Non-existent sex robots already burning holes in men’s pockets Well over a third of men would happily splash out on a humanoid sex robot in the near future, academics have found - despite there being no viable product on the market right now. Researchers from the University Duisburg-Essen quizzed 263 chaps on their robo-amorous leanings, and co-author Jessica Szczuka presented their …
Given the war on pornography currently being waged by the British Government, religious fanatics, South Carolina legislators, and the rest of the self-appointed guardians of other people's morals, can you imagine the furor that significant takeup of practical humanoid sexbots would generate.
I don't know what the angle will be - "think of the children" probably won't work, perhaps some imaginary severe damage to health or society.
'"think of the children" probably won't work'
Of course it will work. It will work because people in general are morons and claiming that something is "harmful to children" is the quickest way to shut down genuine discussion. Or if you want to actually discuss it, are you one-a them thar "Peter-files"?
Also, fuck moral guardians. Literally, figuratively, I don't care. Pricks that they are.
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“it could be imaginable that clients who pay a lot for sex robots are aware of the fact that robots are non-human, which could prevent their ejaculations from falling into the uncanny valley.”
Assuming the "uncanny valley" is the same as Leonard Cohen was talking about when he wrote
"Those holy hills, that deep ravine"
Of course, that was followed by the line "I was never any good at loving you..." which doesn't bode well for a happy <span class="strike">finish</span> ending!
Just think, it's a whole new arena for patents. They'll just take all the existing ones and add "on a sexbot" such as Method of Swinging on a Sexbot.
Hmm, the sexbot icon needs rounded corners. -->
overly attached with their cars
I've always found suspicious that videos of women washing a car are considered sexy, as opposed to say washing windows. There's an obvious link to the usual assumptions of inverse proportionality between the size of a bloke's car and that of his wedding tackle...
Washing windows, most women will stand pretty much upright and away from the glass. When washing a car, there's a lot of bending over, plus the option to mash the bosoms on windows while soaping up the roof.
The best example I can think of is this scene from the classic movie "Cool Hand Luke", where a woman teases the convicts with her car-washing technique. Were Hollywood honest, every one of them would have sported a raging woody.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veCZvM6-okQ
Have you seen the smoking performance of Liv Tyler in One Night at McCool's ?
“For this purpose,” the researchers continued, “the robots do not only provide replications of some secondary sexual characteristics (e.g. breasts), but also external genitals (e.g. labia). ... to move ... and speak.”
As the researchers note, “At present, there is no sex robot available that is suitable for the masses and that provides all the features listed above.
The conclusion (assuming this isn't just the result of a clumsy use of language) is that there IS such a device, but that it's not "suitable for the masses". Did the researchers accidentally let slip that they had such a device, but wanted to keep it for themselves?
Consider that good sexbots could replace human sex workers. No more pimps pushing vulnerable women into drug addiction, etc. The same thing will be argued as about porn - causes nasty behavior in otherwise vanilla people, but I (most of the time) disagree. Rather than a gateway drug, such things mostly give people an outlet for urges they already had.
I'll go out on a limb here, if you disagree please spare me flames. It uncomfortably seems that pedophiles are programmed that way, much as the rest of us are in our particular sexual orientation. Which totally sucks, because you can't cure them and you can't allow them to mess with kids. Telling someone they cannot have sex at all never works, look at Catholic priests and similar. Although I cringe to think of it, you could give pedos sexbots and spare a lot of real kids from trauma and abuse.
As far as Average Folks, most of us have some interesting fantasies that we don't indulge for various reasons. Happily married but the spouse is totally vanilla. Partner might not want sex at all (more common than you might think). Lack of a partner. Multiple-partner sex is a common fantasy, but somewhat dangerous and awkward to indulge. Rent up a few bots though, and no chance of disease, hurt feelings, or lurid stories being told about you at lunch the next day.
But of course, we'll have to wait for the Real Thing to see how the chips fall. Gimp mask becoz Obvious!
"Seems unlikely; in the UK at least it is illegal to possess sexualized drawings of children."
Where the definition of "children" is a depiction of anyone who is, or who looks, under 18. So any such figures would have to look well into their twenties to stay clear of over eager law enforcers.
"Where the definition of "children" is a depiction of anyone who is, or who looks, under 18. So any such figures would have to look well into their twenties to stay clear of over eager law enforcers."
Its a sad situation when this is the case, where a mere drawing can be made illegal...
And can we stop calling anyone under 18 a child? If we treat people under 18 like children, they will act like children..... And in the case of politicians, they never stop...
You know that won't happen. However good sexbots may become, there will always be a market for "natural" interaction.
That's the thing with porn and the sex industry, nothing replaces anything, anything new is just added to ever-growing list of things we do to satisfy our compulsions.
If humanity gets wiped out by robots, it probably will not vanish due to raging terminator like robots but the ones with an eternal smile, no headaches and the empathy to be the perfect partner.
The part of humanity that can afford afford a robot perfectly capable to replace a human partner in every aspect of life, will not bother anymore wasting time with moody humans, and probably will not feel the need to reproduce.
The poor country equivalent of a pension fund is grand children. When there is a high child mortality rate, parents go for lots of children in the hope that one or two of them can produce grand children that survive long enough to look after their grandparents.
Reducing child mortality, and providing access to contraception and education causes parents to switch to a strategy with fewer children. It is safer for the mother and concentrating resources fewer children who are expected to survive results in healthier children with an education good enough for a higher paying job.
On the other hand, policies intended in increase crushing poverty provide a steady supply of sex workers and remove the need to create sexbots. (Try a web search for "Trump modelling agency")
The Roman Catholic Church would do their best to outlaw such robots. They would maintain their official stance that sex is only for procreation between a married man and woman couple. That's why they ban reliable artificial contraceptives and masturbation. They would also invoke dogma against fornication, adultery, and same sex practices too. The relatively common practice of using anal intercourse for contraception in poorer countries is probably unapproved too.
No doubt some Protestant religious groups would go along with most of that too - as well as limiting education about sex.
Even Pope Francis's apparent criticism of a Philippines woman having "too many" children was clarified as being effectively "three is the minimum - and more is better as long as the mother doesn't die prematurely".
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2015/01/20/its-hard-not-to-take-the-popes-remarks-about-big-families-personally/
The RCC has next to no influence on that issue where people have the means to purchase sexbots.
In poor countries, however, it does have that kind of influence but they wouldn't be able to purchase the bots anyway. You could probably find some "massage parlors" offering them though, if there's one thing Catholics are good at it's openly hating something while secretly using that very thing.
I suspect there is (in general) an inverse relationship between knowledge about programming and AI and interest in 'sex' with robots. Blow-up dolls are appealing to many for the very reason that they don't intrude on mental fantasies with any simulated (=fake) sexual behavior.
It is the very fantasies that are real. Robots can only get in the way.
> blow-up dolls are appealing to many ...
Sales of blow-up dolls are tiny compared with sales of female targetted sex toys (tiny fractions of 1%).
I'd bet that we are much more likely to see commercially successful "sex-bots" for "girls" a long time before we see them for "boys". As they'll grow out of increasingly sophisticated vibrators.
"As they'll grow out of increasingly sophisticated vibrators."
Just got a wierd mental picture of girls planting rows of dildos, and watering them.
Re the article, yet another piece of research with an absurdly small sample which according to the numbers quoted are for 'over 1/3 of subjects questioned not 2/3.
Surveys and statistics play a part in research, but are not really research in their own right without a much larger sample spread over a number of countries, economic and social classes etc etc .
Personally I don't have social issues with women, many of whom are more desirable than a robot, the next pussy I am likely to buy will be a Maine Coon.
Slightly off topic, but sex surveys are one of the handy tools to show just how inaccurate surveys are, especially when dealing with anything that is not the norm to be publicly discussed.
Durex does surveys into people's sex lives, as part of their market research for selling condoms. For straight people, apparently men have on average 3-5 times the number of partners (over a lifetime) than women, based on survey answers*. Since proving that the average number of partners for both genders** in this section of the population is equal is trivial, it's clear that some combination of the following factors:
- people lie about their number of partners
- people have different definitions of "sex", such as counting (or not) oral-only partners
- men with low numbers and women with high numbers do not answer the survey
It's also one of the more fun examples to give in class when showing that self selecting surveys will almost always miss data. CPI basket of goods selection is far more important (wealthy people do not answer it) but less interesting to show that you can clearly see incorrect results.
* exact rate depends on country, NZ being the only place where the ratio is roughly 1:1.
** This is for straight people who've only had partners of the opposite gender
Well over two-thirds of men would happily splash out on a humanoid sex robot in the near future
They found that a stonking 40.3 per cent of the sample said they would “buy such a robot now or within the next five years.”
Have I missed something here? 40.3% -according to my calculations- is nowhere near 2/3. 2/3 would be 66.6% and "well over" would be a number in excess of that.
You could make extra money on the rework service. Return your sexbot annually for servicing - and for an extra fee, we'll let you switch the appearance to any of our library of stock faces, builds and skin colors. More extreme mods available, but in the 'if you have to ask' price range.
A realistic AI is a long way off. However, you don't need that at all. All you need is a realistic mechanical body to use as a physical avatar. By placing suitable sensors on both the human and the local avatar s/he is interacting with, the remote avatar can be arranged to mimic all the muscle (and hydraulic) movements of that human, corrected for differences in size & shape between the human and the remote avatar s/he is controlling. A duplex audio link can also be included. This will make it possible to have extremely realistic (and anonymous risk-free) sex with someone else via the Internet.
I'm fairly certain that the technology exists to make a mechanical body that has the same movement capabilities, skin texture and temperature as a person. Facial & tongue movements are probably the most challenging, but I doubt insurmountable.
Muscle wire, perhaps. There's no way you could fit the power supply in there too with anything approaching current technology, so you'd have to have an umbilical plugged into the back carrying compressed air, power and data lines. It could be done, yes, but the cost would be greater than is commercially viable.
You wouldn't use hydraulics. Electric motors are more than capable of all the movement you need. Hydraulics are expensive, messy, heavy and power-hungry.
Leave them out, and you also solve the power supply problem, because now you just have to find a space for a decent sized battery, which could easily fit inside the ribcage, skull, and/or perhaps inside the thicker "bones".
Hydraulics are expensive, messy, heavy and power-hungry.<P>
You are doing it wrong. You don't have to use the same technology as JCBs! However, I think pneumatics would be the best approach. And an umbilical cord is probably the best approach to power - I would prefer mine was not mains powered.
A balanced study would have included women, at a minimum.
Sounds like a scheme to create a brothel not a sex partner for your own home. I don't really like the idea of an exploitable female analog either. No doubt great fun for the rugby club, but if you can freely abuse a machine designed to look and act like a woman then the lines could get very blurred.
Some code of conduct might be required - inhuman rights act, perhaps?
Jump on and take it for a ride
All prices are inclusive of sex-bot excise duty for a year and a set of fully charged "quickie" batteries.
Long endurance, all night long battery packs can be supplied at extra cost.
Yes, the "Not tonight I have a headache" mode can be disabled via the App
And over here we have our preloved models
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