albums that would be a good starting place for anyone newly interested in the genre. It hemmed and hawed a little:
Krautrock is a diverse and vast genre of music that incorporates elements of electronic, psychedelic, and experimental rock music. As such, there is no definitive “starting place” for someone who is newly interested in the genre.
But it still managed to pick a few titles.
- Can’s “Tago Mago”
- Neu!’s “Neu! 75”
- Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”
Not bad choices, though I might suggest Can’s “Future Days” instead.
These albums are considered to be classic examples of krautrock and are widely regarded as influential in the development of electronic and experimental music. However, there are many other great krautrock albums out there, and the best starting point for someone new to the genre will depend on their individual tastes and interests.
Good conversation, chatbot, good conversation.
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@Perugga:
I’m german and I just looked up the etymology of Schmetterling. To my surprise, you were right- apparently, it comes from an old german word for cream (Schmetten). According to wikipedia, certain kinds of butterflies were attracted when butter was made, so much so that other names like Milchdieb (milk thief) were also used.
It’s not something I’ve witnessed personally, but I could see butterflies being attracted to dairy as a nutrient-rich liquid animal product—the same reason they’re drawn to carrion and urine. (A friend of mine has a screened patio that mysteriously became a graveyard for swallowtail butterflies unable to find their way back out; my guess is that what brought them was the elderly and incontinent dog who then lived there.)
Also, we have bats. You have Fledermäusen; the German LEGO word is the clear winner.
@Full Metal Ox
Isn’t it great how the general perception of butterflies is that they are pretty, dainty, almost decorative like flowers, but in reality they are just animals with animal instincts? The image of the butterflies and the poor incontinent dog is quite something… if the dog was anything like mine, he would have been quite annoyed with the butterflies circling him.
Sadly, I don’t see many Fledermäuse where I live. Love the LEGO thing. Yes, we do stack words together like that…
@Full Metal Ox
Fledermaus (singular), Fledermäuse (plural). No ‘n’ at the end for regular plural. With an ‘n’ at the end, it only appears in the dativ case (“den Fledermäusen”). Iirc, how the plural is formed dependson the word gender and ending, but I don’t remember the exact rules. It’s weird how you often remember grammar rules of your secondary/tertiary language better than your first…
@Alan Robertshaw
I doubt it. Very old English loan words afaik didn’t make it to the south, due to how fragmented the country was during a long stretch of its history, but “Schmetterling” is a pretty old word. The actual origin was explained by Perugga above.
@Surplus
It’s Reichsbürger, not Reichburgers. The pronounciation and meaning are completely different. Bürger in German is an old word for citizen that is still used today. Reich means realm and is used in words like Kaiserreich (empire, where they get take it from; best translation would likely be something like “citizens of the empire. They are lunatics who believe that the current government is fake, usurpers, and that we are actually still an empire so German law, coming from a fake government, is void).
I personally like my language. I never found it angry or any bullshit like that. It can sound very gentle and, contrary to what that joke implies, eloquent. It’s really not any different from any other language, and at least pronounciation is consistent contrary to English… my only gripe is the lack of gender-neutral personal pronouns.
And to be fair, my local dialect, Swabian, is a bit softer than others I think…
She’s not precisely krautrock, but I just want to express how disappointed I am that Nina Hagen has gone full TERF, in addition to being an HIV/AIDS denialist.
@KMB:
Hmm. Sounds a lot like those “Sovereign Citizen” types who use similar conspiracy theories to argue against having to pay their taxes or parking tickets. (Cue ever-larger fines, contempt charges, and, eventually, jail.)
No “they/them” kludge even? The plurals are gendered or something?
And in the decades since that book was released, we’ve all experienced a CAPTCHA that mistakenly flags us as bots.
bcb: I recently saw somebody joke that after centuries of philosophical debate over what makes us human, it turns out that what makes us human is the ability to click on every square that contains an image of a motorcycle.
@Moon Custafer – or traffic lights! For some reason, I always get traffic lights.
Here’s a German song I like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12yxMHtj_FI&list=RDMM12yxMHtj_FI&start_radio=1
@KMB – Could “sie” with a plural verb conjugation be used as a gender-neutral singular, like “they”? Or would you mentally file that into either “formal ‘you'” or “they = more than one person”?
…And very much yes, it can be hard to explain grammar conventions in your first language! Because it’s hard to articulate things you do automatically. Even more so in phonology than grammar.
Like, it took me a linguistics class to actually notice that English speakers pronounce the ending “s” differently depending on whether the sound before is voiced or unvoiced (/z/ after voiced sounds, /s/ after unvoiced). And when I asked my teacher for beginner German whether “s” was always pronounced /z/ before vowels, she had to think about it before answering.
(In English, “s” is often pronounced /z/ between vowels…but /s/ if the vowel only comes after, like in “so” or “also”)
@Surplus @epitome
German plural always uses the female “die”. “Die Frau (singular the woman), die Frauen; der Mann (singular man), die Männer”. German is, unfortunately, a highly gendered language, and while there is a neutral pronoun in “es”…. I think most people would object to be called “it”, or call themselves that. It’s kinda dehumanizing. When talking about someone else, we got “sie (she), er (he), and es (it)”, but “sie” capitalized is also the polite form of “du” (you) and used all the time when addressing people, especially those you don’t know (eg. “Arbeiten Sie hier?” for “are you working here?”). So yeah, it would most likely be filed as polite “you” or female pronouns. There is no real they/them equivalent that’s usable the same way that I know of. Mh. Maybe the old royal way of addressing people with “er” when talking to a man or “sie” to a woman, but that is super condescending and also still gendered… we will need a completely different pronoun which will take time to introduce and spread.
About the English ‘s’. I think there are times when something like that happens in German, too, but I personally never notice it. It also doesn’t help that many people’s speach is colored by their local dialects, even unconsciously. I speak pretty clean standard German, for example, but even when trying my best, people are still able to figure out where I’m from simply from how I pronounce certain things like “st”, for example. In my dialect area (middle Swabian) we usually pronounce the “st” sound “schd”, and even when switching to standard German some of that gets retained and often sounds a lot like “scht” both at the start of a word and in the middle. Other dialects have their own quirks like “ick/icke” in the northeast, especially Berlin. Nobody like the Saxon dialect…
@KMB Haha what are the chances of finding another swabian in this comment section? Hallöle! 🙂
Gender neutrality really is a difficult topic in German as KMB explained. And the best(?) most commonly used options are often criticized to ironically emphasise gender by using punctuation marks to “include” the female gender.
That means that a gendered plural like “Studenten” (which, same as in spanisch can either mean both male and female students or a group of only male students) becomes “Student:innen”. That is often criticised (not without reason) as exclusive to non-binary people and a non-practical solution for spoken language. The first attempts are to make a little pause when saying a gendered plural, but it’s not as common yet. Personally I use it as often as possible in written language because it’s at least a start and a way to make people think about how language is used. The generic masculine noun hides women and that has a proven psychological effect on how people see the world.
It’s also a favorite topic for MRA in Germany. Most ironic is how many claim that women KNOW that they are “mitgemeint” (also adressed) and then in the same sentence go on to complain that they feel left out by the use of the female “innen”-suffix
Edit: For any english speaker who wanna know what Germans are talking about when they’re making fun of the saxonian dialect: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cl6yDnGjfqk/?hl=de
@KMB: My dad was stationed in West Berlin (before I was born) and he, my mom, and my brother were all lost when they went to Garmisch one winter.
@Moon Custafer: LOL. I get traffic lights or buses.
@rusalka: So it’s the equivalent of our “stupid southern yokel” accent?
@GSS ex-noob: I’m not sure that there really is an equivalent to “southern yokel” in Germany or the German language. Sure, a strong accent might be associated with a lack of intelligence or education or being a “hillibilly” but it a) depends on the dialect and b) on the person perceiving said dialect.
A person with a saxonian dialect will mostly be associated with being the stereotypical “Ossi”. A person from the former GDR but there’s not one common opinion on what accent is the “most ridiculous” in Germany, to some it’s bavarian and to some it’s berlinerisch. There are dialects like saxonian that like 90% of people agree sounds hilarious (or horrendous), while other’s like hessisch get less ridicule.
And it’s not all about ridicule btw. Dialects play an important role in german humour and I feel like it works slightly different than with English. I can’t say how, I lack the experience of living in an english speaking country. But take the motto my home state invented for example “Wir können alles – außer Hochdeutsch” (= We can do everything – except speak proper, standard German). Some people think that’s cringe, others think it’s funny as hell.
I once knew an online commenter from Austria who claimed the funniest sounding German is spoken “in Switzerland above 2000 meters”. I reckon that in recent times, rural areas have generally retained more of their local quirky dialect compared to more urbanized areas, and in Switzerland rurality apparently correlates very much with altitude.
Epitome:
I came across a video a few months ago where an instructor gives tips for pronouncing English words, and realized I’d never really thought about how the consonants on the ends of words are usually almost silent, unless the following word begins with a vowel. Even though the same thing happens in French, it’s just a bit more formalized there.
@KMB, russalka: Is Saxony the yellow section on map #3 here?
https://twitter.com/terriblemaps/status/1069654921857908740
@rusalka
Ha so äbbes! Grüß Gottle!
Mir Schwoaba send echt übral.
@Moon Custafer
Kinda, but the eastern half especially. Erzgebirglerisch is the “worst” part of it iirc, which would be the along the southern border of that area.
Interesting! For German, yes, I’ve run across plural forms like “Student*innen” in the textbook but I wasn’t sure whether you were meant to say both “Studenten” and “Studentinnen” or just pause. French has the same deal with gendered plurals, so I often see brackets, e.g. “tou(te)s” for all/everybody, but in speaking aloud people usually say both (at least for short words like this).
(English is my first language but I live in Quebec, which is majority French.)
Regarding German:
My missing message that went to spam on Friday still hasn’t shown up again, but I took German for three years in high school, as well as French for four years. (I’m Canadian, French was pretty much expected, German just looked interesting.) And I still say I learned more about the English language in my German class than I did in my English class, because a few oddities like the English possessive ending of -‘s make much more sense once you realize it’s almost certainly a contraction of the German genitive case ending of -es. (The older the parts of English are, the more likely they are to be Germanic or Danish rather than Latinate or French.)
And yes, German has lots of dialects, just like English does. From a historical perspective, you could make a good case that while the Gutenberg Bible is mostly known for bringing religious interpretation to the masses, it’s just as important for formalizing a single written German language out of the dozens of dialects at the time. The translation work on it spent a lot of effort on choosing words that could be understood by as many of the different German speakers as possible.
(And there used to be a comic book called The Desert Peach, set in a German ‘misfit unit’ during WWII, in which at one point in an argument one character insulted another character for his accent by calling him a ‘mealy-mouthed Swabian’. Donna Barr was not unfamiliar with the German language.)
Also on the music discussion… aside from Nena, the first modern German music I heard would probably have been Münchener Freiheit, which was also considered part of Neue Deutsche Welle. They released a few albums entirely in English, and one of their tracks (“Keeping the Dream Alive”) apparently hit #14 on the UK charts, as well as getting a bit more renown elsewhere. So they’re a bit of a one-hit wonder in the Englsh-speaking world. Though my favourite song from that album would be “Kissed You in the Rain” instead.
(A friend of mine who acts as a DJ sent me a mixtape of songs that I listened to a lot when I was in the hospital back in the mid-1990s, and a couple of Freiheit’s songs were on there. I spent some time looking for the original album after I got out of the hospital again.)
@KMB Aber echt! In jedem Eck a Schwoba Geck! Reminds me of the time I sat on a rock at Finisterre (my last day of the Camino de Santiago), looking out to the sea and what do I hear? “JA DA GUGGET MOL NO! HA ISCH DES NET SCHEEEEE?” (= translate that as some very loud swabians trampling right through my little contemplative moment) 😀
@Lumipuna: That’s interesting. I think that might be cause that person understands Swiss german somewhat and thinks that many of the terms are hilarious (they are). To many Germans who don’t really understand any Swiss German it actually sounds cute! Or at least that’s a common opinion where I live.
@epitome of incomprehensibility: Makes sense that french has the same issues and interesting that the choice is to usually say both. That’s how it started in German I think but the complaint about that often is that it’s too long in written language/ takes too much time. Another option I forgot about is using the present participle (eg. Studierende). But that is something that is mostly done at universities.
@Jenora Feuer:
(And there used to be a comic book called The Desert Peach, set in a German ‘misfit unit’ during WWII, in which at one point in an argument one character insulted another character for his accent by calling him a ‘mealy-mouthed Swabian’. Donna Barr was not unfamiliar with the German language.)
I was wondering if anyone was going to bring up Desert Peach (whose title character is Erwin Rommel’s fictional flamingly gay brother—I seem to recall that the concept was inspired by the name of a paint color.)
There’s a scene where Pfirsich and Erwin, realizing that the British are eavesdropping on their radio conversation, revert (to the refined Pfirsich’s disgust) to their native Swabian—which Barr chooses to render as quasi-hillbilly dialect:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/ozL33Rav126csMI2MuwHE1YgmvN_adhmqigPMjl-vcv_BRP66wkqA1csNHLrde6wkOQ8M6UFN3SxyZJsV41xJ6dYY101wuhfxNge8y8eEZpyj57BHhr8CrSEK3nkzbJ3EXU2AETMPg=s0
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/t_yvjBkOYSUE8uLvG-foKiyWKCJ_vi8BTRK3Vm1AfuVINPNg272Ao97jYn3jvJAJkwfcWwzBYfpJoaO2uAhGZD5cALG0zn7D6Yi1VeolBdfDVgFfrGtawhTfi8bceeAobWtPCtNMbA=s0
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/E5VlnQmc7gSHvBFMNK6UrQ0UGkbuqaodOwWGIf9lvOGTc8_Dan4TLu4nKyIFEEg569ewVGGN1_TT1l0-lL4SjmpOFp2Ml8K7lidT9CEEOJVYi5MLkYyZhU8mo9uRj2YRDbiqhi8gBw=s0
@FM Ox: Funny comic.
I must say, discussing German dialects is much more interesting than MRA’s. It’s not something I’ve read a zillion times before.
@Jenora: Same thing happened when I took Latin. Despite having an excellent English education, including teachers who had us diagram sentences in class and in homework. I finally learned the names of parts of speech I’d always spoken/written. Then when I tried Gaelic (fail, alas), I noticed “gee, this is like Latin, but not like Spanish”, which turns out to be an actual linguistic theory I did not know at the time.
@rusalka
Ahahaha, omg. Those people really are everywhere. It’s always funny when something like that happens, my parents and I once met some Stuttgarters in some rather remote part of Italy. That was funny, too.
That somewhat also reminded me of the time I went to a Japanese restaurant in Stuttgart (I know, not really hard to find Swabians in the Ländle, but hear me out) with my boyfriend (a Hesse) and there was that guy in the corner of the restaurant who suddenly burst out laughing so hard you could hear him in the entire restaurant, and we had to fight so hard not to laugh about it. That dude was a living stereotype. That was this summer.
About Swiss German sounding ‘funny’, I know people who say the same about Swabian. I have to admit, I sometimes crack up myself. It’s also interesting seeing a Swiss person implying (if I read that right) that Swiss German is a dialect, because most are just as adamant about it being a different language as Swabians can be, or northerners are about Platt. Interestingly, I don’t have issues understanding Platt. The only dialect I really have a hard time with, that I found so far, was Söl’ring, spoken on the island of Sylt. That one had me capitulate. I think it belongs to the Frisian language.
@Jenora Feuer
I thing that is the consensus among historians, yeah. Wasn’t it part of its intended function, even?
@Full Metal Ox
I’m taking offense from the hillbilly part. This is one of the technologically most advanced regions of the country with many big tech firms having their main seat or German branch here, and Swabian is spoken even in Stuttgart, so that hillbilly depiction is utter bullshit. The most rural areas are still in the east, for the most part.
@KMB:
I’m taking offense from the hillbilly part. This is one of the technologically most advanced regions of the country with many big tech firms having their main seat or German branch here, and Swabian is spoken even in Stuttgart, so that hillbilly depiction is utter bullshit. The most rural areas are still in the east, for the most part.
My apologies, then. I do not even remotely speak German of any flavor—as I’ve already abundantly demonstrated—and was going by the impression I’d gotten from Barr’s (an American who studied German as a second language) rendering.
@ Full Metal Ox:
There’s a gel colour, much used in theatre lighting, called “Bastard Amber.” I’ve always thought that would make a good title for something.