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elfsA couple of final points to drive home (perhaps belabor) the point about how maddening I found Adam Rogers's Sex With Robots.
Rogers makes the observation that millions of women1 have discovered that a robot doesn't have to look human to be sexually satisfying, and then goes on to cite vibrators as the pre-eminent example. But we're not talking about a motor with a programmable rhythm chip and a bluetooth interface.
If you've ever played a first person shooter in campaign mode, the experience of a gun battle does not entail high-minded thinking along the lines of "Oh, that avatar was programmed by the developer to want to reduce my health score to zero, and I will do the same to it." It's more along the lines of "Aieee, that zombie is about to eat my head! Die, die, m10r2!" We don't think about the player at all; instead, we ascribe some degree of agency to the zombie and react accordingly.
The more subtle and capable the robot, the broader the range of possible reactions it can take, the more we attribute real agency to a robot. The shape doesn't matter.
There are two axes on which Rogers is playing this game. The first is the uncanny valley; a range at one end of which we say "is human," and at the other "is avatar," be it puppet, stuffed animal, or cartoon, and in the middle is the valley, a gap where it's "almost human" but in an off-putting or uncomfortable way that suggests illness or anathema3. The second is from human to animal, with some animals being cats and dogs who get cuddled to sleep in our beds with us, others being food animals raised for slaughter, and at the far end mosquitoes and E. coli and things with which we'd rather not have to share the Earth. Even there, pets have their own uncanny valleys: glass-eyed, palsied and jerking movements, gurgling speech all suggest illness and uncanniness rather than a household friend.
But in robots, to suggest that there's a range of moral worth because of body shape, even when all those body shapes are occupied by the same mind, is to argue that bodies, and not souls, are what we care about as a civilization.
Rogers doesn't even begin to account for those local maxima in the uncanny valley where fetishists hang out. There are a surprising lot of them and they already exist as a market for "not human" robots. Above and beyond mere Furries and Ferals, there's Bad Dragon which sells dildos for a market that wants to fuck, you know, dragons. There are fetishists for glossy, metallic, sexy robots, every kind of beast you can find in World of Warcraft, body-morphing "humantaurs", tentacle monsters, even attack helicopters. The robots for this market wouldn't qualify as human-looking, but if they had all the compassion, the wisdom, if they were "absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all the offices of lover as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her," Adam Rogers isn't concerned with their moral fate at all.
As a final thought experiment, imagine a smart house with a server in the basement that supplies the persona for the house. It talks, it listens, it tries hard to meet your needs. It has an extension avatar, a woman-shaped robot that makes sure your lunch is packed, your bed is made, your carpet is vaccuumed. It doesn't really have a mind of its own; just a radio connection to the server in the basement. In Rogers's argument, it would be wrong to slap the robot around, but you'd be completely within the bounds of social acceptability to take an axe to the server because, after all, it doesn't look human.
That's incoherent. And if the house is indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person in speech and word, immoral.
1 Millions of men, too. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that on a dollar basis, men spend more on sex toys every year than women, and not for toys that they intend to use with women. The most expensive and boutique sex toy manufacturers, such as Squarepeg or Oxballs, actually market to gay men, and even on the determinedly non-gender retailer Bad Dragon, a large portion of their consumer base is self-described straight men who just enjoy the challenge of shoving large things up their backsides.
2A common convention among nerds is to shorten long words to their first and last letters and a count of the letters in between. "Internationalization" becomes "i18n;" "Localization" becomes "l10n." You can probably figure out what "m10r" stands for.
3Modern filmmakers and choreographers exploit this. Crystal Pike's modern ballet, Emergence, uses dozens of highly trained dancers at the height of their physical capabilities and human beauty, and teaches them jerking, mime-like motions to suggest an insect hive, and the effect is definitely uncanny.
Rogers makes the observation that millions of women1 have discovered that a robot doesn't have to look human to be sexually satisfying, and then goes on to cite vibrators as the pre-eminent example. But we're not talking about a motor with a programmable rhythm chip and a bluetooth interface.
If you've ever played a first person shooter in campaign mode, the experience of a gun battle does not entail high-minded thinking along the lines of "Oh, that avatar was programmed by the developer to want to reduce my health score to zero, and I will do the same to it." It's more along the lines of "Aieee, that zombie is about to eat my head! Die, die, m10r2!" We don't think about the player at all; instead, we ascribe some degree of agency to the zombie and react accordingly.
The more subtle and capable the robot, the broader the range of possible reactions it can take, the more we attribute real agency to a robot. The shape doesn't matter.
There are two axes on which Rogers is playing this game. The first is the uncanny valley; a range at one end of which we say "is human," and at the other "is avatar," be it puppet, stuffed animal, or cartoon, and in the middle is the valley, a gap where it's "almost human" but in an off-putting or uncomfortable way that suggests illness or anathema3. The second is from human to animal, with some animals being cats and dogs who get cuddled to sleep in our beds with us, others being food animals raised for slaughter, and at the far end mosquitoes and E. coli and things with which we'd rather not have to share the Earth. Even there, pets have their own uncanny valleys: glass-eyed, palsied and jerking movements, gurgling speech all suggest illness and uncanniness rather than a household friend.
But in robots, to suggest that there's a range of moral worth because of body shape, even when all those body shapes are occupied by the same mind, is to argue that bodies, and not souls, are what we care about as a civilization.
Rogers doesn't even begin to account for those local maxima in the uncanny valley where fetishists hang out. There are a surprising lot of them and they already exist as a market for "not human" robots. Above and beyond mere Furries and Ferals, there's Bad Dragon which sells dildos for a market that wants to fuck, you know, dragons. There are fetishists for glossy, metallic, sexy robots, every kind of beast you can find in World of Warcraft, body-morphing "humantaurs", tentacle monsters, even attack helicopters. The robots for this market wouldn't qualify as human-looking, but if they had all the compassion, the wisdom, if they were "absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all the offices of lover as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her," Adam Rogers isn't concerned with their moral fate at all.
As a final thought experiment, imagine a smart house with a server in the basement that supplies the persona for the house. It talks, it listens, it tries hard to meet your needs. It has an extension avatar, a woman-shaped robot that makes sure your lunch is packed, your bed is made, your carpet is vaccuumed. It doesn't really have a mind of its own; just a radio connection to the server in the basement. In Rogers's argument, it would be wrong to slap the robot around, but you'd be completely within the bounds of social acceptability to take an axe to the server because, after all, it doesn't look human.
That's incoherent. And if the house is indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person in speech and word, immoral.
1 Millions of men, too. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that on a dollar basis, men spend more on sex toys every year than women, and not for toys that they intend to use with women. The most expensive and boutique sex toy manufacturers, such as Squarepeg or Oxballs, actually market to gay men, and even on the determinedly non-gender retailer Bad Dragon, a large portion of their consumer base is self-described straight men who just enjoy the challenge of shoving large things up their backsides.
2A common convention among nerds is to shorten long words to their first and last letters and a count of the letters in between. "Internationalization" becomes "i18n;" "Localization" becomes "l10n." You can probably figure out what "m10r" stands for.
3Modern filmmakers and choreographers exploit this. Crystal Pike's modern ballet, Emergence, uses dozens of highly trained dancers at the height of their physical capabilities and human beauty, and teaches them jerking, mime-like motions to suggest an insect hive, and the effect is definitely uncanny.
