Humpjones

Total Capitalism: Synthetic Sex Slavery

Posted Apr 03, 2007 19 comments

People love to talk.  This is probably why our species is doomed. Yesterday I excreted something about ”Android Sexual Rights”—but as Bill Hicks learned, you can’t even make jokes anymore, becuase your most cynical black humor will be normal daily reality two weeks later.  Over in South Korea, people are talking about Robot Ethics:

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea. The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007. It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.

Over in America, the future is already here, and it’s been around for awhile now.  I’m sure a lot of you have already heard about the RealDoll.  They don’t walk, they don’t talk, but they are probably the most disturbing thing you’re going to see today.  (Unless you click on this.)

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Full of Shit

The coverage of the RealDoll phenomenon is universally condescending: who are these pathetic and lonely losers who spend thousands of dollars on fake fuck toys? It’s important to have people to look down on, you know?  Otherwise we’d have to start examining our own lives or something.

RealDoll is a trademark of Abyss Creations, and their website reads like a peek at the future.  The purity of their capitalism, juxtaposed with the weirdness of their product, is even unsettling to jaded pervert acidhead like myself.  Speaking of acidheads, it’s hard to discuss android sex without thinking of Philip K. Dick, a great author that humans are just beginning to catch up to.  Blade Runner, an adaptation of a Dick story, introduced the concept of “pleasure bots” to the viewing public, and I say that knowing full well I’m wrong and some film buff will be correcting me.  (Too bad I already beat you to the punch yesterday.)

It also brings to mind that panel back in Korea—“a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer”—and I have to wonder, is that sci-fi writer Phil?  Sure, sure...he’s dead and all that...except the thing is, he’s really not. And I don’t just mean in the Gnostic, escape from the Black Iron Prison sense, either. 

There’s been a Philip K Dick android making the rounds at tech conferences lately, and by all accounts, it’s been disturbing the hell out of even the most sober people who encounter it.  There is a certain poetry in that. Aside from the sheer irony of a Philip K Droid, it’s also a very, very sophisticated piece of work, which gets updated and refined all the time.

The hardware will manipulate Hanson’s proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people’s identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech recognition software, advanced natural language processing, and speech synthesis in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics’ highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system.

IIS will create the artificial intelligence personality of the robot by mathematically deriving it from Dick’s life and works in a manner very similar to that described by Dick himself in his book We Can Build You (published in 1964).

Neck Down, Waist Up

So, yeah, okay, the image that started this article off was deliberately shocking.  That’s a RealDoll torso, which you can buy for $1,499. I was just amazed to find such an honest expression of 21st Century sexuality.  It’s the McDonald’s drive-thru of penetration, pared down to a latex vagina and some jiggling titties to watch while you masturbate. 

The variations are fascinating, though.  Transexual RealDolls with detachable penises.  The Booby Ball—buy a set of 2 for $49.95.  You can customize your RealDoll to pretty much any extent, which could easily be an article unto itself.  I have to confess, I’m pretty intrigued by the concept of Yeti Sex ever since I read Revelation X, and apparently I’m not alone.  Dig this passage from an excellent Nerve article on test-driving a RealDoll:

Speaking of transgression, Matt [McMullen] told me about a couple of potential customers who requested some seriously whacked-out customizations: one wanted a facsimile of his own mother and offered thousands of pictures from which to work. Another wanted a woman covered in apelike body hair. One chap even wanted a replica of a canine. “He offered me $50,000 to do it,” Matt confided, “but y’know . . . I just couldn’t.”

While people with nice ties have meaningless talks over in Asia, college kids in the UK are coding out robot sex programming languages in their boxers.  Who do you think will have a greater impact on the future?

The Sum of Our Broken Parts

Like every other product in our Brave New World, RealDolls are overpriced and tend to break down.  The Invisible Hand of market dynamics works the same no matter how small the niche, though—broken RealDolls have led to the even stranger cottage industry of RealDoll repair shops, or “Doctors.” It’s a long chain of causality, but it terminates in one of the single most disturbing webpages I’ve ever seen. (That constituted a warning about the link, in case you couldn’t tell.  Don’t click on it. Really.)

Keep an eye on the perverts with money. That’s where the future gets created.  That’s where the real decisions get made.  Public policy, charters, conferences—that’s all just reactionary circle jerks, they’re discussing shit that happened last year because they’re laboring under the delusion their opinions matter.  Hopefully by now I’ve convinced anyone reading this that my own opinions are barely coherent horseshit, even when I give really good advice...like for instance:

Relax your moral sphincter.  The apocalypse has been underway for awhile now, the best thing to do is kick back, observe and enjoy the show.  Don’t wring your hands about this stuff, don’t lose any sleep, it was Way Too Late before any of us were even born.  Our technology has been outpacing our brains for 1000 years at least, wether that’s a sitcom or a horror movie is mostly a matter of where you’re sitting at the time.

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