Sixteen Volts

In the earlier post "Ooh baby, give it to me" I speculated a future in which some form of technology, for the sake of brevity and convenience called "sexbot" (even though instead of an actual physical gynecomorphic robot, it could also be a Kurzweil-style sensory simulation with nanotechnology, or simply a stream of prerecorded fully immersive sensory input as in the movie "Strange Days") can provide the user a sensory experience of a horny attractive woman who behaves toward him as if he was a rock star or other similar alpha male. My prediction is that were such sexbot technology ever developed and available for a reasonable price, men would embrace (heh) it. This would happen the exact same way that people embraced Walkman and MP3 player technologies to listen to music instead of trying to convince live musicians to play music for them. One result of this would be that the sexual interaction between men and women would decrease, and the supply and demand mismatch between sexes would be equalized, taking power away from women and giving it to men. Women might also notice that disgusting men don't look at their body parts and objectify them so much by thinking that sex with some woman would be fun and try to approach her, without first ensuring carefully that the woman feels the same way.

I might be wrong, of course. If any of my readers believes that my predictions are false, in the sense that sexbots would not become a fantastically profitable and ubiquitous product, please post or otherwise point me to alternative explanations of what you think would happen if sexbot technology were developed. Please also note that it is a totally different question to ask whether good-enough sex robots could be built (I am highly skeptical), than it is to ask what would happen if they were built. Even if we don't believe in the technological feasibility of sex robots, they are an interesting thought experiment that might reveal us a lot about both sexes and society in general.

In style of Marvel comics in which supervillains use their intelligent humanoid robots to commit villainy but never become billionaires by, you know, mass-manufacturing these robots to serve the whole humanity, we should additionally assume that sexbots are good only for sex but not for other tasks. Given the complexity and range of motions of both tasks, building a satisfactory sexbot would be easier than building a robot that is able to work as a maid that cleans the house and cooks a delicious dinner. Otherwise, with robotic technology that advanced, all physical jobs would go the way of phone switch operators as robots would do them (including the jobs that Americans famously "won't do"), which would totally transform the whole society and make all predictions moot. If robots were able to perform all physical tasks, a human who cleans his home instead of having the robot do it would be considered as weird as we would consider somebody who cooks his dinner by building a campfire on the kitchen floor.

To start, in the comments of my earlier post, Alex voices a variation of objections that I have seen addressed to The Danimal so many times that I have already lost count. Let's see if I can take a stab at them:

Scoring with real women will always be an achievement, what men really want. In our society, men who, by "choice" or necessity, forgo real women in favor of porn, real Dolls, etc. are considered losers who do so because no woman will have them. This stigma will also be associated with sexbots.

By that logic, Honda and Toyota would have gone bankrupt long ago after futile attempts to compete with Ferrari and Porsche. Second, there would be stigma only as long as the technology remained humorously crude (as evidenced by the present-day connotations of the word "robotic"), the same way that sexual blow-up dolls are considered pitiful and humorous. But if the sexbot technology got past the uncanny valley, this stigma would vanish or at least become essentially meaningless --- probably roughly comparable to the "stigma" that people who buy their artificial foodstuffs from a supermarket receive in our society, instead of hunting and gathering for more natural food. Or the stigma that is cast on people who listen to artificial music on an MP3 player instead of going to a live concert. That is, goose egg.

The Danimal once noted that when the first cars and airplanes came out, people laughed at them, just like they will laugh at the sexbot version 1.0. And for a good reason, since the early cars and airplanes were quite humorous, when you look at pictures and films featuring them. A hundred years and countless improvements later, nobody is laughing any more. (Especially the terrorists don't laugh very much when an F-16 drops a 500-pound bomb on them.)

Given a choice between sex with an attractive and enthusiastic sexbot (or two) who is in all relevant respects indistinguishable from [your favourite sexy celebrity du jour] so that this sex is as easy and certain as getting water from the kitchen tap (in other words, the otherwise "realistic" sexbot would be highly unrealistic compared to how a similarly attractive real woman would behave towards the man, as the sexbot would have no subconscious "Egg Protection Prime Directive" to obey, nor a horde of potential suitors to discourage), versus the extremely difficult and uncertain task of getting sex from the average woman who is vastly less attractive (and failing this, masturbation with flat and non-interactive porn), I would say that this choice is a no-brainer for the average single man. And it would require massive social conditioning and religious brainwashing to make him choose the other way. Islamic madrassas or Opus Dei might succeed in doing this to their followers, but the Western liberal democracy has no chance.

Furthermore - what about hookers?

What about them? In fact, by their very existence, prostitutes pretty conclusively prove many of my (and The Danimal's) points in predicting what would happen with the introduction of sexbot technology. With the possible exception of the high class call girls, a human prostitute basically offers the same service as a sexbot would provide, but in a vastly more expensive and inferior manner with various more and less serious defects, from the point of view of the customer. Therefore any man willing to purchase sex from a prostitute (who rarely look like the prostitutes in movies) would certainly be willing to bang an attractive sexbot.

Prostitutes also nicely invalidate another possible objection to sexpots, one that is based on the nutjob idea that men would reject having sex with sexbots because they provide no "challenge" or a "thrill of a hunt". How could this be so, when the very service that the prostitutes provide essentially consists of the virtual (heh) certainty of sex with no fear of rejection, and getting to bypass the whole complex and risky process of seduction? If men really needed the "thrill of the hunt" to be able to enjoy sex, prostitutes would have gone out of business a long time ago, yes?

In every other aspect of life it is painfully clear that given a free choice, everybody prefers certainty to risk whenever something important is at stake, and everybody enjoys being fully in control to exercise and realize his or her preferences. This is one reason why artificial things will always win in the end, compared to their unreliable natural alternatives. The whole point of artificial things is that they don't have to be "realistic" but can improve reality, so that an airplane doesn't have to fly by flapping its wings. To see what I mean, just look around you right now and count how many artificial things you can see, as opposed to natural things. We can also observe this vividly in the fact that most people prefer to own cars that reliably start each morning and then go wherever you steer them, instead of the car (or a horse, a warm and thinking and feeling horse that the cold and unthinking car yet absolutely crushed in competition for providing transport services to humans) occasionally randomly deciding that it doesn't feel like leaving the garage today, this way providing their owners an exciting "thrill" of uncertainty and risk. Television sets that always show the channel that the viewer chooses far outsell television sets that show channels randomly, completely ignoring what the user clicks on the remote control. And so on. And even if I was totally wrong in this, how hard would it be to program a sexbot occasionally have a "headache" or demand that the man first has to pursue it for a long time?

And of course there's the powerful internal drive for things like the social validation involved in showing off that woman on your arm to your social circle (no one's taking the sexbot out for a walk), the desire for romantic love/to be cared for/to be desired by another human being, creating a family (yes, lots of men eventually want children/a wife). Sexbots will never satisfy these needs.

Probably true: at least in the beginning, the man would probably have to be young Johnny Depp to be able to own a sexpot and manage to be a socially sympathetic character. Even so, most men will never get to satisfy their needs to date an optimally attractive woman let alone get social validation from being able to do this, so that objection is pretty much a moot point. Second, the fact that something is a status symbol in no way prevents the lower-status people from choosing less expensive and hassle-free alternatives. Owning a Ferrari is a classic status symbol, but Honda and Toyota still manage to make brisk business. Last, we should note that owning (or renting) a sexbot would not preclude a single man later pairing up with an actual woman whenever he and she together so desire, neither for a short term or a long term, any more than having a one-night stand or masturbation would prevent man from doing this. Of course, the artificial sexbot would be programmed so that it would not make a fuss in such an event, but would happily fold itself in the original cardboard packaging and shut down.

So far, I have only considered female sexbots for male customers, but obviously, if there were economic demand for the male sexbots that service women (in style of Jude Law's character in the movie "AI"), free market would certainly provide them. But I predict that this market would be significantly smaller than the fembot market. First, due to the supply-demand sexual mismatch between the sexes, it is far easier for women to find men for sex than vice versa. Second, what men tend to find sexually attractive in women (youth, good looks, externally observable behavior that is concordant with the hypothesis that that particular man's penis is the absolute greatest thing ever) is probably far easier to simulate artificially than what women tend to find sexually attractive in men (in addition to good looks, women want man to display signs of power, status, wealth and confidence). If some robot could possess actual power and status over humans, the whole world would have to be so unimaginably different from ours that the question of sexbots might be the least of our concerns.

But since artificial things are designed to provide services that natural things fail to provide optimally, perhaps many women would enjoy an "Oprahbot". That is, an artificial girlfriend who unfailingly behaves as if her mistress was the greatest and best friend ever, and who has both the energy and willingness to talk about all those things that women consider important and endlessly listen to her mistress's problems and concerns. I could definitely see a market for this product.

Dog of Justice also objects:

There is also the evolutionary factor. Barring artificial wombs or some similarly disruptive technology, the first generation created after the invention of viable sexbots is going to be descended from the subset of the population that decided to have children anyway.

This assumes that a man would exclusively use sexbots and totally forgo real women. This wouldn't happen, any more than a man would exclusively masturbate, except with the worst losers with no mating prospects anyway. Instead of making sure that these men don't procreate using the traditional ways of constant rejection and mockery, wouldn't it be far more humane to let these men have simulated sex with attractive fembots to their hearts content? For the non-omega population, sexbots would basically be equivalent to other well-known contraceptive techniques (except that they would far more pleasant) so that when the man could have all the recreational sex that he wanted (and the vast majority of all sex is recreational) and when he finally wanted to have a child, he could do the real messy thing. In fact, in this respect (heh) sexbots would be good for women, since they would know that whenever some guy approaches them, he is after a long-term relationship, and guys wouldn't spin lies "of course I want to have children in the future" to get in the gals' panties.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 1:10 PM