Quickies: Sexbots, Again

     Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. Maybe there’s more going on there than I’m aware. But I doubt that whatever it is, it’s sufficient to justify a tirade of these dimensions:

     Porn and sex have always driven technological development....The development of sexbots’ capability and quantity has leapt forward in the last five years, and is expected to grow exponentially in the next five.

     Manufacturers are talking with oil companies, as a boatload of sexbots can relieve the stress of workers isolated on all-male oil-rigs for months at a time. Manufacturers would also like to see sexbots in prisons, to reduce rapes and tension between inmates. The most popular market for the Samantha bot is truck drivers. Apparently, they enjoy her conversation on those long, lonely drives as much as they appreciate her availability on those equally long and lonely nights.

     Even with the rather crude models that are available today, there is a market for sexbots. There are already all-robot brothels in Italy, France, Japan, Britain and other countries. One academic study predicts that by 2050, Amsterdam’s infamous Red Light District will be staffed entirely by sexbots free of infectious diseases, and not by sex slaves smuggled in from Eastern Europe and Asia. Experts say these specialized robots will start to appear in ordinary homes in the next decade, as lonely humans look for love.

     There are underlying trends of greater importance than the rise of the sexbot, because they power the accelerating popularity of the sexbot:

• The increasing hostility and distrust between the sexes;
• The burgeoning obsession with “youth;”
• The legal and social assaults on marriage;
• The ever increasing cost of childbearing and child-rearing;
• The political and social intrusions into the family;

     …among others. He who fears that the sexbot will damn and doom our species would do better to direct his efforts against those things. Men – I speak with authority here – want actual, loving, supportive women, not sexbots. (We also want companionship, children, and communities.) We only recur to artificial substitutes when the real thing is unavailable, unreliable, or untrustworthy.

     I could be wrong; it happens now and then. But I can’t see us arriving at a Cherry 2000 future unless we allow the diseases of our present to go unaddressed long enough to become incurable.