The Trouble (Or Is It?) With Robot Sex
Elf Sternberg has a concern about our sexual future in the age of sex bots:
But just as the tasteless tomatoes of the grocery store have replaced the vine-ripe readiness of our gardens, artificial substitutes for partners have started to satisfice enough to make people sit up and notice. Even as we become so blase about discussing sex in public, there’s a retreat that will only grow as virtual reality and robotics start to delay our sexual debuts, cripple our sexual vocabulary, and shorten our sexual impatience.
I mean, why go through all the trouble of dating, negotiating, and risking disappointment when you could always go home to your model 2021 Rebel Girl Mark IV, especially since you paid for the VR upgrade? With the contact lenses in, she can have any of a thousand starlets’ faces; when you leave the office, your phone will notify her to activate. By the time you’ve pounded down a Soylent and your Tesla has pulled into the driveway, she’ll be warm enough to convince you that you don’t need anyone else.
It’s a serious point, but:
1) Who is to say that sexual technology will falter at the “square, green, and crunchy” stage the way supermarket tomatoes seem to have done? It’s not obvious in either case that we can’t do better.
2) Elf says “retreat” like it’s a bad thing. But if the only people taking the trouble to have actual meat-on-meat sex are the people who love it so much they’ve invested a lot of effort into getting really good at it, what have we really lost?
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=16177
Futurist philosopher David Pearce (he of The Hedonistic Imperative) appears to take a more positive view of our eroto-robotic future.
Sex has been a means of control for all of human history. Even if you and I have it better than the Victorians, we’re still being manipulated with sex.
Porn and sex-bots represent an avenue of escape from that control, even if in the real world they turn out to be yet another form of control.
It may well turn out to be easier, cheaper, and (overall) healthier to address this chronic problem of sexual control head on, instead of continually trying to invent ever more clever workarounds. I am not eager to own my human sexual partner, it’s hard to see the advantage in owning a robot that would substitute for a human partner. Especially if I could actually get my sexual needs met, instead of having them used as strings to manipulate me.