Re: Sexbots

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
11 Mar 1999 18:43:10 +0100

"Billy Brown" <bbrown@conemsco.com> writes:

> > This would avoid all the emotional and physical complications of having
> sex
> > with people.
>
> Well, almost all. Considering how attached people can become to their pets,
> I don't think its much of a stretch to expect that most people will be quite
> fond of their sexbots. After all, they look human, they talk, and you have
> all sorts of fun together. A whole industry is likely to spring up to
> provide personality customization, smarter AI software, and so forth.

The movie "Cherry 2000" might be relevant. It revolves around the protagonist's quest in a post-apocalyptic landscape to find a new body for his beloved "wife" - she got a short circuit and broke down, and now he is trying to find her obsolete body model so he can put in the memory chip he has stored. Not much of a film or story (it is quite predictable), but psychologically not entirely unreasonable.

> Of course, this raises an important moral issue. Any reasonably functional
> sexbot is already going to be at least as smart as your cat. Once you start
> adding speech comprehension, personality software, domestic skills, and
> other cognitive functions you're getting uncomfortably close to having a
> real person - and different people will draw that line in different places.

And we end up in the special purpose entity discussion again. Of course, one might argue that sexbots with the right hedonic circuitry might even have better lives than humans ;-) 

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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