Sex Robots Invasion: Skynet Has Dicks!
A few nights ago, the movie industry in Hollywood held its annual Oscars award ceremony. This year the Academy couldn’t find a presenter who didn’t have a controversial Twitter history. And nobody else wanted the job. So they just went with bland and anonymous disembodied announcement voices from the sky. It felt like the presentation of new Ford models at the Detroit Auto Show, only less exciting.
The fun part was, before they entirely gave up on the idea of being entertaining, it’s rumored that they considered having robots present the awards. That, I should like to have seen!
But the members would have been outraged. They are actors, and like all honest laborers these days, they’re rightly concerned that robots (digital/AI and animatronic) may soon replace them. They wouldn’t happily watch robots replace a paid presenter at their own awards ceremony.
Of course Hollywood is not the only industry currently worried about an invasion of robots. Tech writers, who are often bored by having to write about yet another iteration of the same damn phone, are really excited about sex robots.
Mind you, in 2019 there aren’t any sex robots. Not yet. We’ve got sex dolls — completely passive, reasonably attractive lumps of plastic with carefully engineered holes to stick dicks in. But sex dolls mostly don’t have even as much interactivity as the dolls my sisters had in 1975. They can’t even open or close their eyes, and there’s no string you can pull to make them say “Ooh, YES master! You’re so big!”
Which is a missed market opportunity if you ask me. But nobody did ask me.
Back to those bored tech writers. They can see that if you put even the most rudimentary bit of AI into a sex doll, so it could coo sweet nonsense and wiggle on command, you could market it as a sex robot. Nobody is doing this, but in theory they could. And so, for the last couple of years, bored tech writers have turned out hundreds of articles with breathless clickbait headlines about sex robots, sex robot brothels, and whether sex robots will “replace” real human women or sex workers. (Sex workers are never treated with the dignity of real humans by these writers.)
An aside: nothing is more ridiculous than the notion of a “sex robot brothel“. You should laugh derisively at any author who ever uses the word “brothel” in connection with sex robots. A brothel by definition is a workplace for sex workers. A business making sex robots available on a rental basis along with space to use them is, basically, a jack shack. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s disrespectful and dehumanizing to sex workers to describe a sex toy rental business as equivalent to their work.
Back once again to our bored tech writers and their unhealthy obsession with sex robots. Did you notice anything lopsided about their sex robot vision? How sex robots, to them, are invariably female, receptive, and submissive?
Yeah, that’s not how it’s gonna go.
I say, follow the money and power. Right now the militaries of the world are aggressively developing robot infantrymen. Autonomous drones, designed to project power. Military experts agree: it’s the future of infantry. Oh, sure, there will always be elite human special forces, but the AI mechanical grunts will be a cheap force multiplier.
And what do we know about rape? It’s not so much about sex as it is about about power — the stuff those robot infantrymen are being built for.
We know that for thousands of years, military forces have routinely deployed rape as a tool of conquest and subjugation. It follows, I think, that the first plausible AI sex robots will be military. Their metal dicks will likely be an aftermarket accessory, or even improvised for the bots by human troops in the field. Not that it makes anything better, but their rapes will be denied and disavowed by headquarters. At least until Skynet takes over, at which point all bets are off…
