elfs: (Default)
[personal profile] elfs
As everyone who reads my stuff knows, I'm fond of sex, robots, and sex with robots. It's rather too bad that there aren't any really good sex robots out there, but in the meantime, humans do just fine. I suspect I'll be one of those perverts who'll continue to find sex with humans interesting long after the robots have exceeded Aria Giovanni or Gavin Tate for exceptional human, ahem, quality.

So imagine my pleasure at stumbling upon Why Sex With Robots Is Always Wrong, a rather peculiar little diatribe in which the author takes the idea that sex with robots will be so much better than anything else that, long before reproduction stops, lolicon, shotacon and zoophile bots will have so corrupted us that society will grind to a halt.

Unfortunately, although his mainstreaming is intriguing, his actual imagination is paltry enough that I didn't find much interesting there to exploit for my own work. He kinda blows his own premise by insisting that the acronym he dreams, FACA or "Female Anatomically Correct Android", will persist long after society has shaded into his dystopian ideals of fuckable sexbots shaped like little boys, stuffed pandas or toaster ovens. And his "the day we accepted that they're robots" scenario churned my stomach for its biochauvanism. Still, it's fun to see more and more the Christians are worrying about the posthuman future.

I used to say this a lot back when I was young and dealing with whacked-out religious types who insisted "Jesus was coming soon:" He'd better get here in the next 40 years or so or he's gonna be outclassed.

Date: 2009-09-20 01:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hugh-mannity.livejournal.com
On the one hand sex with robots is going to be so much better than sex with another human that we'll stop doing that.

On the other hand, rape will be trivialised as a criminal offence.

Ummmm... if everybody's getting off with robots, who's doing the raping?

Riiiiight...

Date: 2009-09-20 02:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gromm.livejournal.com
Heh. In other words, Masturbation will do us all in!

Funny thing about humans: even with easy access to reliable birth (and disease) control that enables us to have carefree sex our whole life long, we ah, still wanna have kids.

Funny how that instinct to reproduce just keeps coming back eh?

Date: 2009-09-20 05:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elfs.livejournal.com
The funny thing is, I don't believe that there's an instinct to reproduce. There's an instinct to have sex, and it manifests differently in men and women (on average), and there's an instinct to take care of your children, but no instinct to reproduce per se. The substitutes are inadequate.

I don't doubt the guy's scenario. But the pleasure of taking care of your children (which is not the same as the pleasure of reproducing) is strong enough to drive people to artificial insemination and other extreme interventions. And by the time robotics are that good, there'll be other things in the pipeline that might make good old biological reproduction (as opposed to, er, intercourse) sorta obsolete.

Date: 2009-09-21 01:10 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sianmink.livejournal.com
There's certainly a drive to *have kids*. Even I feel it sometime before I shake it off as ridiculously impractical. Totally separate from the 'have sex' one, and I may not even really call it an instinct really, as it takes cognitive awareness, so I'm going to have to agree with your assessment. Kids are a side-effect of the sex instinct. Anything else is learned/cognitive.

Date: 2009-09-20 02:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
Wasn't this a PSA on Futurama?

Date: 2009-09-20 04:17 am (UTC)
ext_74896: Tyler Durden (Default)
From: [identity profile] mundens.livejournal.com
FACn MACA-FACAs !

Date: 2009-09-20 04:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com
As usual, I'm late in learning about the latest trends. I'm working on it, though. What's the difference between shotacon and yaoi?

Date: 2009-09-20 05:05 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elfs.livejournal.com
Shotacon involves boys under the age of, er, puberty. Yaoi, presumably, involves mature teens and men.

Date: 2009-09-20 06:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] christinaathena.livejournal.com
I'm pretty sure that they're not mutually exclusive, for that matter. Shotacon = young boys (any orientation), yaoi = gay (of any age). Much like lolicon (young girls) and yuri (lesbian)

Date: 2009-09-20 06:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] christinaathena.livejournal.com
I commented on the very same thing on my LJ (http://ranka.livejournal.com/720242.html). I found it interesting how revealing it all was of his own misogyny. Clearly the only reason a man would be interested in a woman is if she can fuck and serve him, and if a robot can do the job better, then women become obsolete!

Date: 2009-09-20 07:23 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Anyone else think that the only people who will take notice of this are people who would never have thought about sex with robots anyway? So in essence, as with so many things you post about, this is doing more to get this kind of idea "mainstreamed" than to halt it.

Date: 2009-09-20 01:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] oldhans117.livejournal.com
If this essay is true then the Amish will inherit the earth!

Date: 2009-09-20 03:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nbarnes.livejournal.com
The part that I found typical of blindered Christianists is where the sexbots are all submissive doormats who who house chores when not putting out. Because that's all that men really want in a life partner. Nobody ever dates opinionated, dynamic, aggressive women, because who wants a partner like that?

And then, lacking the vision to even consider the possibilities, of course the author doesn't think about how, at some point, AIs are going to get better at poking human social reward buttons than humans are. Up to and including the point where AIs are fully capable of taking into considering the human need for a certain amount of difficulty, setback, and struggle in order to feel fulfilled and providing us with a carefully calibrated amount of pushback and sophisticated social interaction. It's not that real partners can't compete with doormats, it's that real partners can't compete with AI simulations of real partners who give us exactly the feedback we need in order to be happiest and healthiest.

Date: 2009-09-20 04:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elfs.livejournal.com
The thing that upset me in the whole article was the courtroom scenario where one robot is called in by the defense to cross-examine the testifying witness robot, and as she's doing so, the lead defense attorney takes an axe and hacks into her to reveal the wires and cabling underneath, then says, "Would anyone accuse me of murder?"

Fuck yes, dude.

Date: 2009-09-21 03:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] qtplatypus.livejournal.com
One of the common tropes within robot girlfriend anime is the development of the bot from a submissive doormat into something more sophisticated.

It may be the case that we will end up with AI who perfectly fulfil our need for companionship, but I don't see that as a reproductive dead end. I'm willing to speculate that the partners will end up with children, if not via biological means then as kidbots.

Date: 2009-09-21 01:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sianmink.livejournal.com
Like those who rally against sex before marriage, homosexual sex, sex with children, or sex with animals, the author secretly finds it totally hot but his upbringing has taught him to be disgusted and ashamed and to rally that much harder against it. This will not keep him from thinking and writing about it every waking hour.

Seriously how many of the politicians who rallied hard for traditional family values or against gay marriage ended up in some embarrassing scandal? we just expect this sort of thing now.

And he definitely needs to be more imaginative.

Profile

elfs: (Default)
Elf Sternberg

December 2025

S M T W T F S
 12345 6
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jan. 8th, 2026 09:52 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios