> In two recent movies, Her and Ex Machina, filmmakers explored an intriguing concept: whether humans will fall in love with and want to have sex with AI or robots.
Never mind Ghost in the Shell throwing that idea about, like, 20 years ago already. It's always fun to be see folks late to the party.
Didn't Rei Toei first appear in Virtual Light? In Virtual Light I seem to remember Rydell driving in downtown LA at night and getting distracted by a hologram of a naked East-Asian looking woman - who would later turn out to be Rei Toei.
"In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides he was "not interested in women", but his statue was so fair and realistic that he fell in love with it."
Blade Runner (1982) had a pleasure android long before Ghost in the Shell and there's several Sci-Fi stories that had them before then. Here's one from (1938)
Exactly! This is a subject dominated by imagination and fantasy. All that is needed is a spark. Arguably, the robot should be quite different from a real human, because they are available already and at a reasonable price.
I think the post misses completely the point of technology replacing humans. Like autonomous cars, sex robots will be viable when they are better than the alternative. And for many people, this means better than nothing/sex toys. They don't need to be perfect as it suggests.
Spot on . . . to borrow from Thoreau, ''the mass of men lead [sex] lives of quiet desperation''. (As a man, I'm more familiar with the male perspective.) I think even a crude early version of a sex robot that males could interact with at home would revolutionize society with all sorts of consequences to romantic relationships, birth rates, social development, and so on. Combine the physical manipulations with AI and VR and I think it will be as or more important than developments like self driving cars and 1 hour drone deliveries.
But better along what axis? There is a lot of stigma around having a sex doll/robot. There's even a smaller amount of stigma around sex toys for men.
So to penetrate a mass market it would have to not just be better than a sex toy, it would have to be better enough that it outweighs the stigma associated with it (and the difficulty of keeping it hidden).
What people never learn, human intelligence is not learning by analyzing and doing it better. human intelligence means actually doing something which could never be calculated and which could be a total mess, however it could still be the right thing.
Current AI's will learn, but they will learn with their input, which is something humans don't do, their thinking is abstract.
Your description of "human intelligence" sounds more like a bounded random number generator. Also, your thinking is restricted by sensory input - just like the AI.
Oddly I am reminded of a comment about New Mexico. There the ratio of non-imprisoned men to women is something like 90:100 in the non-White community, and so apparently women are more
Likely to acquiesce to the sort of male demands you can imagine - so less marriage, more polyamory, and apparently more sex more frequently.
(I am now racking my brains for a reference - it could be Tim Harford?)
The point being, that real people competing against a free "good enough" alternative are going to be the unusual example of economic Uberisation
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadNever mind Ghost in the Shell throwing that idea about, like, 20 years ago already. It's always fun to be see folks late to the party.
Ovid lived over 2,000 years ago.
The play is from 1913 AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)
But it is based on a Greek mythological character from over 2,000 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology)
Also Eliza is the statue.
Thanks for pointing out my errors.
> Of course, this isn’t the first time people have lusted after artificial human entities
Stop being overly pedantic. You'd be better off criticizing the first picture, which is actually two robots, not a human and a robot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_O%27Loy
Blade Runner was set in 2019, and Cherry 2000 was set in 2017.
I doubt the lack of nanotech to create perfect artficial skin (or many of the other features mentioned) are going to hold this back.
Personally, I would not be interested unless the robot was indistinguishable from a real human.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
So to penetrate a mass market it would have to not just be better than a sex toy, it would have to be better enough that it outweighs the stigma associated with it (and the difficulty of keeping it hidden).
Or better than a fat wife that will take the house and kids when you divorce.
(I am now racking my brains for a reference - it could be Tim Harford?)
The point being, that real people competing against a free "good enough" alternative are going to be the unusual example of economic Uberisation
Or better yet, a house-cleaning feature (male or female).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03LVC_r9gJE
(RG starts at about 1:45)
I doubt that anyone actually worries about this.