5 ms·

Robotic "Companions" Are Testing the Scope of Privacy and Sexual Freedom

29 points by delichon 3y ago

lupusreal 3y ago
I thought the law concerning sex toys was settled years ago. If they're going to ban "sex robots" then are dildo bans back on the menu?
- hanselot 3y ago
  Don't tell me you condone the violent rapists that objectify men's phalluses. How dare people enjoy their lives.
Thro4849 3y ago
[flagged]
bediger4000 3y ago
Seems lazy and includes an unexplained slur about "liberal voices" that Turley never connects to the rest of his article. The laziness involves merely listing objections to sex robots/sex dolls without examining any of the nuances or reasons for people to object, then posing "libertarian" as a simple, easy solution. Turley is not incorrect in subtly noting that the "Lost in Space" character Dr Smith is a robosexual.
soco 3y ago
Games about killing people are not a problem, as long they are labeled properly (enforcing that, that's another story). Do we have a bigger problem with objectification, than with plain murdering, or with drug dealing? And how's the argument about having sex with prostitutes in GTA? Really all this only confuses me - people are cherry-picking topics to be upset about, while ignoring similar glaring ones right there. I'm not even saying about what one should be upset, just expecting some consistency in it.
- therealpygon 3y ago
  Cherry-picking is fundamental to most people’s views, sadly, and they always use “we have to draw the line somewhere” as an excuse for why it is valid to ignore similar or even far worse situations. Worse still, they focus their time creating elaborate objections to what are mostly meaningless topics, mostly due to not being able to exercise their control over those much bigger and broad issues. For example, known effects from cigarettes versus theorized effects of e-cigarettes. Same goes for debates on alcohol vs pot, electric car accidents vs ICE vehicles, so on and so forth. It also happens when placing extraordinary value on an individual cherry-picked life or theoretical life, rather than any of the actual lives lost every day to solvable problems. End of the day, it’s all about people trying to control other people’s thoughts and actions by forcing them to conform to the box the debater has created and lined with cherry-picked facts. You can see that in the arguments of this article and in this thread. Just as a note, I’m not advocating one way or another on any topic, just addressing the issue of cherry-picking that happens regardless of which side anyone falls on an issue.
  - hanselot 3y ago
    Anecdotally, I would like to mention that my partner has been sick for over a month with some kind of lung shit he got from an e-cigarette (vuse something disposable crap). He has been literally unable to sleep through a night for over a month, multiple doctor visits, 3 courses of antibiotics, lung xray that apparently confirmed it was viral pneumonia, but yeah. I have been smoking for over 6 years and still alive, but he smoked that shit for less than a few weeks and he is barely functional. I can't remember the last time I got a full night's sleep anymore, because I constantly have to apply muscle relaxants and ensure he has proper medication to be able to remain asleep. So yeah, not really the point of your argument, but fuck e-cigarettes, for the rest of time I will have this stance. And yes, I am brutally aware of what cigarettes do as well, but don't knock the "theoretical" effects of e-cigarettes.
    - fluoridation 3y ago
      If it's viral, how can you tell it's from the e-cigarettes and not a direct human-to-human infection?
PedroBatista 3y ago
Historically there always has been a furious reaction from women/feminist movements against anything related to this, even in past decades when even the act of thinking or imagine anything like this was all one could do. This is a topic with more mines than an Ukrainian field, but I'll say this: Last century, we moved places because there were many problems and deservedly so we wanted something better, we had to choose paths to take. What if the paths we choose weren't the best ones? Can we have the courage to admit that? This doesn't invalidate any problems with the starting point, but the place we ended up might not be any better. The same applies to this "sex robots" thing, the place of unimaginable silent pain and loneliness is already here, so we want to move to a better place, is this the best choice? or is this the only choice available to those in need? - Just as the first part, this one is to be answered by the ones following the path, not the ones on the sidewalk.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yareal 3y ago
  Women, and especially feminist women, in my experience are pretty open to the idea that the need for sex exists and that sex toys are a delight. What they object to is the equating women to sex objects - treating women like sex tours rather than whole human beings with rich lives and emotional depth and complexity. Some men have a hard time decoupling the concepts. A fancy toy like proposed in the article is great for the folks who want it so long as it's not seen as a "woman analogue". (Just like how a dildo isn't a man analogue.) There should be no shame in sex toys, if they make someone happy, go for it. I'm not sure what the implication of "best choice" vs "only choice" is referring to, because I could interpret it quite negatively I think maybe you could expand that idea more?
- lawlessone 3y ago
  I think the issue is when it's a bot or doll emulating a full human and hitting the uncanny valley. Plenty of toys out there for men and women nobody has an issue with outside of some(not all), strongly religious people. If there was more of market for male dolls I could definitely some elements of the "manosphere" decrying it as an attempt to denigrate and replace men. The UK already had an incident with mentally ill guy wanting to kill the queen. Partially because he felt an AI "girlfriend" encouraged him to do so. https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-an-ai-chatbot-to-assassinate-queen-elizabeth-ii-receives-9-year-prison-s https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-a... So it isn't that impossible to believe some user somewhere , divorced from reality , will do something bad to a real person that they might not have done had they not tried it with these dolls/bots. I don't think they should be banned(although ones emulating children probably should be), but it's worth debating it.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I'm guessing I'd be one of the liberal voices he hand-waves away. He lists off numerous things I feel are worth considering: - That sex-bots offer a denuded, perfectly submissive woman to a man: a woman that exists entirely for his pleasure, and should he desire a new one, is 100% disposable, or even resellable - That the fact that sex-bots designed to appear as children is not a coincidence to the former thing, and seems to be part of the draw, at least for a fair slice of the market I also feel the numerous comparisons to dildos in this thread really alarming. This isn't just a sex toy. This is, at some point and seemingly what their market truly wants, a simulated human being with which one may have a relationship: except that relationship is entirely one-sided, and will never challenge, grow, or pose a problem to the person in question. I don't think having full and complete access to a perfectly simulated person that you can do literally anything to and any time with zero objection or consequences will be good for anyone's mental health. We can't even help but form relationships and strong emotions for people on fucking television, do you really mean to tell me that a fully three dimensional, simulated human being, in front of you, that you can touch, smell, hold, and fuck are going to somehow not affect us in the slightest?
- gitfan86 3y ago
  Like all technologies, there will be risks and negative outcomes. Just look at books. At some point a married woman read a romance book that depicted an unrealistic male character who wanted nothing but to satisfy any desire of the woman in the book. And after reading that book she became unhappy in her marriage because her husband would never be like that character. Is that a bad thing?
  - jevoten 3y ago
    It's a bad thing if it offers some measure of comfort to icky people. ToucanLoucan is concerned about child-like sex-bots - would he prefer their buyers instead focus their attention on human children? Or does he believe sexuality is malleable, that they can be sent to conversion therapy and become attracted to adult women instead? In which case we might witness some mental gymnastics to explain why conversion therapy only works on sexualities frowned upon by society, but is ineffective pseudoscientific abuse for any of the accepted or celebrated sexualities.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jevoten 3y ago
Privacy, personal freedom, absence of victims, even absence of interaction with any other being (human or animal), will not keep society from interfering if they can portray the perpetrator as a modern-day witch.
jacknews 3y ago
IMHO There's no good reason for 'feminists' to be upset about robot brothels. If anything, it would re-inforce the divide between fantasy and reality. The only explanation is that it's competition. It might sate some men, expecially singles, reducing their craving for sex with real women, and therefore it's 'value', and the effort they're willing to expend to obtain it.
- delichon 3y ago
  Incrementally better pornography is incrementally better at suppressing fertility rates by satisfying sexual hunger with lower odds of producing zygotes. Robot sex is a kind of better pornography. But there are feminist natalists and anti-natalists, and that's only a problem for the former.
  - jijijijij 3y ago
    You think "feminist natalist" think about men's sexual health like they're cattle? I don't know about you, but I never met a single "feminist", or woman, who was involved with a stranger man's fertility at all.
    - delichon 3y ago
      Very different experience here. The feminists I've known are very concerned about the cumulative effect of our actions on the wider society and not unusually focused on their own narrow point of view. And discussing sexual health neutrally in academic terms, "like they're cattle", is also a feature of medicine and epidemiology, where feminists are well represented.
      - jijijijij 3y ago
        Can you link me something? Like an instance where a feminist, for the feminist cause, wants to police male sexuality and bodily autonomy in regard to fertility preservation? Because, even writing that feels silly. I think sometimes medical and epidemiology opinions are just that, even when they are voiced by a feminist. Lol.
dandare 3y ago
>Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. What does it mean to be a Shapiro Professor?
- delichon 3y ago
  "The J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship is an organization that donates a lot of money to George Washington University's law school. Two of the faculty chairs are named after them. Jonathan Turley, and also Robert Glicksman, who is the J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/979js7/what_is_a_shapiro_professor_of_law/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/979js7/w...
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    Or, more generally: > An endowed professorship (or endowed chair) is a position permanently paid for with the revenue from an endowment fund specifically set up for that purpose. To set up an endowed chair generally costs between US$1 and $5 million at major research universities. Typically, the position is designated to be in a certain department. The donor might be allowed to name the position. Endowed professorships aid the university by providing a faculty member who does not have to be paid entirely out of the operating budget, allowing the university to either reduce its student-to-faculty ratio, a statistic used for college rankings and other institutional evaluations, or direct money that would otherwise have been spent on salaries toward other university needs. In addition, holding such a professorship is considered to be an honor in the academic world, and the university can use them to reward its best faculty or to recruit top professors from other institutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Endowed_professorships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Endowed_pr...

29 points by delichon 3y ago

I thought the law concerning sex toys was settled years ago. If they're going to ban "sex robots" then are dildo bans back on the menu?

hanselot 3y ago
Don't tell me you condone the violent rapists that objectify men's phalluses. How dare people enjoy their lives.

Thro4849 3y ago

[flagged]

bediger4000 3y ago

Seems lazy and includes an unexplained slur about "liberal voices" that Turley never connects to the rest of his article. The laziness involves merely listing objections to sex robots/sex dolls without examining any of the nuances or reasons for people to object, then posing "libertarian" as a simple, easy solution. Turley is not incorrect in subtly noting that the "Lost in Space" character Dr Smith is a robosexual.

soco 3y ago

Games about killing people are not a problem, as long they are labeled properly (enforcing that, that's another story). Do we have a bigger problem with objectification, than with plain murdering, or with drug dealing? And how's the argument about having sex with prostitutes in GTA? Really all this only confuses me - people are cherry-picking topics to be upset about, while ignoring similar glaring ones right there. I'm not even saying about what one should be upset, just expecting some consistency in it.

therealpygon 3y ago
Cherry-picking is fundamental to most people’s views, sadly, and they always use “we have to draw the line somewhere” as an excuse for why it is valid to ignore similar or even far worse situations. Worse still, they focus their time creating elaborate objections to what are mostly meaningless topics, mostly due to not being able to exercise their control over those much bigger and broad issues. For example, known effects from cigarettes versus theorized effects of e-cigarettes. Same goes for debates on alcohol vs pot, electric car accidents vs ICE vehicles, so on and so forth. It also happens when placing extraordinary value on an individual cherry-picked life or theoretical life, rather than any of the actual lives lost every day to solvable problems. End of the day, it’s all about people trying to control other people’s thoughts and actions by forcing them to conform to the box the debater has created and lined with cherry-picked facts. You can see that in the arguments of this article and in this thread. Just as a note, I’m not advocating one way or another on any topic, just addressing the issue of cherry-picking that happens regardless of which side anyone falls on an issue.
- hanselot 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I would like to mention that my partner has been sick for over a month with some kind of lung shit he got from an e-cigarette (vuse something disposable crap). He has been literally unable to sleep through a night for over a month, multiple doctor visits, 3 courses of antibiotics, lung xray that apparently confirmed it was viral pneumonia, but yeah. I have been smoking for over 6 years and still alive, but he smoked that shit for less than a few weeks and he is barely functional. I can't remember the last time I got a full night's sleep anymore, because I constantly have to apply muscle relaxants and ensure he has proper medication to be able to remain asleep. So yeah, not really the point of your argument, but fuck e-cigarettes, for the rest of time I will have this stance. And yes, I am brutally aware of what cigarettes do as well, but don't knock the "theoretical" effects of e-cigarettes.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    If it's viral, how can you tell it's from the e-cigarettes and not a direct human-to-human infection?

PedroBatista 3y ago

Historically there always has been a furious reaction from women/feminist movements against anything related to this, even in past decades when even the act of thinking or imagine anything like this was all one could do. This is a topic with more mines than an Ukrainian field, but I'll say this: Last century, we moved places because there were many problems and deservedly so we wanted something better, we had to choose paths to take. What if the paths we choose weren't the best ones? Can we have the courage to admit that? This doesn't invalidate any problems with the starting point, but the place we ended up might not be any better. The same applies to this "sex robots" thing, the place of unimaginable silent pain and loneliness is already here, so we want to move to a better place, is this the best choice? or is this the only choice available to those in need? - Just as the first part, this one is to be answered by the ones following the path, not the ones on the sidewalk.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yareal 3y ago
Women, and especially feminist women, in my experience are pretty open to the idea that the need for sex exists and that sex toys are a delight. What they object to is the equating women to sex objects - treating women like sex tours rather than whole human beings with rich lives and emotional depth and complexity. Some men have a hard time decoupling the concepts. A fancy toy like proposed in the article is great for the folks who want it so long as it's not seen as a "woman analogue". (Just like how a dildo isn't a man analogue.) There should be no shame in sex toys, if they make someone happy, go for it. I'm not sure what the implication of "best choice" vs "only choice" is referring to, because I could interpret it quite negatively I think maybe you could expand that idea more?
lawlessone 3y ago
I think the issue is when it's a bot or doll emulating a full human and hitting the uncanny valley. Plenty of toys out there for men and women nobody has an issue with outside of some(not all), strongly religious people. If there was more of market for male dolls I could definitely some elements of the "manosphere" decrying it as an attempt to denigrate and replace men. The UK already had an incident with mentally ill guy wanting to kill the queen. Partially because he felt an AI "girlfriend" encouraged him to do so. https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-an-ai-chatbot-to-assassinate-queen-elizabeth-ii-receives-9-year-prison-s https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-a... So it isn't that impossible to believe some user somewhere , divorced from reality , will do something bad to a real person that they might not have done had they not tried it with these dolls/bots. I don't think they should be banned(although ones emulating children probably should be), but it's worth debating it.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

I'm guessing I'd be one of the liberal voices he hand-waves away. He lists off numerous things I feel are worth considering: - That sex-bots offer a denuded, perfectly submissive woman to a man: a woman that exists entirely for his pleasure, and should he desire a new one, is 100% disposable, or even resellable - That the fact that sex-bots designed to appear as children is not a coincidence to the former thing, and seems to be part of the draw, at least for a fair slice of the market I also feel the numerous comparisons to dildos in this thread really alarming. This isn't just a sex toy. This is, at some point and seemingly what their market truly wants, a simulated human being with which one may have a relationship: except that relationship is entirely one-sided, and will never challenge, grow, or pose a problem to the person in question. I don't think having full and complete access to a perfectly simulated person that you can do literally anything to and any time with zero objection or consequences will be good for anyone's mental health. We can't even help but form relationships and strong emotions for people on fucking television, do you really mean to tell me that a fully three dimensional, simulated human being, in front of you, that you can touch, smell, hold, and fuck are going to somehow not affect us in the slightest?

gitfan86 3y ago
Like all technologies, there will be risks and negative outcomes. Just look at books. At some point a married woman read a romance book that depicted an unrealistic male character who wanted nothing but to satisfy any desire of the woman in the book. And after reading that book she became unhappy in her marriage because her husband would never be like that character. Is that a bad thing?
- jevoten 3y ago
  It's a bad thing if it offers some measure of comfort to icky people. ToucanLoucan is concerned about child-like sex-bots - would he prefer their buyers instead focus their attention on human children? Or does he believe sexuality is malleable, that they can be sent to conversion therapy and become attracted to adult women instead? In which case we might witness some mental gymnastics to explain why conversion therapy only works on sexualities frowned upon by society, but is ineffective pseudoscientific abuse for any of the accepted or celebrated sexualities.

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jevoten 3y ago

Privacy, personal freedom, absence of victims, even absence of interaction with any other being (human or animal), will not keep society from interfering if they can portray the perpetrator as a modern-day witch.

jacknews 3y ago

IMHO There's no good reason for 'feminists' to be upset about robot brothels. If anything, it would re-inforce the divide between fantasy and reality. The only explanation is that it's competition. It might sate some men, expecially singles, reducing their craving for sex with real women, and therefore it's 'value', and the effort they're willing to expend to obtain it.

delichon 3y ago
Incrementally better pornography is incrementally better at suppressing fertility rates by satisfying sexual hunger with lower odds of producing zygotes. Robot sex is a kind of better pornography. But there are feminist natalists and anti-natalists, and that's only a problem for the former.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  You think "feminist natalist" think about men's sexual health like they're cattle? I don't know about you, but I never met a single "feminist", or woman, who was involved with a stranger man's fertility at all.
  - delichon 3y ago
    Very different experience here. The feminists I've known are very concerned about the cumulative effect of our actions on the wider society and not unusually focused on their own narrow point of view. And discussing sexual health neutrally in academic terms, "like they're cattle", is also a feature of medicine and epidemiology, where feminists are well represented.
    - jijijijij 3y ago
      Can you link me something? Like an instance where a feminist, for the feminist cause, wants to police male sexuality and bodily autonomy in regard to fertility preservation? Because, even writing that feels silly. I think sometimes medical and epidemiology opinions are just that, even when they are voiced by a feminist. Lol.

dandare 3y ago

>Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. What does it mean to be a Shapiro Professor?

delichon 3y ago
"The J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship is an organization that donates a lot of money to George Washington University's law school. Two of the faculty chairs are named after them. Jonathan Turley, and also Robert Glicksman, who is the J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/979js7/what_is_a_shapiro_professor_of_law/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/979js7/w...
- greenyoda 3y ago
  Or, more generally: > An endowed professorship (or endowed chair) is a position permanently paid for with the revenue from an endowment fund specifically set up for that purpose. To set up an endowed chair generally costs between US$1 and $5 million at major research universities. Typically, the position is designated to be in a certain department. The donor might be allowed to name the position. Endowed professorships aid the university by providing a faculty member who does not have to be paid entirely out of the operating budget, allowing the university to either reduce its student-to-faculty ratio, a statistic used for college rankings and other institutional evaluations, or direct money that would otherwise have been spent on salaries toward other university needs. In addition, holding such a professorship is considered to be an honor in the academic world, and the university can use them to reward its best faculty or to recruit top professors from other institutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Endowed_professorships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Endowed_pr...