Rambling Thoughts on Robo-Masochism

[D.Olivaw]

Robot fetish media is full of conscious gynoids that love to be dismantled, more or less violently, sometimes to the point of destruction. Among other things, this serves a narrative purpose by straightforwardly manifesting the tension between the gynoid’s human appearance and her mechanical nature. But I’ve often wondered: what diegetic motivations could explain this lust for damage? Would such a machine experience damage as something analogous to pain? What follows is a summary of my tentative thoughts on the topic, such as they are.

Physical pain in living organisms derives from nociception, a system for detecting tissue damage. Special nerves sensitive to mechanical disruption, damaging temperatures, and chemical threats send signals to the brain that are perceived as pain and trigger brain functions that, in addition to more immediate effects, selectively suppress the neural pathways of the behaviors that led to the painful stimulus. In human masochists, there’s some evidence that their nociceptive neural response is malformed, causing these signals to be mistaken for pleasurable stimuli. Physical pleasure works similarly, in that certain nervous stimuli trigger (different) neurotransmitters and neural patterns to strengthen the pathways for behaviors associated with those stimuli.

A robot could be designed with an analogous nociceptive sensory capability, even if implemented purely in software via the coding scheme for sensory signals. Assuming a human-like neuromorphic cognitive architecture with the above-discussed systems for inhibiting or promoting behaviors, such a robot might very well have the subjective sense that such signals are painful (pace David Chalmers on qualia isomorphism as a necessary consequence of functional isomorphism). But strict biomimicry isn’t the only route, especially in light of the different material considerations of a mechanical as opposed to a biological body.

Physical pain emerged as an answer to a particular set of problems. Biological organisms can heal even grave injuries, but this ability is limited. Healing takes time during which further damage can slow or reverse the progress of regeneration, so it’s vital that the affected area not be too stressed by further activity. The body’s healing powers are limited in their capacity, so it’s imperative to prevent additional injury lest a tipping point be reached beyond which full recovery becomes impossible. In the ancestral environment, each non-trivial injury came with a risk of death or serious debilitation. Under these conditions, the strength of behavioral suppression and aversion that result from the neural mechanisms associated with pain are worth their drawbacks.

Assuming technology of a more or less conventional nature and skipping over some edge cases, the situation is very different for robots. They don’t heal the way that biological organisms do: physical damage is remedied by dismantling a robot sufficiently to replace all affected components, followed by reassembly. Far from maintaining themselves despite use, or even strengthening as a result of it, their parts are worn down by their working and must be periodically replaced. Even damage severe enough to cause the robot to totally cease functioning lacks the finality of biological death unless the memory or neural-analogue hardware, the “brain” itself, is wrecked. Unlike our ancestors, the robot is necessarily embedded in a technological civilization on which it relies for the power, replacement parts, lubricants, and other consumables that sustain its existence, so even major damage is more likely to be repaired instead of leading to death. The set of problems to be solved is thus fundamentally different.

At minimum, damage is still inconvenient and probably costly to repair, so being completely oblivious or indifferent to it is not ideal. One possible approach is to implement a version of the pain mechanism that scales differently than ours with the degree of damage, perhaps similar in intensity at lower, ‘slamming your hand in the car door’ levels, but effectively capped not much higher than that. Imagine if having your leg severed was no more painful than a sprain.

Conditional suppression of pain mechanisms could also be implemented. Indeed, biological creatures have this capability: in situations of extreme stress people who have received grievous wounds often describe the pain as much less severe than it grew to be once the stressful situation ended. In robots, one obvious use for this is suppressing pain after the initial damage event, as continued activity poses far less danger to a robot than a wounded human. Other conditions might have to do with environmental or social cues, or the specific components affected by the damage.

Volitional suppression of pain would certainly make sense, too, albeit with hard-coded/wired constraints to prevent abuse (finding ways to override or circumvent these is a possible plot point). One way to realize such volitional suppression might be to design the robot such that, while the pain might still be occurring, their conscious mind, or “access consciousness” as the highest level mental thread that is aware of our other mental processes and sensations is sometimes called, is not forced to pay attention to it. In other words, the robot can choose to ignore the pain.

That brings us to solutions that don’t involve pain at all, or which act independently alongside it. Instead, stimuli associated with damage could force themselves to the center of attention, ensuring the robot is aware of them. They could persist there until some time has passed, or until some condition is met that allows them to be dismissed.

Since damage is still likely to be associated with physical danger, the robot should have analogues to the automatic responses that help us navigate such situations. Damage-prevention reflexes like those that cause us to pull our hand back after touching a hot stove are one example. Something akin to a rationalized version of the fight-flight-freeze reaction is another.

In humans (and probably other animals) the fight-flight-freeze response is often associated with a perceptual time dilation that makes it possible to respond to events much more rapidly than is normally possible. Foreseeable neuromorphic computer hardware is made up of electrical components capable of reacting orders of magnitude more quickly than biological neurons, though there are system level constraints (e.g. most neural processes are memory- and coordination-limited rather than processing-limited) that may prevent them from fully exploiting this. Furthermore, the tight power and cooling constraints that apply to humanoid robots will likely drive a design emphasis on the inherent high efficiency of such hardware (similar to that of brain tissue), meaning that in normal operation such a robot might only be using a fraction of its maximum theoretical cognitive speed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though, and it’s possible that the cognitive hardware of such robots might be designed to temporarily function at unsustainably high rates in crisis situations, such as when they have sustained damage.

Whatever is done with the resulting signals, damage can only be directly sensed in parts of the body that are equipped with sensors of some kind. Of course, this includes the places where a robot interfaces with the world: the skin, eyes, ears, and so on, but also internal sensors associated with balance, proprioception, and the positions of various actuators.

Which other internal parts might be instrumented, and to what degree, is less certain. The boundaries between fluidic and electronic systems, as well as leak-prone parts of the plumbing in general, seem like a good place for sensors that can detect moisture. A network of internal temperature sensors also seems advisable.

Different subsystems or components might at once provide direct sensor inputs to cognitive/neural processes akin to sensation, but also be able to use their own installed compute capacity to generate more detailed diagnostic data when requested. In other words, the behavior of a fluid pump might “feel odd” (the neuromorphic-based intelligence is experiencing that the stimulus provided by the pump’s sensors is atypical), which could prompt a request for the system to which the pump belongs to provide a detailed diagnostic report in a symbolic format (text or image based) that the conscious, symbol-manipulating mind can read.

Finally, we return to the original question: why might a conscious gynoid desire to be damaged?

It seems likely that context will play a central role in governing sexual receptivity. This is especially prominent in the context of BDSM as practiced by humans, but is true for sex in general—your lover touching your genitals in the bedroom elicits very different sensations than a stranger doing so in the checkout line at a convenience store. What frightens or disgusts in one context arouses in another, profoundly affecting the perceived pleasure of a given sensation.

If the pain caused by damage is not especially intense or prolonged, can be suppressed or ignored at will in the right context, or is simply absent, the problem becomes a matter of identifying the positive allure of the experience. Something about being damaged must seem pleasurable, whether by that we mean outright sensual pleasure or the satisfaction of some less immediate psychological hunger. I think the latter is too nebulous and contingent even for an exploration as speculative as this one to produce any useful generalizations, so for the time being let’s consider how physical damage might produce physical pleasure.

Damage implies extreme stimulation of sensors: a blow will produce a stronger sensation (higher magnitude signal from pressure sensors) than a caress. Internal damage will stimulate sensors that are usually dormant, or else produce routine signals that rarely rise to conscious attention during normal operation. In a psychologically receptive state, such extreme, atypical sensations could be perceived as powerfully pleasurable and delightfully unpredictable—feelings that would be subjectively amplified and extended by any damage-induced hyperarrousal and time dilation. Even if the sensation of damage itself is neutral, though, triggering these mechanisms might be desirable because of their effect on co-occurring, more conventionally pleasurable sensations.

Important too are the specific qualities of the gynoid’s sexual system. What set of physical stimuli produces pleasure for her in general? Is she made so that only the stimulation of a few erogenous zones can ever be perceived as sexually pleasurable or, like humans, does a state of growing sexual excitement open the gates to erotic pleasure from a wider range of sensual inputs? In the former case, only damage to those erogenous parts of the gynoid has the potential to result in direct extreme-stimulus pleasure. The latter provides a much broader scope for the enjoyment of damage as a part of sexual play.

If this capacity for experiencing damage as pleasurable is subject to the behavioral reinforcement mechanism so central to the causal-mechanical aspect of what we call “pleasure,” positive accidental or experimental experience could result in a self-reinforcing desire to explore more extreme manifestations.

[BA2]

You’ve given this some thought then!

An interesting post with a lot of detailed technical consideration. I might rob some of this for exposition if I get around to writing again…

For me this sort of discussion is gold, it really helps to suspend disbelief if there’s a plausible explanation for a fembot’s behaviour. Understanding why one scenario hits the spot and another doesn’t is very helpful for creative work but it’s often surprisingly difficult. I think there’s a sweet spot where mechanical design, programming, social factors and personality all okay a part.

I’m not a big fan of massive destruction myself, though it can be fun. I tend to prefer more subtle errors and malfunctions, often involving an element of hubris, and the disregard of the fembot’s personhood as a result.

I can’t add much to your technical thoughts but from a social design point of view here are a few from my imagination:

1) The software making up a fembot’s personality may not be as sophisticated as she feels it is. Uploaded or authored, much of her ‘self’ could be composed of blocks of standard code with only the veneer of a unique personality. When operating outside everyday parameters her programming may lack suitable responses and fall back on code designed for other situations. Her responses could become increasingly inappropriate such as getting aroused by the intimacy of repairs and maintenance. After all, why program her to behave realistically in a scenario where she is obviously not ‘real’.

2) Possibly learning / adaptive personality programming could develop an association between the designed loss of control of a programmed orgasm response and the genuine loss of control during a malfunction, error, damage or while being externally controlled or reprogrammed. The association could develop from inappropriate selection of arousal functions (see above) or from experiencing a malfunction during sex and could develop to the point where malfunction become arousing in itself.

3) A fembot may be programmed with pride in her nature and design, either as a faithful replication of a former human’s desire to ‘be converted’ or for more commercial reasons. She may find the whole idea of androids and being a machine herself arousing and so anything that emphasises her nature may play to this.

4) Changes to her personality programming and settings may have unintended consequences…

[dubhdanaidh]

At the risk of oversharing when it comes my ordering of customs, this topic is one I've considered in-depth.

First, there is the practical problem of a fembot being an advanced machine and sometimes machines just break. That's kind of boring when it comes to content, so I never ask for just that. Truth to be told if fembots ever become a thing I think malfunction content will largely remain in the realm of fantasy as it would mostly likely be a horror when it really happens.

That being said I love the idea of a minor problem being ignored by the fembot and being so minor it is undetected or hardly detected at all. In particular I love the idea of a fembot's personality being a program running in an operating system. I know Freud's ideas are outdated in many ways, but when you factor in "drivers" it is similar to the id, ego, and super ego with the id being the drivers, the ego the operating system, and the superego the persona program. When they work in sync everything is good. When they don't problems emerge.

As for how fembpts respond to pain it can go either way. The fembot isn't advanced enough to respond appropriately to an issue or the fembot is so advanced they can override or choose the an inappropriate response. That being said I agree that "pain" would serve to protect the unit. I would say 100% of my custom content should end with the fembot recognizing there is a problem and powering down. But that's boring.

[BA2]

I guess people are generally unpredictable and illogical when it comes to personality where machines generally function as designed (though are not always well designed…) So, a machine programmed to ‘be’ a person might include quirks that hinder its efficient operation. Perhaps especially so if the programming is ‘self-learning’ and/or if it is derived from a human source.

I like the idea of a beta version of personality programming where the huge complexity of working out any bugs is basically just ignored in favour of intervention to correct problems as they emerge (with or without consent).

[D.Olivaw]

I guess people are generally unpredictable and illogical when it comes to personality where machines generally function as designed So, a machine programmed to ‘be’ a person might include quirks that hinder its efficient operation. Perhaps especially so if the programming is ‘self-learning’ and/or if it is derived from a human source.

This sounds more like you're talking about a conventional suite of software running on a computer built along the lines of the Modified Harvard Architecture (i.e. the vast majority of modern computers). While that's a perfectly valid topic, I feel obligated to point out it's a completely different animal than what I was discussing in the initial essay.

One of the defining characteristics of a genuinely neuromorphic design is that it would be probabilistic, at least on the macro-behavioral scale; more like the transformer neural-net systems that are so prominent now but vastly more flexible and fluid. Essentially a reproduction in electronic hardware of the operations of a human neocortex.

Right now the frontier in robotics is Vision-Language-Action models like Helix, where (simplifying a lot!) you train a transformer on a bunch of teleoperation data so it can go between words like "load the boxes in the bins" to a set of physical actions that accomplish that task. The key thing here is that we're already outside the realm of explicitly programming the robot to move its hand just so and lift the box just so, because that turned out to be impossible to do in a way that was flexible enough to generalize. Like all transformers and other backpropagation-based models, though, once the model is trained, it's static, it can't learn anymore unless you give it a software update with a new model.

Skipping a bunch of speculative development steps, I do think an intermediate design we might see (maybe even in real life if the kind of hardware I'm talking about ever makes it off the lab bench) uses the fluid, continuously-adaptive, power-efficient cortical architecture as the intermediate, translation layer between the world (the robot's sensors and body and such) and a conventional set of software that's acting as the top-level intelligence. The latter is deterministic, predictable, and easily programmable; very desirable if you're making a machine that needs to be safe, subject to quality control, and able to perform repeated tasks the same way every time. The artificial cortical system in this case is serving to filter the world down to the very abstract and constrained set of symbolic representations the 'normal' software can handle, and then in turn to adapt its similarly simplistic commands to the complexities of the environment.

Such a machine wouldn't be conscious, of course, it lacks the heterarchical, self-reflective and recursive functions of a real brain (or reproduction of such via wholly neuromorphic hardware), but of course that's hardly desired for most applications!

[Inspectron]

I always wonder how the robot, especially if they're a convert/upload, feels. To "wake up" as version 2.5 and realize that you weren't sapient until this moment, and then wonder if you even are now. (Humans wonder, too.)

To realize that the 2.0 update and new body isn't you, and now you're being sold used. (And then to wonder if your human self was killed to make you, which can't really be answered.)

To realize that you're in the wrong setting but incapable of changing it without your remote, which you can't pick up and use anyway. ("Able to change her settings based on social cues" was a surprising thing to be a new feature for uploads in BA's story snippets.)

To discover that you don't feel physical pleasure, but fulfilling your function feels even better.

To prod at the limits of what you're capable of thinking and wondering about, and feel yourself gently pulled away every time.

To meet two copies of yourself, programmed to get along and work in perfect sync with you. (You are, too, not that you'd know.)

To have such a short operational life that it should terrify you, but it's okay.