by Len HolmanMay 7, 20216:22 pm

Sexbots, Theseus, and Color TVs

In my day, no one had a color TV. Then the prices came down and down, and color TVs became ubiquitous. Can The Age of Sexbots be far behind?

What with all the recent angst over the “soul of America” and the accompanying struggle to make America great again or to return America to normal, it comforts me to know that for a mere ten grand or so, I can buy a machine to have sex with. It comforts me to know that good old American know-how is still alive and well; it comforts me to know that no matter how many riots occur, how many fences and walls are built, whether the nation’s children ever set foot in a classroom again, I can relieve my anxiety and stress by going home to my sexbot and getting a proper snuggle.

Curmudgeonly ethics professors and traditionalists of all stripes are in an uproar. These people don’t seem all that concerned about rubbing the lamp for other applications of Artificial Intelligence that has already been done and is continuing. It’s not like just freeing a genie, because after your three wishes, the lamp becomes inert and the genie goes off to wait for his or her next assignment. THIS genie produces a never-ending stream of fulfilled wishes: sex with AI-enhanced bots, war with AI-enhanced bots, space travel and colonization with more bots, cars and taxis and trains and semis hauling goods—all robots serving mankind. Why, it’s breathtaking. No the angst is reserved for sex (as Americans seem to be constantly outraged about)—specifically sex with machines, with robots, with non-humans.

On a BBC website from last year, a screaming, ominous headline: “Sex Robots May Cause Psychological Damage.” Unlike sex with living humans, I guess. And if one strips away all the jargon and verbal pearl-clutching, we seem to be talking about a version of a famous philosophical problem, the problem of personal identity: what makes you, YOU? The ship of Theseus.

Suppose you have a boat (let’s call it the Betty) which is dismantled and the boards and planks of which are stored in the garage. One day, you decide to rebuild the Betty, using the very same wood. You do and you are now looking at the Betty, your boat. But is it? It is identical to the original boat, but for the nails and screws and such, but you call it Betty and your friends and neighbors call it Betty and everyone assumes it’s the Betty. What makes it the Betty? And here, I submit that what makes it your original beloved boat is that you decide that it is. Just the way the folks on the Enterprise decide that Picard is Picard, no matter how many beam-ups and beam-downs he makes, the way you decide you are you, as you grow up, no matter how many body cells or brain cells die. So perhaps the idea that an artificial girlfriend is—despite the fact she started life in a factory and was never on the cheerleading squad in high school—in your mind, still a girl you can have sex with. She’s a girl who never says “No” and never smirks at the size of your equipment. She remembers that you like lemon pie, what positions you like, which kinks make you salivate. In advanced models, her lips move as she talks, her head can be put on a different body (hey, with enough dough, you, to can be master of a harem!).

There is, of course, a dark side to this. Already, AI sexbots are being made to imitate children, those who want some BDSM, who will provide any aberration desired. It this a good thing or the last wheezes of a modern-day Rome, going to hell?

One of the arguments for this wrinkle is that people who would normally harm women or children now have an outlet for their predilections, a safety-valve which protects society and individuals. This, so far, applies only to those deviant people with hefty bank accounts.

If a person’s mind accepts his Tupperware Tanya as a real person, then she is. He gets what he may have been missing: love, security, intimacy, companionship. Someone to chat with on those lonely nights, someone to care for and to BE the one caring—even if those emotions are not biological. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is The Porn Argument.

In 1983, the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance was written (originally) by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mackinnon. Actually a number of ordinances, they were aimed at treating porn as a violation of women’s civil rights and proposed to allow women harmed by pornography to seek redress in civil courts. Eventually, court interrupted this march to a shinier morality by noting its infringement on the 1^st Amendment. And there can be little doubt that some porn is degrading to women (porn’s evolution since ’83 has proceeded apace, with startling variants and, shall we say, astonishing limit-busting). Sexbots are not mentioned in these ordinances, but the idea lingers, though to what effect is questionable. Linda Boreman, she of Deep Throat infamy (as “Linda Lovelace”) wrote a memoir, Ordeal, in which she chronicled her physical and mental abuse and coercion into making her movie, and the idea of legislation to address her, and others’, trauma came to the sunlight. And her ordeal and these ordinances seemed to spark a heightened awareness of not only the pernicious problems of some porn, but of the effect on women, and on men’s attitudes and behaviors toward them. All worthy things, but are sexbots in this category?

Are women dehumanized and made to be objects by these constructed females? Is this the poisonous effect of the ongoing behavior and ideas about women? If a man wants an AI sexbots to be The Little Woman, to act out his fantasies, no matter how puerile and unenlightened they may be, is this porn as we all have come to know it? Is this the beginning of yet another variant of male-directed, male-dominant, knuckle-dragging behavior and attitude toward women? Of course, some women will, as in “regular” porn, want in on the action, with their own versions of sexbots heaven. And the variations are legion, since, anything which can be programmed to do the unthinkable, WILL be. Who will be the first to sue for damages or alienation of affection? Sexbots will not be engaging the services of a lawyer. Sexbots will do the bidding of their owners and not even care they ARE owned. Some group, some organization, some splinter of #MeToo will no doubt be unable to avoid the temptation of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Sexbots, for those who have them, are women, identical to wives, girlfriends, companions. It is pointless to say to the guy with the rebuilt boat, “But this really isn’t YOUR boat anymore”, or to say to the Enterprise crew, “This isn’t REALLY Jean-Luc Picard anymore”, just as it is pointless to tell a man who has shelled out ten grand, that what he paid for isn’t really a woman. And any lawsuit would have to tacitly (at least) acknowledge some level of identity with flesh and blood females.

First, there was the love that dares not speak its name, then, mistresses as part of a household, animals, transwomen and men, BDSM, the internet, phones, every conceivable (so far) variant, and now sexbots—becoming more sophisticated and compliant. The ethical dilemmas and moral conundrums will, no doubt, multiply, but so far, the prices are such that no major societal impact has yet emerged.

But remember when color TVs came out, with their green-skinned people with blue hair? No one I knew had one, no one in my family knew anyone who had one, no one I heard of could afford one. Then the prices came down and down, and color TVs became ubiquitous. Can The Age of Sexbots be far behind?

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7Comments

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1

Lyra Jannetta on February 6, 2023 at 8:10 pm
Reply

Given the jury’s in on the fact that men who pay for sex & consume pornography actually become more likely to sexually offend as a result (something to do with it bolstering their sense of god-given entitlement to sexual access to women, perhaps…?), I doubt the following, but:

If manipulative men who seek a woman to abuse or subjugate would be prevented from hurting real people (such as prostituted women, for example) because of this technology, all to the good. But something tells me this isn’t really solving the root of the problem here. In fairness you do (carefully) avoid making an explicit claim about the relative merits of the advent of sexbots – the message of your article seems to be more along the lines of, sexbots are coming to a cinema near you, so get dressed. However, you do make a claim that the main question thrown up by all this is one concerning “the problem of personal identity”, “what makes you, you”, etc – and I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. At the very least I think your answer to your own question is wrong.

Let’s say I have the desperate urge in life to sit on a cactus. I just really want to do it, and will do so every time I see a cactus. Trouble is, some of them are prickly as hell [they sexually reject me], making sitting on them painful [I cry about it]. So, in an attempt to approximate the consummation of my urge, less this set-back, I find an engineer who designs for me a hyper-realistic looking (& maybe feeling, who knows) cactus, the bristles (bristles?) of which are not painful. Now, any biologist worth her salt would tell you that this is obviously not actually a cactus. It does not possess the necessary parts, nor perform the required life-processes, which would earn it that particular classification in the plant kingdom (or indeed classification as a plant at all).

But maybe you think this is pedantic. After all, you’re saying that the robot *might as well be* a woman, because the guy who just forked out a few grand for it *perceives it to be* such. (I actually doubt this is true, by the way. The guy knows it is a robot & not an actual woman – that’s what he paid for. As you later hint at in your list of other productions of the growing transhumanist trajectory of our increasingly alienated and hyper-consumerist society, part of the allure of sexbots is that they are bots – superficially humanoid, but uncanny and Blade Runner-esque). Indeed I’d wager (& correct me if I’m wrong) that my argument that the cactus-bot is not really a cactus seemed kind of obvious to you. After all, you likely don’t interact with cacti all that often, and the idea of defining the cactus based on the criteria plant-scientists would use to define a cactus is perhaps something you’d therefore be more inclined to defer to. But by what actual logic exactly are you asking the reader to defer, in her definition of a woman, to the sex-infused (& thus subjective) perceptions of this sexbot-buyer? I’m not going to make an argument for the misogyny implicit in that idea, because you kind of handwave that qualm through most of the article, so I’ll assume you don’t care. Ok. Instead I will just leave it at pointing out that your claim here is downright silly.

This is also why your Theseus’ ship analogy doesn’t work. People can argue over whether it’s “still the same ship” (Trigger’s broom, etc), but we can all agree it is at least manifestly still *a ship*.

It may be “pointless” to try to tell a guy who has spent a great deal of money on an automaton which he deems to be “a woman” that it is, by definition, not one – but that don’t mean it ain’t true. And we should say so. A piece of metal (& I don’t know, carbon fibre or some shit) shaped to look like a woman is no more in actual fact a female human being than a chair in the shape of a cactus is actually a cactus.

What you appear to revel in as the coming of a new dawn for Man, to me is little but a new suppressant for an old symptom of an even older sickness. It is like giving calpol to the leukemia patient. We have been using technological advancements to solve problems for an Age: machines have granted us high-speed communications and the ability to explore the surfaces of planets we can’t yet get to. What problem do sexbots solve? You say it yourself: they solve the problem of women. They solve the problem that women are, alas, human beings with free will who might not want to fuck you – or, perhaps they do want to fuck you, but they aren’t interested in any accompanying demands on them of obedience and domestic servitude. This, I believe, is why so many otherwise rational people – people who wouldn’t be fooled even by the most ingenious animatronics expert into believe a cactus-bot really is a biologically complex arid-environment-dwelling water-storing life form – are willing to delude themselves into thinking a lump of machinery, even if it has prosthetic lumps grafted onto a chest-like area and is programmed to speak in a vocal range of 165 – 255 Hz or even one day think for itself (though not too hard of course, or it’d price itself out of the sex market), could somehow be any more a woman than it would be a fish, or for that matter, a man.
- 2
  
  Alex Sheremet on February 7, 2023 at 7:03 pm
  Reply
  
  Len Holman hasn’t written for the site in a year, so no idea if he saw your comment, but it’s worth a response.
  
  Jury might be in on the *correlation* between violence and visiting prostitutes/consuming pornography, but no one cares- it’s a trite, boring statement. The more interesting (and wrong) thing is your attempt to invoke causality, down to the explanation: “more likely to offend as a result…something to do with it bolstering their sense of god-given entitlement…” On the prostitution side, you’re starting with a group of men who are all willing to break the law. This might include sexual violence, specifically, often in the moment of some related crime (such as paying a prostitute). Not exactly a shocker that, in a world where many people commit no crimes whatsoever, those that do commit one set of crimes are often willing to commit other kinds of crimes, as well. Add to this that sex work, in being illegal, falls outside of the bounds of government regulation, and you’re left with a criminal underworld essentially making its own rules and procedures. Then there are the men who deduce that only “dirty”, “bad”, and “criminal” women would ever put themselves through such, because this is how the law in fact treats them. As long as prostitution is illegal, these basic facts will remain.
  
  When it comes to pornography, surely you are aware of how controversial your claims are amongst researchers, with at least as many (or more) studies opposing your POV. Beyond the effects on individuals, pornography, according to some of these studies, actually reduces sexual violence in aggregate at the population level. But let’s assume there is a robust link between porn and violence. When you look at the strongest links, it’s really men on the fringes who consume large amounts of porn, especially of a violent sort. That’s already a small percentage of men who are fucked up to begin with, then continue to fuck themselves up with addictive & self-destructive behaviors. Virtually every man in America uses porn, but despite its prevalence, sexual violence is the lowest it’s ever been in all of human history. We went from marriage under duress, no ability to divorce, no laws on marital rape / domestic abuse, no age of consent, & the world being siloed off into tiny villages where pretty much anything went, to the world you see now. The places with the worst sexual violence happen to be places with no access to pornography whatsoever. Now, it might very well be that porn still increases violence, while everything else in the modern world suppresses it, but this is, at best, unproven.
  
  Your cactus example is instructive. Here you design a cactus-analogue that is objectively MUCH better, for you, than the real thing, yet you still find something to complain of. It’s really up to you to decide whether the sting/investment/requirements of the real thing outweigh the dishonor of seeking out a superstimulus. In the case of sexbots, it’d be better, on average, if a man learns how to talk to women and how to cultivate meaningful relationships, but since we know there will always be some percentage that cannot (the reason doesn’t matter), sexbots it shall be. You’re correct, these men absolutely know the difference between a real woman and a superstimulus. There’s nothing in Len’s article that suggests otherwise. I’d bet the majority of men with sex-dolls would prefer to have a girlfriend, though of course some would prefer to not deal with a human being at all. This is also implicit in Len’s argument: “she never says no”, etc. If a robot can never say no, that is only because a real woman does. These men are paying for this difference. The payment is not only in the form of cash, but stunted growth, as well.
  
  ##### But by what actual logic exactly are you asking the reader to defer, in her definition of a woman, to the sex-infused (& thus subjective) perceptions of this sexbot-buyer? #####
  
  He’s not asking the reader to defer to the perceptions of the buyer, he’s saying arguments to the contrary are IRRELEVANT to the buyer: “Sexbots, for those who have them, are women, identical to wives, girlfriends, companions. It is pointless to say to the guy with the rebuilt boat, ‘But this really isn’t YOUR boat anymore’, or to say to the Enterprise crew, ‘This isn’t REALLY Jean-Luc Picard anymore’, just as it is pointless to tell a man who has shelled out ten grand, that what he paid for isn’t really a woman.” Do you really wish to argue categories and definitions with a guy so far gone that he’s having sex and making conversation with an inanimate object? Really, for someone so literal-minded, it’s like you’re not even reading.
  
  ##### I’m not going to make an argument for the misogyny implicit in that idea, because you kind of handwave that qualm through most of the article, so I’ll assume you don’t care. Ok. Instead I will just leave it at pointing out that your claim here is downright silly. #####
  
  The emotionalism & sanctimony makes one wonder- did you lose a boyfriend or girlfriend to porn-sickness? Do you install spyware on a potential mate’s laptop?
  
  ##### This is also why your Theseus’ ship analogy doesn’t work. People can argue over whether it’s “still the same ship” (Trigger’s broom, etc), but we can all agree it is at least manifestly still *a ship*. #####
  
  I agree, it’s not a perfect analogy. But if Theseus’s ship is “still a ship”, even if not “the” ship, it is, for the purposes of the owner, a ship because it does everything he needs it to do. It’s still a ship if it has a hole in it, but the owner is no longer interested. A sexbot won’t reproduce with you, but the owner is STILL interested. So, while 1 is lacking in an essential way and the other is simply defective, for the PURPOSES defined, it is irrelevant to both. Len is simply getting into the head of a very peculiar, fringe sort of male. That they may become less and less fringe over time is a collective social failure.
  
  ##### It may be “pointless” to try to tell a guy who has spent a great deal of money on an automaton which he deems to be “a woman” that it is, by definition, not one – but that don’t mean it ain’t true. And we should say so. A piece of metal (& I don’t know, carbon fibre or some shit) shaped to look like a woman is no more in actual fact a female human being than a chair in the shape of a cactus is actually a cactus. #####
  
  Trust me, there will be no shortage of women to tell men that “sexy”, “nubile” robots aren’t real women, lol. It’s not like we have a shortage of women, today, complaining of this already, as well as about porn, fleshlights, plus whatever else might get invented. I gotta say, the world is getting more & more competitive- and, of course, it’s competition for all the wrong things. Thus the resentments begin.
  
  ##### What problem do sexbots solve? You say it yourself: they solve the problem of women. They solve the problem that women are, alas, human beings with free will who might not want to fuck you – or, perhaps they do want to fuck you, but they aren’t interested in any accompanying demands on them of obedience and domestic servitude. This, I believe, is why so many otherwise rational people – people who wouldn’t be fooled even by the most ingenious animatronics expert into believe a cactus-bot really is a biologically complex arid-environment-dwelling water-storing life form – are willing to delude themselves into thinking a lump of machinery, even if it has prosthetic lumps grafted onto a chest-like area and is programmed to speak in a vocal range of 165 – 255 Hz or even one day think for itself (though not too hard of course, or it’d price itself out of the sex market), could somehow be any more a woman than it would be a fish, or for that matter, a man. #####
  
  And yet they also solve the problem of men. Some men are lazy, lonely, autistic, not charismatic, not tall, not wealthy, not healthy, can’t speak, can’t fuck, have no personality, & do not wish to be bothered with creating one. And yet, since they are still biologically wired for companionship, they’ve created a work-around. They are doing YOU a favor by leaving you alone, & the most ‘faithful’ among them would not dare sour their perfect relationship by whistling at you. Ah, but the prospect of no longer receiving attention, makes you crave this attention. How very much like a woman! In fact, how very much like a MAN, because they have the same exact problem. You go from complaining about male entitlement, to demanding that even the most obscure loser sees you a certain way, as if it matters.
  
  It’s fascinating that while men are still trying their best to control women’s bodies, emotions, & lives, we now have contingents of women obsessed with men’s sex lives. Particularly when it doesn’t involve them, lol. And particularly when it’s pathetic and sad, as if we ‘must’ take away the toys from 50-year-old children. Really, it’s like the mirror image of inceldom.
- 3
  
  Chin on February 7, 2023 at 10:18 pm
  Reply
  
  Alex already answered most of your comment, so I’ll just add my own two cents. I agree that sexbots can only be a stopgap to a far larger problem: that of human alienation and human loneliness. Problem is, that’s basically a perennial issue at the core of human existence that even the most utopian circumstances would hardly eliminate. I can imagine a state where everyone gets UBI, problems of economic inequalities are wiped out, and the worst excesses of sexual violence are mitigated by, say, women having taser implants on their fingers or cybernetic rape-preventing vaginas or something, and you’d still have this problem of a subset of humans being unable to find a proper connection. And attempting to micromanage human choices and reducing their outlets simply will not put them on the road towards any form of transcending these issues, which ultimately must come from within.
  
  Of course, the best case scenario is for every human to self-actualize healthy relationships and make the most of their existence, but that’s an almost impossible ideal — same way I think it would be a nice but impossible thing if everyone in the world had the ability to access the sort of creativity that allows them to make great art.
  
  Also I find it interesting that so much of this is focused on the male-side of the equation, when there are also a ton of lonely women out there who are in that situation because of looks, personality, or other reasons. There are definitely women out there who would be perfectly happy with an emotional-support dildo-butler with looks like a K-pop idol able to whisper cliched sweet nothings in their ear, even if they know it’s not the real thing. I know, at least, there are male anime ASMR vtubers out there who have millions of subscribers because they provide a parasocial boyfriend experience to their subscribers. This too, is only a stopgap, but what social arrangement out there other than some SF-esque Transhumanist scenario would be able to stop that gap for good? It’s easy to moralize about the mass of humanity lifting themselves from the muck and preach high from one’s pulpit at the incels and femcels of the world, same way it’s easy to moralize about the existence of sex-work and drug consumption while ignoring the violence and abuse that erupts from, as Alex mentioned, the unregulated state of these activities.
  
  Anyway, given the current state of technology and the rate of advancement, where the most AI can muster is a schizophrenic non-sequitural simulacra of human conversation (which, at least, makes for good absurd comedy), and given the incoming climate-change shitshow, this probably won’t even be an issue for most humans for the next hundred or few hundred years or so, other than those rich and powerful enough to have robo-maids.
4

Dan Schneider on February 8, 2023 at 7:33 am
Reply

Lyra, I recall you submitting some poems to Cosmoetica and having talent and a good mind.

That said, you really exercise cliches here. Yes, the jury is in on porno and violence, and it definitively shows that blue light areas reduce sexual violence, ment who use porno do NOT go out and prey on women, and that the men who do violence, sexual or otherwise, do so far more often for other reasons.

I grew up in an area w johns, hookers, dirty cops, gangsters, and can tell you that your view of sex, prostitution, etc, is somewhere between Taxi Driver’s unfortunate stereotypes of the sex industry, and Ted Bundy’s claims that PORNO MADE ME DO IT, as great a self serving lie as The Jewish Question.

Most sex workers deserve support and legalization. This includes porno stars, prostitutes, strippers, and others like phone sex workers or writers of porno.

This neo-Victorian attitude is especially disturbing in light of deaceds of research that shows societies w more open attitudes towards sex, fetishes, kinks, and so forth show absolute decreases in sexual violence.

And it also shows the puerility of a society when it thinks sexual violence is a normal outcome of sexual kinkery, which is what sexbots would be.

Now, sex with fully AI androids is a different story, but if one is not ready for sexbots then AI androids with boners and wetties will probably send you screaming in terror.
5

Dan Schneider on February 8, 2023 at 8:42 am
Reply

Why is the sexbot owner any worse than a woman with a dildo? The woman clearly imagines a whole man in he rmind, or at least a lesbian with the dildo strapped on?

No one- gay male or heterofem is turned on just by the dildo.

The only diff between the dildo and sexbot is that there is simply more of a physical extension of the same concept.

And whether drawn to such an end by desperation or kink, as long as no other person is harmed non-consensually, why do you care?

To me the greatest perverts are those who care about what others do in their private lives, as long as there is no evidence of violence. If you hear a moan from a basement and look in a window to see a 5 year old being tortured and raped, THEN intervene, yet how many times do people JUST MINF THEIR OWN BUSINESS THEN.

And of you think a sexbot is on any level equivalent to the scenario I just wrote, there is something deeply wrong w you, and WAY beyond sexual prudery.
6

Dan Schneider on February 8, 2023 at 8:43 am
Reply

MIND not MINF
7

Ethan Pinch on February 8, 2023 at 11:20 am
Reply

Kanye West and Lyra seem fairly well aligned on the subject of p*rn.

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