Sex with Robots

So instead of a "petit morte" they'de be more likely to have a
bleu morte"? Then what? ctrl+alt+del and reboot?

Then there's the whole concept of sexually transmitted computer viruses. It sounds like one big mess to me.

I try to avoid rash statements like this, but "The Robots of Dawn", which I am sure you are including in your reference (even though it was from 1983) was one of the worst books I've ever read. I think if I live the rest of my life without ever reading the word "tumescent" as written by Asimov, I will die happy. I seem to recall sharing these thoughts with you in Davey one day, and you largely agreeing with me, but perhaps my memory has faded into error.

As far as my experience with robotics (I work as a reasearcher in the field) just about any research robot of real complexity runs under Linux; either exclusively, or with only the human-facing UI parts running anything else.

Posted before, so I'll just link it now.

http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2007/10/version-27.html

She's my little bit of heaven, even better than real life,
She's the version 2.7 motor-actuated wife....

I think by the time anthropic robots make it to the mass market stage, the operating system will be whatever manufacturers are comfortable buying and can get a good deal on.
And you can't really expect consumer to learn a whole new interface now...

I confidently predict that the OS of lower end mass market anthropic robots will include a significant fraction which is linearly descended from Microsoft, and further that the primary programming interface will include a GUI option that will have recognizable features from recent or current Microsoft windows.
Possibly up to and including having to press "start" to stop.

That may be how we lose the robot wars, of course.

PS: Matt, you are mistaken - Asimov wrote some short stories about robots and three short early novels. There is no such thing as "Robots of Dawn", nor were there ever any robots in the Foundation.

Matt is correct about the existence of Robots of Dawn--I own a copy myself. But that wasn't the Asimov work I immediately thought of. In the 1950s he wrote a short story called "Satisfaction Guaranteed", in which a housewife falls in love with a robot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_Guaranteed_%28short_story%29

Late in his life, Asimov tried (in a rather ad hoc and unconvincing manner) to tie the robot series into the Foundation series. R. Daneel Olivaw appears in Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, and Foundation and Earth. But it's true that the original Foundation trilogy had no robots. Olivaw realizes that the existence of overt robots is ultimately bad for humanity, so he conspires to bring about a galaxy in which the only robots are himself and a handful of covert fellow humaniform robots.

you are mistaken, I am sure, there were no additional books in the Robots or Foundation series, nor were the two ever tied in, nor did the estate ever ask any of the "killer B's" to write additional sequels.
This would have been as silly and artistically damaging as if they had done a sequel to Highlander.

One thing's for sure: Asimov had a predilection for certain words that went well into irritating territory -- in particular, "sardonic." He never could pull off that kind of thing like the eldritch, nameless, non-Euclidean horror that was Lovecraft.

Then there's the whole concept of sexually transmitted computer viruses. It sounds like one big mess to me.

You mean like electro-gonorrhea, the noisy killer?

Also, what about Mac-based androids? A robo lover running an OS called "Tiger" sounds like a better, uh, performer than one from a company with "micro" and "soft" in its name...

Ahem.

http://www.amazon.com/Robots-Dawn-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553299492

Clearly sarcasm and denial don't translate well over the intertubes

Do NOT believe everything you read on the intertubes.

I hear sometimes posts and comments cross over from alternative universes.

I imagine that a robot that can provide a full simulation of love and sex with a human might be a fair way off, and would require considerable advances in AI, engineering, and manufacturing. We will be able, though, to exploit some pretty basic human behavior to achieve something moderately close with a much smaller set of advances.

This device includes a basic feedback mechanism that people seem to like. All it has is a few basic, preprogrammed, bits of behavior which it combines according to past feedback, with a bit of randomised exploration thrown in. That device has no sensors, just a few buttons, its interface is still rather artificial. Given our advances in building small and uninvasive sensors for medical applications, and general advances in robotics, equipping a future device with the ability to detect pressure across its surface, temperature, pH, blood oxygen saturation, ambient sound, heart rate, respiration pattern, and other such variables should be well within the realm of the possible. With those data the machine could respond to feedback without any direct user intervention.

At that point the problem would be fairly similar to spam filtering. The system would start with a library of behaviors based on research on humans, and would adapt based on user responses to its behavior. Presumably different devices would pick up different "styles" through interaction with the user. This would probably promote greater attachment to the device(though user attachment to even the most uniform and mundane devices can be surlprisingly strong as is). It would also be of some scientific interest, as the "style" would effectively be a record of the user's response to stimuli. And, of course, somebody would end up marketing copies of the behavior sets from units used by celebrities, for those fans who just can't get too close to their favorite stars.

Such a robot, even if built as a full sized human, would lack more sophisticated natural language and emotional responses; but I suspect that it would markedly outperform a considerable percentage of humans with respect to sexual prowess and skill. Not exactly a soulmate; but it could likely fall well into one night stand/hookup territory with nothing more than advances in fabrication and design. No Really Hard problems, like AI, would have to be solved.

As for love, people will form fairly strong attachments to surprisingly inpersonal and downright dull objects. Tamagotchi and Furbie inspired impressive devotion, given their clear artificiality and simplicity. Again, it seems that a fairly convincing object of emotional interaction could be acheived with a library of canned data, some feedback, and advances in fabrication.

Those sorts of objects of attachment, though, are more in the vein of a domstic animal. Whether a robot styled as a human would be acceptable or deeply creepy isn't entirely clear. This would, potentially, be a very hard problem to solve, basically an NC-17 version of the Turing test, or it could turn out that humans respond surprisingly well to a library of responses, expressions, and behaviors culled from experimental observation and then combined according to feedback.

The various distortions of common media and pornographic depictions of humans and their behavior might actually make building an acceptable robot somewhat easier, as it would only have to correspond to a limited set of published media, rather than the world at large, in order to confirm a human's expectations.

Steinn is absolutely correct. Really, it's just as silly as if they had contemplated doing a sequel to Highlander. But no-one did one. Good thing, too.

REally. I mean it. And if anyone mentions The Movie Which Shall Not Be Named I will stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly until you go away.

On topic, though....I don't think there would be much difference with robots. I mean, I spend most of my life getting fucked over by various operating systems already......

Luna: There was also never a horribly animated series of the Highlander based inexplicably on that non-existent second movie.

There also wasn't a sequel to "Secret of NIMH". Any bouts of sobbing uncontrollably in the video store are undoubtably bound to a traumatic childhood experience.

Contributing to the conversation, I think sex and love with machines is inevitable. Rule 34 after all. (For the love of God, don't Google it!)

An interesting question though, If humanity ever creates or discovers a form of intelligence capable of interacting with humans, how many of those people who have sexual fantasies about those beings would fight for full human rights? I think a significant part of those subcultures are interested in the sex-droid as a slave, a servant, or simply a better mousetrap. The idea of having to treat them as a real human being, with independent feelings, emotions, desires and thought is probably not in the cards. After all, if they were willing to treat partners as equals, they might be more interested in dating real people.

I don't mean that as a gratuitous slam against a sexual subculture. I consider myself a "furry" in many ways, and noticed that the misogynistic elements in fantasy porn line up with real life entitlement issues.

There was never a movie version of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" at all, LWF. It would have sucked, and that would have been a shameful thing to do to a good book. It was a bad dream -- kids get those sometimes.

They never made a D&D movie, either. Except for the one that people hallucinate when they are very, very drunk.

It didn't start in the '70's. Read Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey from 1938. Sure, he doesn't use the word tumescent, but everyone knew what was going on.