elfs | We're doomed! Doomed, I tell you!

I, for one, am ready to reach out and shake the hands our new cybernetic overlords. Really. It's not going to take much to slim down those components an addition 15%, cover her in prosthetic-quality neoskin, and, well, it'll be all over after that. The human race is doomed.

Up next: The Panasonix DX Supervillain Personal Assistant.

Current Mood: giggly
Current Music: CNN, Crossfire

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

purly.livejournal.com

In the early 90s there was a doll that all of my friends had. It could walk and respond to basic voice commands. It was terrifying. This strikes me as a much larger version of that.

From: (Anonymous)

I understand your alarm - yet I suspect (and hope) there will always be a "critical mass" that prefer real sex with real people

From:

heofmanynames.livejournal.com

(that was me - sorry!)

From:

elfs.livejournal.com

Good enough. My concern is simple: every advance in erotic technology peels away from the reproductive core of our population a small percentage of the reproductively responsible. As the technology improves, so will the decline of reproduction increase, to a tipping point where the population begins to fall. And if there's one thing the ZPG people don't like talking about: our standard of living is directly attributable to our population count. So, yeah, while there'll always be a core of people who want to have kids, without corresponding increases in lifespan an increase in non-reproductive erotic outlets leads to a decline in population.

From:

dv-girl.livejournal.com

I disagree with the idea of 'reproductively responsible' in general. Some people are pretty lousy parents, I agree, and the last thing we need are more ignorant conservatives.

However, myself and many of my friends are the children of said ignorant conservatives. We're smart, well-educated, and nothing like them.

As homogeneous as the human race is, asserting that any one group is more fit to breed than any other group strikes me as rather egotistical and really not any better than the small-minded thinking of conservatives, who believe they should out breed their competition.

We 'win' by provoking the minds of others to dream, explore, wonder, learn, and grow. Making a child that's an avatar of your ideals is nice and all, but it's' been done and (as my parents discovered) there are a tremendous number of factors a parent cannot control. You can more directly interact with the world by your own works and creations.

We humans are inherently curious. That's the true failing of conservatism. All it takes is that one little thing that hits it the right way to put a crack in a wall and then it's only a matter of time before the whole thing comes down.

/soapbox

From:

elfs.livejournal.com

Could this rant have been avoided if I'd said, "Those responsible for reproduction?" Which is to say, everyone who wants kids regardless of merit? My argument isn't with the fitness of parents here; it's with the willingness (or sheer bad luck sometimes) of people to be parents. I didn't want to imply or even discuss parental fitness.

I wanted to point out that each substitute for the reproductive act reduces the overall pool of reproducers. Most substitutes are poor substitutes, but they're getting better-- that's the inevitability of technology. I worry that someday those technologies will have the same satisfaction index as World of Warcraft, and in a way that actually shorts out the drive to produce another generation. (I don't think WoW has quite the same pull.)

From:

sirfox.livejournal.com

so, does it tip the other way once we bio-engineer one to carry a child to term, then?

From:

purly.livejournal.com

There are already too many people on the planet. I don't see what the problem with reducing the population a little might be.

From:

heofmanynames.livejournal.com

pretty much exactly what I took your remarks to mean. even so, populations boom & bust like economies in response to arguably a similar range of stressors & introduced errors; seems to me there must be trade-offs in terms of what population scale supports what level of tech/industrial sophistication, contrasted with the population densities (and their attendant impositions) we're willing to tolerate. The complicating factor is that reduced family size seems an inevitable result of a rising living standard.

In the end, I think it may be a self-defeating prophecy: "unsafe" sex will be around to keep the masses at least semi-entertained during even the worst crisis...and each such crisis will produce a baby-boom (or two) of its own. If nothing else, there will always be more fleshbots than dolls.

From:

shockwave77598.livejournal.com

The human race is too large as it is. This would be a good way of bringing reasonable numbers to a group that refuses to accept birth control for any reason.

From:

antonia-tiger.livejournal.com

In my now-remote youth, I sketched an escapist story about a refugee Galactic Prince hiding out on Earth with a close protection squad of assassin-trained sex-droids who (Mary-Sue warning) couldn't compete with a real human woman.

It's only a matter of time.

From:

shockwave77598.livejournal.com

Before I can purchase his majesty's discarded sex-droids on Ebay? Really? You know, I bet with some bleach and a good bristle brush, it'd be good as new! :)