Another Baffled Article

[xodar]

25 August 2013 Last updated at 19:34 ET 7
Will we ever want to have sex with robots?
By Tim Bowler Business reporter, BBC News

Meet Roxxxy the sex robot with a triple XXX. Depending on your view 'she' is either at the cutting edge of the human-robot interface, or a modern reflection on some men's difficulties in relating to real-life partners.

While sex aids are nothing new, what makes Roxxxy different is "we've taken artificial intelligence" and "combined it with a human form," says creator Douglas Hines.

Of course, humanoid robots have been the stuff of science fiction for decades - ever since Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, or Isaac Asimov's I Robot stories.

The reality is somewhat more clunky.

Walking robots currently have little commercial value - they are expensive and are prone to falling over if they are placed on anything other than a flat surface.

One of the best of the bunch is Japan's all singing and dancing female robot, HRP-4C, from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

The main drawback of this type of robot is that they have a very short battery life - they only last for about 20 minutes.

It is enough for a rather impressive dancing routine from HRP-4C says the team, but for little else.

"One practical application for biped humanoid robots is the entertainment industry," says AIST "provided the robots can move very realistically like humans."

Loving the robot

In 2007, the British chess player and artificial intelligence (AI) expert David Levy said in his book, Love and Sex with Robots, we would be having sex with robots in five years - and be capable of falling in love with them within 40 years.

His argument is based on improvements in robotic engineering and computer programming - and extrapolating from the income generated by the porn industry each year.

Such robots would be a "terrific service" for mankind, he argued.

As for Roxxxy, she weighs in at 60lb (27kg) is 5ft 7in (1.70m) high and comes with a variety of hair colours, moveable limbs and 'lifelike' skin.

She is the brainchild of electrical engineer and computer scientist Douglas Hines, the founder of TC Systems and True Companion, who formerly worked in the artificial intelligence lab at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

He says the sex robot developed from his firm's line of healthcare robots, which were designed to look after elderly or infirm patients.

"Our skill-set is based on commercial and military robotics and what we did is we looked for an opportunity in the marketplace to apply that technology.

"One very obvious market is healthcare - but there's a less-known which is gaining more and more momentum which is the sex industry."

'Exciting time'

Mr Hines says his aim in developing his robot's artificial intelligence engine, was to go beyond a simple sex aid and to provide companionship

"The life experience with a partner goes beyond that - and that's really what we've gone for."

However, no matter how well-programmed a robot may be, it is still a machine, and he agrees a plastic and metal humanoid is not capable of replacing the real thing - yet.

"We are getting closer and closer. The gap between what is robotic and mechanical and what's human-like will minimise, so it's a very exciting time."

Roxxxy costs up to $9,000 (£5,700) and there is also a male version called Rocky. Later this year the company plans a more advanced model which it says will be mobile and autonomous.

At the heart of our relationships with such machines, fictional or not, is the question of what it means to be human and to relate to others.

While no machine, however well-engineered, can ever feel empathy - something which defines us humans - it might be able to simulate it well enough to allow us to play along and treat it as if it were a sentient being.

Novelty appeal

But will there ever be more than a fetish or novelty appeal in such robots?

In a survey earlier this year, one-in-11 of people - some 9% - told a YouGov poll for the Huffington Post in the US that they would be prepared to have sex with a robot.

That works out at over 25 million Americans - which could translate into a lot of robot sales.

Yet critics caution that we should not be too quick to embrace robots like Roxxxy.

"It is time to reconsider the premise that a robot is better than nothing," says Sherry Turkle, psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Because, if you are trying to solve the problem of care and companionship with a robot, you are not trying to solve it with the people you need to solve it with - friends, family, community."

Not promising

"We may think we are only making robots," she told this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "but really we are re-making human values and connections.

"The pretend self of a robot calls forth the pretend self of a person performing for it," she said.

And that, she says is not promising "for adults trying to live authentically and navigate life's real, human problems".


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23637225

[Miss Pris]

It's time for Sherry Turkle to stop repeating her same, tired, anti-tech mantra, over and over again. She's starting to sound like a machine...

[Grendizer]

I think Turkle, and people like her, simply love living the contrarian irony of neo-Luddite technologists. There's some other quais-famous yahoo, a damned computer scientist of all things, that enjoys lecturing audiences about how computers are rotting away our human capabilities. Some of you could probably name him from that description alone. Can't remember his name, but he's much like Turkle. Don't let them fool you: they absolutely will continue taking large sums of money to "study" the very things they have already concluded are worthy of their scorn.

[daphne]

Turkle's a paranoid goofball who's made a living doomsaying every step of the internet revolution since MUDs were a big thing, and being wrong about all of it. I wouldn't worry too much about her opinions.

[KingJeremy]

The following is only opinion -

She's right. If you are using a robot because you lack human companionship and want that in your life.

She's wrong if you just have an attraction to female looking robots.

That being said, if you're cripplingly shy, handicapped, ugly or any other numerous things that would prevent you from having a relationship that you want to have with a real woman and you want to experience that connection with a machine, there is absolutely no harm. I don't think she takes those things into account. I think she's just going on the assumption that some people are lazy and in those cases she would be right.

If it's just a sexual attraction to machines that look like women, fuck her. Everybody has something that isn't missionary for the sole purpose of procreation that gets them going. Unless that thing harms another person/animal then it's perfectly healthy.

As I said, this is only opinion and I could be way off base here. People that have been here awhile know that I don't have any interest at all in actual robots, my attraction lies with flesh and blood women playing/acting the part of a machine, so I don't really have a personal handle on this but from seeing stuff posted on the forum over the years that's my take on it.

[darkbutflashy]

While no machine, however well-engineered, can ever feel empathy - something which defines us humans
How do you check if someone has empathy? Empathy is all about mirroring someone else's expression. Sure a machine can do that, check the faces and gestures and mimic it. If you don't know it's a machine doing that, how do you tell the difference? You can't look into some else's mind either. "Feeling someone's empathy" is a delusion built onto the belief one cannot lie. That's a strong belief because most people are bad liars, but a machine has no problem with that.

For people who seek for empathy, a machine will be the perfect liar and thus, the perfect lover.

[daphne]

You can't look into some else's mind either.

This is an important point that director David Mamet makes in his book On Directing Film. He points out that the camera is not technologically capable of recording "feelings", only the actions of the actors. Therefore he believes it is a waste of time for actors to go into things like method acting and finding a character's motivation, because what would be the point? How you feel at the time the film is shot is irrelevant to the process of making a movie. Actors, he says, should be concerned with performing actions and no more. A famous example of this is Humphrey Bogart, long considered one of the geniuses of the silver screen, who acted in this exact way. There was no "motivation" to Bogart's work; he simply did what the script told him to do and nothing more.

Certainly we can have empathy for characters on a screen. Whether it's Walt from Breaking Bad, Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, or Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, we forge connections from our observations of these characters actions. The characters themselves are not real people. They are as manufactured and technological as any robot would be, constructs of the artist's ego made real through electronics. So why should it be any different with machines that do the same task, that are themselves actors playing a part in a very real sense?

[darkbutflashy]

They are as manufactured and technological as any robot would be, constructs of the artist's ego made real through electronics.

You could drive it further by taking a drawn character or even some figure from a novel where the whole "acting" is done in the reader's mind. This is very familiar stuff. The whole "feeling" is something that happens in the mind of the one who's recepting, and all the things that might happened in the minds of others are mere projections.

[xodar]

You can't look into some else's mind either.

This is an important point that director David Mamet makes in his book On Directing Film. He points out that the camera is not technologically capable of recording "feelings", only the actions of the actors. Therefore he believes it is a waste of time for actors to go into things like method acting and finding a character's motivation, because what would be the point? How you feel at the time the film is shot is irrelevant to the process of making a movie. Actors, he says, should be concerned with performing actions and no more. A famous example of this is Humphrey Bogart, long considered one of the geniuses of the silver screen, who acted in this exact way. There was no "motivation" to Bogart's work; he simply did what the script told him to do and nothing more.

Certainly we can have empathy for characters on a screen. Whether it's Walt from Breaking Bad, Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, or Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, we forge connections from our observations of these characters actions. The characters themselves are not real people. They are as manufactured and technological as any robot would be, constructs of the artist's ego made real through electronics. So why should it be any different with machines that do the same task, that are themselves actors playing a part in a very real sense?

This is exactly right. I remember reading some time ago, maybe in the 60s, about a method actor whose depiction of Mussolini was severly criticized becaue he hadn't really acted like the dictator and who explained that he was trying to depict Musolini's "turbulent inner self". I would suppose that the latter's actual observed behavior was a result of his "inner self". Acting is the result of depicting what the author and director want plus certain understood if not always articulated thespian conventions. If this weren't so mirroring wouldn't function or else nobody would be able to lie; to a huge extent what you see is what others are.

If a fembot -- and why shouldn't they be as much for people with reationship difficulties as for people turned on by robots -- can be programmed to behave as the owner wants then a genuine relationship exists. In either of these cases the human benefits, which probably benefits persons associating with them.
Are we really so sure dogs and cats are experiencing what emotions we think they are or they just engaging in behaviors they know will get them attention and treats? Possibly dogs to an extent because of unconscious and deliberate selection over milennia, but does it matter if both benefit?