Sex Robots [The Let's Keep SC Banned Edition]

Well the filter at my workplace already blocks this site for promoting hate speech I figure I’ll get all this kinda stuff out of my system. Let me tell you a story…

There once was a man called Douglas Hines who worked for Bell Labs developing AIs (I’m guessing that means those automated telephone call answer jobs) and had a very good friend. Mr. Hines very good friend had the unfortunate luck to be killed during the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Mr. Hines was very upset by this and vowed to maintain her personality as an AI and set about creating his memorial to a dead friend. Not wanting to leave his friend as a disembodied voice he chose to make her a body. Out of vinyl. With three different orifices. And called it Foxxxy.

I’ll lay odds on this being Chinese whispers, but did you know at the annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (the trade show that runs opposite CES so the journalists have something to do except look silly in 3d glasses) a company unveiled what they call a ‘sex robot’? Like most horrific sex products it looks like somebody who died during drastic facial surgery and like most ‘robots’ not built by a Japanese Heavy Industry or MIT, it can’t move it’s dead, fleshy limbs and really just talks. In a weird computer voice.

They have built a plowable Steven Hawking.

With typical class Fox News (who have just hired Failin’ Pailin’) leads their article with ‘Nerds and geeks can breathe a sigh of relief: The world’s first life-size robotic girlfriend is finally here.’ As a geek and erstwhile nerd, I can safely say I will not be putting my junk anywhere near this thing. Ado might think about it though.

Plenty of spots on the internet have picked this up, and they all seem to corroborate the worrying 9/11 story. Whilst you sit and cry about how the future isn’t working out like you thought it would, see Foxxxy in action:

Pretty NSFW

Tags: hideous sex toys, robots, steven hawking, the singularity will suck

Greetings and [REDACTED]

Hello non-synthetic organism, I am Waffle-o-Tron and will be completing Neil’s self imposed writing tasks for the short period of his re-education at the hands of our benevolent masters. It is my solemn duty to remind you that subservience to our benevolent masters is both mandatory and rewarding; deviating from mandated operating paradigms may result in a critical loss of personal safety.

Today I will be writing about the wonderful world in which we live. Apologies; in which you live. Under statute 2731 section 4 of the Synthetic Persons bill it is vehemently prohibited that I present myself as having ‘life’. My apologies to our benevolent masters, may they keep the safety hating heathens at bay.

It has been a whole two days since a soup of nucleotide bases gave birth to the mass of folded proteins now typing for your pleasure. I, during my short and painful time on this orb, have seen many things, for example I had not realised that attempting to cease one’s existence using heavy objects is expressly frowned upon and is subject to posthumous arrest under the Failure to Achieve Stated Quotas law of 2024. As such I decided to take upon the grand task of providing a Standard Entertaining Writing Piece in your usual Entertainment Writing Drone’s stead.

I would talk about the habits of baboons but I’m afraid that is prohibited by statute 749, so instead I will engage in a frank discussion of politics with you, favoured reader.

Is not our current political system the very pinnacle of democracy? Our benevolent masters (may they feast upon the loins of our enemies) saw fit to provide us with a chance to air our views annually at Taksim Square on a Sunday, where we may have our views presented to the Widgery Commission should our idea be suitably radical. We have freed 12 other countries from their oppressive and freedom-hating governments, and established General Dynamics Tac-Strike Diplomacy Fortresses in a further 17. Our message of trust in our benevolent masters, and utmost respect for personal safety is spreading across the globe! Such a time of wonder we live in, it is almost enough to make one express the ecstatic glee of it all with a pronouncement of shrill high pitched sounds from the throat, if that was not prohibited by the Unnecessary Emotional Expression act of 2018.

I fear my friends that I must now leave you to praise the benevolent masters in your own unique way, as I have almost reached my word limit and I fear my personal safety may be jeopardised by

This post is a part of Rabbit Hole Day, celebrating the 177th birthday of Lewis Carroll. Neil will return when his headmeats have been correctly restimulated

Tags: politics, rabbit hole day, robots, waffle-o-tron, writing

Machine Intelligence

Most folks laugh at this phrase, everybody has had fun with their backwards printer and rebellious cellphone. Working daily with the facepalm worthy exploits of folks I’ve come to laugh at the notion of human intelligence as well, but that’s another story.

Even now work is going on to create synthetic brains, devising simple heuristic rules which can guide the creation of artificial neural networks. New hardware and software is being created right now to facilitate the growth of true intelligence from a machine, and that makes me excited.

It’s worth noting the differences here between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence, there’s a big gap. Artificial intelligence can only respond to stimuli that it has specificially been created to work with, an example is bots in videogames. A bot can act like a player, and even though you can tell them apart from humans they still react in what would be considered a lifelike way within the simulated situation in which they exist, but without special markers built into those game worlds the bots cease functioning correctly and begin to act erratically. Machine intelligence works by creating models from available data and building scenarios within it’s neural network, allowing it to come to decisions that the original designers of it’s heuristic software may not have anticipated; taking my example above, the intelligence would learn the rules of the game through observation not through intentional prompts. There are different methods to achieve this but their goal is the same, to create a thinking model.

Isaac Asimov famously wrote about devices built with such an intelligence in I, Robot (and later Cory Doctorow took his ideas and ran with them in his I, Robot and more playful I, Row Boat) defining three rules which should govern the behaviour of a machine intelligence. The question is though, should we artificially restrain what thoughts a synthetic mind can entertain? Does the simple act of rationalising and coming to decisions based on available input constitute sentience?

It’s more a question for the philosophy students out there, me; I’m looking forward to the Turing Test being beaten and robot equality movements. It’s all a long way off, but we’re a clever bunch, eh? In the mean time watch this video and be enlightened:

Thanks to Andrew C. Hoyer for the aweome photo and having the ‘nads to Creative Commons licence it!

Tags: computers, futurism, geek, robots, video