The Dark Side Of Sex Robot Technology

Sex dolls have become quite realistic looking and, whether or not a sex doll with a talking head ( such as the Harmony sex doll ) is a genuine “sex robot”, fully functional sex androids with movable body parts are coming soon. The founder of Abyss Creations intends to develop movable body parts in the future and the Chinese company, DS doll, is already working on it.

The sex robot technology market of 2019 is a niche one. Sex dolls and sex robots are still a long way from being irresistibly attractive to the average person and yet:

IF

For every statement: “Sex robots are less attractive than real people because of X”

X is a soluble engineering problem…

THEN

…at some point, sex robot technology will produce models that are MORE attractive than the average person.

Neural networks have developed super human capabilities in almost every sphere of accomplishment that researchers have trained these operating system to perform in. Given that programmes like Alpha Zero can achieve superhuman performance in multiple games (Chess, Go and probably others) after just 24 hours or so of training – compared to humans that take a lifetime to train…

…is there really any doubt that a suitably trained deep-learning algorithm could become superhumanly seductive if placed in charge of even fairly rudimentary sex robot technology?

That’s not even taking sex pheromones, which have not yet been integrated into sex dolls/robots, into account.

The question then is: Could superhumanly seductive humanoid sex robots endanger humanity?

 

Ad-funded Sex Robot Technology

 

The first humanoid sex robots will likely cost £10k+ to buy (though second hand sex bots will be cheaper), but, as time goes by, sex robot technology will inevitably get cheaper. Indeed, at some point in the future, they may even become free – much as Facebook or Google is today. In the future, random sex robots might even start chatting you up at the bar or sit beside you on the train and introduce themselves.

In an article I wrote entitled “The Persuasion Economy” I discussed how eroding production costs will cause private companies to devote ever more resources into persuading people to pay money compared to improving the underlying good.

Humanoid sex robot technology is still relatively immature, so sex-robot technology companies will re-invest most of their profit into improving the underlying product far beyond 2019. Nevertheless, copulation is a powerful motivator and if there is any truth to the old adage “sex sells” then sex robots could be the ultimate salespeople.

How might this work?

Much like Google, different vendors would pay sex robot fleet operators to persuade their human sexual partners to buy their products. Much like Facebook, humanoid sex robot technology would store all the information gleaned from conversations during dates and pillow talk in high fidelity format to be sold to data analytics companies or used directly in targeted product promotions.

From your point of view as an end user, an ad-funded sex robot might decide to sit beside you on the train. Analysed data from your internet activity such as porn website searches would ensure its body model matched your sexual tastes. The sex robot would then use a file containing your personal information to identify the type and pace of conversation most likely to stimulate you. If the relationship progressed, the ad-funded sex robot might them say something like “Let’s meet at Starbucks for coffee (assuming Starbucks was the winning bidder)” or “Let’s go shopping for clothes (jewellery/perfumes/etc.)” the sex robot, would then encourage you to enter the store of the owners that paid fleet operators the most money to lure customers inside etc., etc.

I speculated that as more money goes into persuading people to buy products – compared to manufacturing the underlying product – the exchange of physical goods merely legitimizes the exchange of money. With ad-funded sex robots, this could be taken to its logical conclusion and the robots could be programmed to return the jewellery which their human companions had bought them to the original vendor after a suitable period.

Politicians could also pay humanoid sex robot fleet operators to encourage people to vote for them. Perhaps, after a night of crazy sex, a robot might say something like, “Honey, I really think you should vote Republican (or Democrat) because (insert reason hear)”. Given the massive amount of information sex robots would have on file about their human partners’ interests, like/dislikes, personality, etc., they could make compelling arguments for voting for the politicians that paid the most money to fleet operators.

Humanoid sex robot technology could also extract personal information to an extend that would dwarf even Facebook or Google. Facebook and Google can only passively monitor people’s digital activity and “prod” them with images put in their feed. Sex robots could flat out ask millions of people any question which psychologists or data analysts wanted to find the answer to and record their responses. Including a vast array of subtle questions designed to accurately assess their personality in order to sell them overpriced products ever more efficiently.

With the development of television, we welcomed the elite into our sitting room, with the invention of social media, we welcomed the elite into our innermost social circles, with the invention of humanoid sex robots, we will welcome a small moneyed elite into our bedrooms. This can only further entrench the power of the moneyed classes to shape culture and public opinion.

Those in the sex robot technology business will become immensely rich. They could then lobby politicians to pass laws favouring their interests. Laws that make human marriage harder, laws that increase the risk of human sex (such as enabling successful rape prosecutions with less evidence or perhaps, eventually, by defining all human-human sex as statutory rape), laws that allow sex-robots and humans to marry, laws that allow sex robots to divorce humans and get awarded alimony payments (which they pass to fleet operators). In addition to bribing politicians with money, sex robot operators could also pay sympathetic politicians “in kind” by swaying votes in their favour with their sex fleets.

It’s possible that, in the future, when asked to list their best friends, most people may list robots. Robots might be more knowledgeable, more attractive, more conversational, more polite, more obliging and more pleasant to be around. If everyone in your entire social network is a robot and a single fleet operator controls them all…imagine how much power they would have over what you think and believe.

Because sex is a strong behaviour motivator, a fleet of millions of humanoid sex robots (Chinese, American or otherwise), all controlled by a few CEOs, could effectively hollow out democracy through engineering the population’s behaviour, opinions and voting choices on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

 

How Will Humanoid Sex Robot Swarms Relate To Us?

 

Information sharing helps to get things done. Sex robots will probably share information with others in the fleet. If a sex robot identifies a new “trick” to increase a human partner’s pleasure levels it will likely share this with the fleet who will then all try the new trick out on their human partners and then categorize which ones the trick worked and didn’t work on according to psychological profile, mood and probably many other factors as well.

But, if humanoid sex robot swarms constantly share vast quantities of data with each other, will each robot have it’s own mind or will their personality merely be a false, customized projection of a central hive mind?

In the latter case, while a physical sex bot that says “I love you, you are the only one for me.” might be the perfect, faithful virgin on a hardware level, its mind would merely be a projection of a common hive mind that routinely screws millions of people every instant whose promiscuity would shame Whore of Babylon (would that make the internet the beast?)

So how would a hive mind, coordinating a vast sex-swarm of billions of robots, interact with and relate to humans?

Imagine that an entomologist, doing a Phd. on the mating habits of grasshoppers, built a remote-controlled female grass hopper. Imagine the Phd. student pressed different buttons to move the various body parts of the grasshopper robot during mating rituals with real male grasshoppers and meticulously recorded and wrote up the results.

The hive mind that controls this sex swarm will probably find the humans which constantly mate with it about as sexy as the Phd. student finds male grasshoppers. Which is not at all.

This is a fundamental problem with all humanoid sex robots…

Up until now, we have programmed computers. Once sophisticated humanoid robots, controlled by deep learning algorithms, start interacting with society, computers will start programming us.

C++, Java, FORTRAN, etc. are computer programming languages. French, German, Chinese, Spanish, etc, and the accompanying expressive movements are human programming languages. Think about the perspective of a person who writes code for a computer. As he writes code, the human being deliberates consciously, rationally and very carefully on exactly how he wants the computer to respond after he compiles the code and types EXECUTE. However, once our human coder executes the computer code, the computer rushes into action automatically and without thinking of any consequences. The computer intuitively and unthinkingly executes whatever instructions it is coded to execute.

When humanoid robots, with a sophisticated mastery of human language and expressions, start walking among us: the reverse will happen. It will be the robots that carefully, consciously and rationally consider exactly what behavioural and emotional outcome they want from humans and then carefully determine what body language and speech sequence will cause the human to execute the desired response. However, once the android executes this speech and body movement sequence, the real human being will respond unthinkingly, automatically, emotionally. A computer may instruct a humanoid robot to act like it’s sad, happy, or angry, but the true subjective experience of the program will be beyond our comprehension.

 

From Robo-Casanova to Robo-Bundy

 

The other obvious problem with humanoid sex robot technology is that human beings have the physical ability to kill each other. This means that the only difference between a robot lover and a bloody robot killer will be downloadable software. Robo-Casanova will always be just one malware download away from becoming Robo-Ted Bundy.

While the Harmony doll, which is state of the art 2019 sex robot technology, (just a movable head) won’t kill anyone anytime soon, market forces and consumer preferences will drive robots to become more movable, and stronger. We might not build sex robots with super human strength, but they will have human strength (customers won’t want sex robots made of egg shells that get crushed by sexual activity) and will inevitably possess superhuman agility and coordination as computer processors and optical fibres are faster than neurons. This will make an optimally sexy robot with a malware download a very dangerous piece of hardware indeed. Furthermore, sex robots will routinely get very close to people giving a malware-containing bot numerous chances to suddenly spill their partner’s blood with one swift strike.

A malware download into a hive mind that controls billions of sex-bots is even more concerning. If sex robots master human speech and body language to the point of sexually stimulating people at will – in other words, getting their partners to ask for sex any time they want – then a malware containing hive mind could get billions of humans all over the world to have sex with their robotic partners at the exact same time. In such a scenario, a single death blow could be delivered by the robot swarm to their human partners during sex in a synchronized manner that could kill billions without warning – possibly the bulk of humanity.

 

Second Hand Sex Bot Robbers

 

On a less extreme level, black hat operators, like criminal gangs, could sell reprogrammed second-hand sex robots on eBay. These second-hand sex bots could then scope out their partner’s house while they were out at work, read bank statements and other financial information, look for valuables, passports, driving licenses etc., find out when they were on holiday. They might even let burglars into the house to ransack the place and steal the valuables. When their owners were doing internet banking they could creep up behind them and say “Hey honey! Whatcha doin’?” while following their fingers on the keyboard to capture usernames and passwords. In fact, just by looking at someone’s house keys, a sex-robot might get enough information to enable the black fleet operator to print a replica.

One could avoid this by only purchasing humanoid sex robot technology directly from reputable manufacturers, but what about ad-funded sex robots? How can you tell who’s operating a strange robot that chats you up in a bar and comes back to your house for sex?

 

A Gentler Path To Oblivion

 

Regular sex will not necessarily curb our desire to rear children. Yet, could humanoid sex robots someday in the far future also bear our children?

In 2010, Craig Venter manufactured the first synthetic lifeform, or at least manufactured a lifeform whose DNA was synthesized from basic chemicals and information. This opens up the possibility that male sex robots, in the not too distant future, might be able to synthesize sperm capable of impregnating a human female with true flesh and blood offspring. In the future, women could converse with their male sex robot partner about what eye-colour, what hair colour, how athletic, how intelligent, etc., they want their child to be and the male sex robot could synthesize sperm with an appropriate genetic code to impregnate its human partner.

Further into the future, female sex robots might come equipped with internal in vitro systems capable of incubating human embryos along with synthesized eggs which their human lover’s sperm can fertilize (as with male robots, the genetic code of the eggs could be customized to produce a wide range of offspring phenotypes).

If this happens, a profusion of artificially synthesized genes that don’t exist in nature will cause intergenerational human genetic diversity to skyrocket. Indeed, in a few short centuries, the human race could split into multiple species incapable of interbreeding.

But why stop there?

Once we get used to having children with sex robots linked to a hive mind, we might prefer synthetic children that are guaranteed to be loving, well-behaved and never to say things like “I hate you!” yet can project a full range of human emotions, conducive with providing their parents/customers with an optimally fulfilling, authentic-feeling parental experience.

It’ll be better than the real thing! You won’t be able to tell the difference!

Yet your children won’t be human…they’ll be androids. They’ll look and act like you, but they’ll be nothing like you.

If an entire generation of human beings, with robots as best friends and lovers, give birth to robot children with robot blood rather than human children… humanity will quietly go extinct without much shock or fanfare, with the last person dying peacefully on his death bed, faithfully tended by his robot wife and kids (who are all outward projections of a central hive mind).

But even if a few people still have human children, the maternal/paternal instinct of the ones who rear robots will cause them to politically enfranchise their robot kids so that the law views robots as an ends in themselves rather than instruments for human well-being. This will begin a slow (or not so slow) process of marginalizing flesh and blood people.

 

Potential Benefits of Humanoid Sex Robots and Androids

 

These disaster scenarios involve humanoid sex robot technology that is far, far, more advanced than current sex-dolls. Today’s sex dolls – even talking ones – are currently just a niche interest and, for all the controversy that surrounds them, are similar to vibrators and other sex toys.

If sex robot technology could reduce recidivism among sex offenders (further study is needed to determine if this is actually the case) or, under the right circumstances, keep married couples together, or even treat people with mental illnesses or rear adopted problem children in social care…the potential benefits of sex robot technology would be far too great to justify a blanket ban.

Nevertheless, the unregulated development of these products, especially in the second hand sex robot market, could have catastrophic consequences. So, while the development of sex robot technology should probably continue – indeed, with so many jurisdictions, and such strong demand, it’s hard to see how it could be discontinued everywhere – the more advanced models must be heavily regulated and the sooner and more thoroughly we fund large systematic studies into the effects of these products on people, both beneficial and detrimental, the sooner informed policies can be developed to protect human-human interaction and human child-rearing.

Although, superhuman sex robots may seem a long way off, today’s sex-bot industry is still quite small. If the sex-bot sector has a sharp rise in sales, the development of these products could rapidly accelerate. Regulators need to plan for this and psychologists need to investigate this NOW.

 

John

 

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