4 ms·

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, p

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.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    I think it doesn't matter that abusing a robot that looks and acts like an abused child is better than subjecting an actual child to it. There are all kinds of things that are innate and natural and which we simply cannot tolerate no matter how natural they are. All kinds of violence are natural, and the only acceptable response to it is to fucking supress and control it. Clubing a woman over the head and dragging her off to your cave is natural, and should only ever be repressed, inhibited, controlled, not tolerated, mercilessly. All those words that in other contexts are bad, are bad in those other contexts. It's wrong to repress your desire to be an artist. We aren't talking about being an artist are we? Merely for generic violence we just happen to have a few constructive uses for it, and so we have a few uses for those assholes. But what is the constructive use for people who have even a slight desire to mess with a kid that actually looks like a kid? (I'm setting aside the unfortunate class of people who are still kids and should not have to deal with adult life quite yet, but who through no fault of theirs or the people they attract, look sexually mature and attractive. That still needs to be dealt with and isn't tolerable either, but the crime is a different one.) I see no benefit at all to providing quite this nature of pacifier outside of maybe some highly controlled clinical context where a doctor maybe uses it as part of some sort of therapy and not as mere supposedly victimless gratification of someone's otherwise harmful desires. The fact is the desires are harmful all by themselves. I happen to think that animals are not sentient and that until one wins an argument with us about it, it's ok to own them as property and use them as property. I think, in a strict actionable legal sense, that there is no real basis for charging someone with any kind of crime if they say, boil kittens. I know we have animal cruelty laws on the books, what I'm saying is I don't think they actually are logically defensible if we are still willing to eat other animals that just aren't cute to look at. I don't think there is anything especially humane about being killed by any method, and pain and terror are utterly inconsequential next to the big problem of being killed at all. So, I don't think whatever we do to cows is significantly different or better even if it's painless. It may be better but not significantly so. Like if I burned your house down but I considerately waited until you finished watching a tv show. And yet I could never bring myself to boil a kitten and if I knew someone who enjoyed boiling kittens, I would consider that person to be an incredible danger to everyone else. Anyone who would do that, means there is something incredibly and dangerously broken about them, and no one else is safe around them. There is just no way to argue that the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device. Whoever would use such a device, something needs to be done about that, and very little consideration needs to be given to their feelings on the matter. Intolerance? YES, of course, intolerance is the correct response to the intolerable.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I don't think such large questions are served properly with "good" and "bad," context is important. If, for example, the woman in question had no previous knowledge of what a proper relationship looked like, and realized that she was depressed because her husband worked all day, drank beer all night, berated her every effort at making him happy, and couldn't fuck worth a damn, and left him and found a new husband that made her happy? Then I'd say that's terrific. If on the other hand the woman in question was a satisfied, happy homemaker, with a husband who did all he could to make her happy, but then was given an artificial AI sex-bot boyfriend because her husband needed to travel overseas for several months, and she became so enamored with this machine that it undermined an otherwise healthy and productive relationship because no human being can ever truly match up with a simulated one who's sole reason for existence is making another person happy, and as a result, their marriage fractured apart and their children grew up in a split set of two poor households as a result? I call that pretty shitty. I'm not saying ban sex-bots. I'm saying we should be asking why this is a thing people want and maybe try addressing the actual social ills here.
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    In general middle aged women read unrealistic romance novels because they enjoy the fantasy and in general are never going to be with anyone that is as good looking and romantic as the men in those books. I don't shame them for doing that. It is their choice.
antisthenes 3y ago
If I read your post full of hyperbole and double-standards, I'd hand-wave it away too. You simply choose to cherry pick certain realities that paint men in a worse light and women in a better light when it comes to preferences for sex toys. Even if we give you the benefit of the doubt that you are arguing in good faith, you still haven't given a compelling reason as to why it's your goddamn business in the first place what sex toys people use?
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  It's my business insofar as I'm a member of a society which is, on the whole, becoming ever more atomized and anti-social with itself. People retreat into technology because relationships are hard, and relationships are always and will likely forever be hard. People are frightened of their neighbors, people are afraid of being bullied online, people are stressed as fuck because our society is so difficult to live in, and then aside of that, we have a whole cadre of tech companies selling market solutions to our various social ills: shit like AI girlfriends, sex bots, AI pornography, which while yes, do mitigate a level of the immediate symptoms of those ills for their users, also incentivize people to not improve the world, to not integrate into the communities they crave, to not improve themselves as to create intimacy with a chosen spouse(s), but instead to recede even further into their dens where nothing is challenging, nothing is hard, and nothing requires work, but at the same time it doesn't reward you, it doesn't help you grow. It's feeling good without the things that make feeling good a good thing. It's a pale imitation of the human experience. I don't care if you have a sex toy, I have a whole fuckin tote bin of them. I'm not concerned about the toys. I'm concerned about the people who seem to be in a situation where they believe all they can have is toys. That depresses and worries me.
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    So why is it ok for you to satisfy your desires with devices instead of with real human contact in a relationship? There just isn't a clear argument for where the line should be drawn.
    - 3y ago
yareal 3y ago
Many things are discussed in that article, from toys that are really fancy fleshlights to chat ai that poses as a sexualized minor. I find the sexualization of minors, even mock minors, to be reprehensible and we should consider shutting that down. But the rest of it is basically proposing steadily increasingly accurate (or alien) versions of fleshlights. Increasingly fancy toys for people to use by themselves or with their partners. We are not now, not likely will we be in decades, capable of producing something even remotely close to a "simulated human". The concerns there are valid, but as likely to pass as "I'm really worried about people getting access to black magic". Yes, it would be bad if it came to pass and yes, people absolutely want it, but it's not real.
tekla 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that the exact same arguments were made when I was killing cops en masse in GTA2, but I mostly think we turned out fine.
belorn 3y ago
Naturally it will have an effect, some which will be negative. Now that schools has started to utilize AI for teaching, how will children be effected? The school period and teacher-student relationship is a critical part of growing up and developing functional and healthy adults, and replacing it with a cold one-sided interaction done in isolation can only be destructive to peoples mental and physical health. Even if the teaching tools could be made into perfect simulated teachers, the lack of the human connection is a major danger. We can also see the same thing with AI doctors, with worse medical outcomes as a result. People need human relationships and connections, especially during periods of needs. There are plenty of researcher (already published and will likely be published in the future) on the harm that AI/remote doctors has on mental health and outcomes. All this come however at a crash against a reality that not all children get great teacher-student relationships. Not all patient get good doctors. Some don't even get any teacher or doctor. During covid, some doctors did more harm by being physical near their patients than if they did not do anything at all. A robot/ai/word-for-human-replacement will likely be worse than a human, but they can also benefit people when the lack of alternatives are worse. People having simulated relationship with generated AI models might be worse than most real human relationship, but it also might be much better than some of the less-healthy human relationships that people might get as an alternative.

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.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I think it doesn't matter that abusing a robot that looks and acts like an abused child is better than subjecting an actual child to it. There are all kinds of things that are innate and natural and which we simply cannot tolerate no matter how natural they are. All kinds of violence are natural, and the only acceptable response to it is to fucking supress and control it. Clubing a woman over the head and dragging her off to your cave is natural, and should only ever be repressed, inhibited, controlled, not tolerated, mercilessly. All those words that in other contexts are bad, are bad in those other contexts. It's wrong to repress your desire to be an artist. We aren't talking about being an artist are we? Merely for generic violence we just happen to have a few constructive uses for it, and so we have a few uses for those assholes. But what is the constructive use for people who have even a slight desire to mess with a kid that actually looks like a kid? (I'm setting aside the unfortunate class of people who are still kids and should not have to deal with adult life quite yet, but who through no fault of theirs or the people they attract, look sexually mature and attractive. That still needs to be dealt with and isn't tolerable either, but the crime is a different one.) I see no benefit at all to providing quite this nature of pacifier outside of maybe some highly controlled clinical context where a doctor maybe uses it as part of some sort of therapy and not as mere supposedly victimless gratification of someone's otherwise harmful desires. The fact is the desires are harmful all by themselves. I happen to think that animals are not sentient and that until one wins an argument with us about it, it's ok to own them as property and use them as property. I think, in a strict actionable legal sense, that there is no real basis for charging someone with any kind of crime if they say, boil kittens. I know we have animal cruelty laws on the books, what I'm saying is I don't think they actually are logically defensible if we are still willing to eat other animals that just aren't cute to look at. I don't think there is anything especially humane about being killed by any method, and pain and terror are utterly inconsequential next to the big problem of being killed at all. So, I don't think whatever we do to cows is significantly different or better even if it's painless. It may be better but not significantly so. Like if I burned your house down but I considerately waited until you finished watching a tv show. And yet I could never bring myself to boil a kitten and if I knew someone who enjoyed boiling kittens, I would consider that person to be an incredible danger to everyone else. Anyone who would do that, means there is something incredibly and dangerously broken about them, and no one else is safe around them. There is just no way to argue that the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device. Whoever would use such a device, something needs to be done about that, and very little consideration needs to be given to their feelings on the matter. Intolerance? YES, of course, intolerance is the correct response to the intolerable.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I don't think such large questions are served properly with "good" and "bad," context is important. If, for example, the woman in question had no previous knowledge of what a proper relationship looked like, and realized that she was depressed because her husband worked all day, drank beer all night, berated her every effort at making him happy, and couldn't fuck worth a damn, and left him and found a new husband that made her happy? Then I'd say that's terrific. If on the other hand the woman in question was a satisfied, happy homemaker, with a husband who did all he could to make her happy, but then was given an artificial AI sex-bot boyfriend because her husband needed to travel overseas for several months, and she became so enamored with this machine that it undermined an otherwise healthy and productive relationship because no human being can ever truly match up with a simulated one who's sole reason for existence is making another person happy, and as a result, their marriage fractured apart and their children grew up in a split set of two poor households as a result? I call that pretty shitty. I'm not saying ban sex-bots. I'm saying we should be asking why this is a thing people want and maybe try addressing the actual social ills here.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  In general middle aged women read unrealistic romance novels because they enjoy the fantasy and in general are never going to be with anyone that is as good looking and romantic as the men in those books. I don't shame them for doing that. It is their choice.

antisthenes 3y ago

If I read your post full of hyperbole and double-standards, I'd hand-wave it away too. You simply choose to cherry pick certain realities that paint men in a worse light and women in a better light when it comes to preferences for sex toys. Even if we give you the benefit of the doubt that you are arguing in good faith, you still haven't given a compelling reason as to why it's your goddamn business in the first place what sex toys people use?

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
It's my business insofar as I'm a member of a society which is, on the whole, becoming ever more atomized and anti-social with itself. People retreat into technology because relationships are hard, and relationships are always and will likely forever be hard. People are frightened of their neighbors, people are afraid of being bullied online, people are stressed as fuck because our society is so difficult to live in, and then aside of that, we have a whole cadre of tech companies selling market solutions to our various social ills: shit like AI girlfriends, sex bots, AI pornography, which while yes, do mitigate a level of the immediate symptoms of those ills for their users, also incentivize people to not improve the world, to not integrate into the communities they crave, to not improve themselves as to create intimacy with a chosen spouse(s), but instead to recede even further into their dens where nothing is challenging, nothing is hard, and nothing requires work, but at the same time it doesn't reward you, it doesn't help you grow. It's feeling good without the things that make feeling good a good thing. It's a pale imitation of the human experience. I don't care if you have a sex toy, I have a whole fuckin tote bin of them. I'm not concerned about the toys. I'm concerned about the people who seem to be in a situation where they believe all they can have is toys. That depresses and worries me.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  So why is it ok for you to satisfy your desires with devices instead of with real human contact in a relationship? There just isn't a clear argument for where the line should be drawn.
  - 3y ago

yareal 3y ago

Many things are discussed in that article, from toys that are really fancy fleshlights to chat ai that poses as a sexualized minor. I find the sexualization of minors, even mock minors, to be reprehensible and we should consider shutting that down. But the rest of it is basically proposing steadily increasingly accurate (or alien) versions of fleshlights. Increasingly fancy toys for people to use by themselves or with their partners. We are not now, not likely will we be in decades, capable of producing something even remotely close to a "simulated human". The concerns there are valid, but as likely to pass as "I'm really worried about people getting access to black magic". Yes, it would be bad if it came to pass and yes, people absolutely want it, but it's not real.

tekla 3y ago

I'm pretty sure that the exact same arguments were made when I was killing cops en masse in GTA2, but I mostly think we turned out fine.

belorn 3y ago

Naturally it will have an effect, some which will be negative. Now that schools has started to utilize AI for teaching, how will children be effected? The school period and teacher-student relationship is a critical part of growing up and developing functional and healthy adults, and replacing it with a cold one-sided interaction done in isolation can only be destructive to peoples mental and physical health. Even if the teaching tools could be made into perfect simulated teachers, the lack of the human connection is a major danger. We can also see the same thing with AI doctors, with worse medical outcomes as a result. People need human relationships and connections, especially during periods of needs. There are plenty of researcher (already published and will likely be published in the future) on the harm that AI/remote doctors has on mental health and outcomes. All this come however at a crash against a reality that not all children get great teacher-student relationships. Not all patient get good doctors. Some don't even get any teacher or doctor. During covid, some doctors did more harm by being physical near their patients than if they did not do anything at all. A robot/ai/word-for-human-replacement will likely be worse than a human, but they can also benefit people when the lack of alternatives are worse. People having simulated relationship with generated AI models might be worse than most real human relationship, but it also might be much better than some of the less-healthy human relationships that people might get as an alternative.