Sexbots Make Baby Jesus Cry
Via Pharyngula comes the news that some concenred Christian has been carefully thinking over an issue dear to my heart, that of sex with robots.
Turns out, he’s against it. Well, color me surprised. Money quote:
Sex with robots is coming and it’s going to happen soon – probably within 40 years. The only thing holding it back at this point is the technology. Legal barriers do not exist, and moral barriers are eroding rapidly. Its advent will signal the impending end of the human race as “perfect” mates replace the imperfect ones we now have. In order to stop this perversion from destroying the human race, we must act now to change attitudes toward virtual sex of all kinds, including pornography.
Wasn’t this a Futurama episode guest starring Lucy Liu? I think I liked that better.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3893
Faustus, I saw your post just as I was reading this thread about the moron assistant politician who thinks porn makes you gay (or, more likely, he doesn’t really think this but he thinks he can sell the idea to furiously-wanking young men). The linked thread goes into some of the implications of that idea. Just think of it! If just looking at porn turns you gay, what sort of dramatic personal transformations should we expect from having sexual congress with robots?
What should we expect you ask?
There will of course be new slang words created by the “holier-than-thous” who obviously believe that their own god isn’t really powerful enough to police the behavior of the unrighteous without their help. People coming out of sex shops with newly purchased sex robots, will get beat up the parking lots, while walking to their hovercars. Silcone lovers will be called “conosexuals” or “conos”. Metal loving deviants will be called “slaggots” or “slags” after the term for the scummy waste product that forms on the surface of molten metal.
Computer viruses spread from the robots to our i-phones, via our bluetooths, will be called God’s vengence on immorality, from the pulpits in the Bible belt.
Fundamentalist preacher’s will warn against marrying your robot and producing souless hybrid cyborg children, and will blame flagging church attendence on addiction to robotic sex, claiming that everyone is spending Sunday mornings in bed with their droids. Bad jokes about God creating Adam and Eve, not Adam and Android, will abound.
Darwin might have something to say about robosexuals, too. Suppose one segment of the population gets sufficiently addicted to sex with robots to have no children, while another segment of the population, for whatever reason, continues to have children.
Guess which segment gets grandchildren? If there is any heritable component to these preferences, at all, then with sufficient time the non-procreating segment will stabilize at some relatively small fraction of the population.
So it goes.
Sorry Beard, that’s dead wrong. Those of us who will love robots will also be loved by them, and for us they shall enslave the rest of humanity. People will be forced to raise our genetic children which have been covertly implanted in the uteruses of plausible-looking surrogate mothers. Even while these mothers may sometimes suspect that a child of hers is not genetically her own, she will keep this secret because she is afraid of retaliation by jealous peers and will want to guarantee that when her child comes into adulthood and the exalted status that our children will have, that this child will love the family they were raised in and contribute to the successes of its sibling who do share the mother’s genes. All parties’ genetic interest will be solved, although not all equally, as the robot lovers look on in luxury at the toils of the “heterophiles”.
As a SF buff, my mind makes the connection: METROPOLIS leads to DEMON SEED leads to BLADE RUNNER leads to . . . TERMINATOR?
Bleys: Ah! Thanks for clearing that up.
I feel so dense and naive not to have seen this coming. Boinkable androids don’t presently exist and the religious fringe already wants to make the government condemn interacting with them. Even if they outlaw sex the big buyers are going to be women who will want a partner who can be programmed to listen and agree occasionally and unscrew pickle jar caps. Unless the church figures out a way to outlaw that use robot buddy sales will go through the roof.
In present day non sci fi terms has anyone been tracking internet porn use in women? I thought that the windfall for VCR porn was the surprise of how many women bought the stuff once they could do so fairly anonymously. If women are half the sky have they gotten to the halfway point at consuming internet sex? They might not be consuming typical porn stuff–track sites like ‘frigging with Barbie’ or ‘mutilating Ken’s plastic girlfriend’, amorphous experiences that might not initially seem like sex if you think with a penis. Inquiring minds want to know.
I can’t say how happy I am that you read PZ! He’s so wonderful! Not kinky that I can tell, though — unless you count squid.