The Pervertpocalypse.

[Raesvelg]

I touched on this a while back in the pre-reformat blogs, but I felt like bringing it up again.

So.

Within the next 50 years, we can expect to see affordable robots that are difficult to distinguish from human beings. Within the 50 years after that, I'd wager you'll see robots walking around that are indistinguishable from human beings in any way short of detailed medical scans.

While the potential benefits here are hard to overstate, up to an including the sort of communist utopia that Marx always dreamed of, there is the potential for a dark side to all of this.

I'm talking, of course, about the perverts.

Let's be frank; people are already making sex-bots. They're just getting started, but in time I expect we'll see some fairly sophisticated models made available commercially, and probably within the next 20 years.

While this isn't a terrible thing, per se, it will have an impact on the social environment of humans in ways that I personally suspect will be both profound and detrimental, but it'll just be the tip of the iceberg for the pervs.

Because we're going to run into some problems with the programming of these machines, and the uses to which they are put. To say nothing of the potential appearances of them.

If you want to bash your toaster around because it's not adequately crisping your pumpernickel, that's your business. It's your toaster, right? Just a machine, and charming/depressing anthropomorphizations aside, nobody really gives a shit what you do to your toaster. They don't have feelings, they don't care about being smacked around. They're toasters. They toast things.

Part of the purpose of the sort of animated sex toy we're discussing here, of course, would be to fill the shoes of an actual human. And that's where things get tricky, from a moral perspective.

If you let someone act out their darkest fantasies on their personal sex-bot, is that okay? Are we going to see people programming their bots to respond to pain? To cower in fear? To beg for mercy?

Are we going to see people making bots that look like children?

I expect we'll see all of these things.

The question is, what do we do about it. They're just machines, after all; they won't have emotions unless we make them that way (and we'll be able to make them look human a long time before we're able to make them feel human, so to speak), and while they might be programmed to respond like a helpless victim, in reality that's all it is. Just a program.

But I can't imagine that sort of thing not being incredibly corrosive to the psyche of the person dishing out the abuse. Because somewhere, deep down inside, they'll know it's not real. And they'll want to make it real.

It's a common theory that allowing this sort of outlet bleeds off the sort of tension to leads to actual criminal behavior. By allowing people to, say, enjoy their CGI version of kiddie-porn, we'll head off the possibility that the bastards go out there and makes some for themselves.

I'm not so sure, and I'm definitely unsure at what point we'll see the line between fantasy and reality begin to blur when it's not a CG image they're seeing get abused, but an actual physical entity that they're abusing.

Of course, if you want to get really creepy, you can apply this logic to the field of bioengineering. Sure, it's not really legal to experiment with making your own human beings.

But would it be illegal to make something that just looks human?

 

[Misi]

Somebody call Will Smith! Thats all I got lol

 

[Thelona]

you can keep your sex-bots, wake me when we have RL cat girls/furrys.

I imagine all this would have bad effects on society, atleast on those who get sucked into it, but I can easily see someone from before our current technology boom making the exact same argument against internet porn, and even, dare i say.... violent video games.

You're kidding yourself if you think there hasn't already been drastic effects on our society, from moral standards, to the way we interact, our one on one social skills. Some of those effects have been good things, many arguably haven't.


also, will our future sex-bots be constitutionally protected?

 

[Raesvelg]

A.) There are light-years of difference between, say, a Japanese rape-simulator game, where you act out the fantasies of some seriously depraved individuals through a graphical interface, and a sex-bot programmed for helplessness that you can actually physically abuse. The first is frankly disturbing enough on its own; the latter is downright horrifying.

B.) Why would these hypothetical bots be protected? They're just machines, and, to reiterate, not self-aware, merely programmed to give the appearance of sentience. We'll be able to manage that a hell of a lot earlier than we will actual sentient machines.

Besides, the manufacture of sentient robots is inherently undesirable; now, in theory, you do have some sort of moral onus to treat them fairly and give them rights. Not to mention the whole "Fuck you GM, we're unionizing! ROBOT WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!" problem that would quickly crop up.

Sentient machines sound like intriguing concepts, but in reality, there's no real reason for them to ever exist, outside of a laboratory.

 

[Thelona]

oh sorry, no I mean would our ownership of these future sex bots be constitutionally protected, would they be covered by free speech/expression the same as porn, or be outlawed?

 

[Raesvelg]

Well, it's currently protected, so there's no reason to expect that anything would change when people couple a decent personality simulator with a... fully functional robotic chassis.

Like I said, technically, there'd be nothing all that particularly exceptional about these machines. They're simulators; not really AI, just something that can pass a Turing test in a variety of situations. We're already making good progress on that particular topic, but it'll probably be some time yet before we can produce one that can really fool a human reliably. And oddly enough, it seems increasingly likely that we'll be able to make a virtual avatar that looks pretty damn human before we can make one that sounds sufficiently human to really trick someone.