WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

You forget the most common trait to humanity.

We as a species enjoy being miserable.

So we still need (women/men).

 

Honestly, this is the most profound thing I have read all week.

 

Matt "Misery-loves-company" Frisbee

[David Johnston]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

My self-esteem is so low that I don't really really care whether it's robots or other men who are getting the women. Besides the things will initially be too expensive for all but the insanely rich to afford them. Assuming they become affordable then there's obviously one thing some women want that the robots can't provide. So I'm investing in sperm banks.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

... I don't know if this is controversial as much as it is a derailment. I'm with the Lord of Latveria on this one, and in many elements I agree with Oddhat (and I'd rep Nyrath if I could for the SD link - love me some Unca Cece) but I'm not getting to the point.

 

The point is this: if such a thing works, the questions become 'for how long' and 'to what ends?' Oddhat brings up the best point - what's that look like, economically? Here's a fun idea! You buy (rent? lease? mortgage? Is it considered real property?) a Robot. A good model, for... $2,000 a month. Your robot is cleared to do work! It can do manual labor & basic office tasks. Your robot can earn roughly $3,000 a month. Now, you still need a job, but in a grand twist, money suddenly becomes meaningless, because it costs you MAKE MONEY WITH THE ROBOT.

 

Which you also **** to sleep at night. But it'll never be human. Maybe I'm old fashioned, I'm honestly unsure. I simply cannot believe than an AI - no matter how advanced - can replace a human being. Sure, might be more durable, blah blah blah. But they'll never replace human interaction - true human interaction isn't something you can code in a lifetime. And if it were a true AI, then I'd get into a whole 'nother argument asking why a machine that had no concept of 'boundary' but now had free will and thought would ever suffer to be a sex toy.

 

But that's another rant for another time.

[fwcain]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner

 

I'll take the "Brad Pitt's Dilemma" Special, please! That's a Jennifer Anniston clone (minus the cigarette dependency) teamed up with an Angelina Jolie clone (minus the tattoos and minus the more "punk"-ish elements of her personality).

 

Franklin

[David Johnston]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

The point is this: if such a thing works, the questions become 'for how long' and 'to what ends?' Oddhat brings up the best point - what's that look like, economically? Here's a fun idea! You buy (rent? lease? mortgage? Is it considered real property?) a Robot. A good model, for... $2,000 a month. Your robot is cleared to do work! It can do manual labor & basic office tasks. Your robot can earn roughly $3,000 a month

Probably not. A surfeit of supply would reduce the price of labour and if you can build a slave that will adequately reproduce the appearance and sexual functioning of a human being as well as put in a full days labour, then you surely can make a cheaper robot that just does the work but doesn't look pretty or put out. Presumably as long as you have a humanoid AI slave, you might as well have him or her do your housework or lawn maintenance since after all you can only have so much sex, but you aren't actually going to make money on the deal. At most you'll defray your costs.

 

Which you also **** to sleep at night. But it'll never be human.

 

Neither's a vibrator, but there seems to be no shortage of customers for them. I joked about Data that he was every girl's dream. A vibrator who could bring her flowers. Note that Data was in fact the most popular character on TNG with women.

 

And if it were a true AI, then I'd get into a whole 'nother argument asking why a machine that had no concept of 'boundary' but now had free will and thought would ever suffer to be a sex toy.

 

Why do certain humans? All you need is the right personality type. Plus a "safe" word.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

C'mon... we all know what the holodeck was for.

[Lucius]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

You forget the most common trait to humanity.

We as a species enjoy being miserable.

So we still need (women/men).

 

As I said ; if and as they chose. I’m well aware people often choose to be miserable.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary doesn’t get it

[Markdoc]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Dang - they stole my idea for a short story I was going to write..

 

 

See (for example) Tanith Lee's "The silver metal lover" which has almost exactly this theme.

 

cheers, Mark

[Curufea]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Double dang.

[NinjaGeek]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

By the time you could create an android with an AI so sophisticated that it could pass for an actual person (it would have to be that realistic if you wanted to sell it to women as an actual partner instead of a really expensive sex toy.) it would be no trouble to alter its programming so that it would actually be a sentient artificial life form. Give it a few personal desires and some self preservation and viola! You've now got a robot that would very likely start to rebel when they realized that they were being treated as personal property. I believe that someone would try to do this, if for no reason than it could be done. The question is at that point would the future look more like AI (the movie) or The Matrix?

[ThothAmon]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

I probably wouldn't buy one - for all my realism / cynicism I'm something of a humanist.

 

I could see something like this working if marketed correctly, human nature being what it is. I don't agree with the idea that a complex AI would be required - there is a thriving market for dildoesque and vibratory devices now, never mind in the future.

 

I'd be concerned about the consequences of mass uptake of these Perfect Partners. Birth rates may fall, humans may become even more self-centred and sociopathic, the laws of economics may have to be rewritten. Running towards a theoretical endpoint you could posit an entire world with very few real humans enjoying a technologically utopian lifestyle

 

I could also perceive a socio-religious backlash against these devices, of the sort that is currently extant against genetic engineering and a woman's right to abort a foetus. I could also understand certain people (e.g. myself) using programming skills to hack a Perfect Partner, either for comedic or criminal purposes - "...it's the wrong trousers Grommit!"

 

And the issue of AI programming is a big one. If your AI capability is as good as the Perfect Partner, you don't actually need a Perfect Partner - the AI can be built into your home, your car, and so on. Within two or three human generations you will have AI-explored worlds on multiple solar systems and massive advances in the sciences.

 

Sounds like you are angling towards The Culture from the Ian Banks SF novels...

[OddHat]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

I probably wouldn't buy one - for all my realism / cynicism I'm something of a humanist.

 

I could see something like this working if marketed correctly, human nature being what it is. I don't agree with the idea that a complex AI would be required - there is a thriving market for dildoesque and vibratory devices now, never mind in the future.

 

A dildo or vibrator isn't a Perfect Partner. It doesn't represent any new problems, and it doesn't do anything other than make masturbation easier. Men and women who masturbate have been managing to have normal relationships as long as humans have been human.

 

For an interesting new problem, you have to include an AI able to fill the more difficult needs in relationships; companionship, emotional and financial support, entertainment. Orgasms, for most people, are not a major relationship problem.

[ThothAmon]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

A dildo or vibrator isn't a Perfect Partner. It doesn't represent any new problems, and it doesn't do anything other than make masturbation easier. Men and women who masturbate have been managing to have normal relationships as long as humans have been human.

 

For an interesting new problem, you have to include an AI able to fill the more difficult needs in relationships; companionship, emotional and financial support, entertainment. Orgasms, for most people, are not a major relationship problem.

 

I think you misread my post re vibrators and relationship issues I stated simply that an AI wouldn't necessarily be required and that people would probably buy a non-AI version (as they do currently). Then I discussed problems associated with an AI version, as per the original poster's request.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

I think you misread my post re vibrators and relationship issues I stated simply that an AI wouldn't necessarily be required and that people would probably buy a non-AI version (as they do currently). Then I discussed problems associated with an AI version' date=' as per the original poster's request.[/quote']

 

I may have misread.

 

People are already buying very realistic sex dolls, in male and female models (google Real Doll). Vibrators, pumps, artificial vaginas, and other toys are already available in staggering variety. From my own point of view, I don't think any of those would qualify as "Perfect Partners". They're nothing new. Without the AI, I don't think there's much of a story.

[MilkmanDan]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Make the perfect partner? Why, I already have the perfect partner! I wouldn't change a thing, she's ideal!

 

OK, she's gone, so we can talk now.

 

This is a really, really creepy idea. I don't doubt there are a number of people who would go for thing, but they're going to be emotionally damaged people incapable of a real relationship anyways. A perfect partner is one you don't always get along with and who doesn't share all your interests. The conflict and differences is what makes life rewarding.

 

The wife ain't "perfect" in some silly ideal sense, but she's pretty amazing and I wouldn't trade her in for anyone.

[arcady]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

The purpose of the Perfect Partner is two-fold: To be a domestic companion and to be a 'romantic partner.' The explanation offerred is that "women in marriage are forced to endure the problems of men; their constant cravings for sex' date=' their inability to understand anything outside of 'sports-speak', and their uncanny tendancy to pass anything out as 'woman's work'. Women should not have to live with this, and we beleive the [b']Perfect Partner[/b] is the perfect alternative."

 

1) What would your stance on this situation be? Why?

Well first off I think the marketing campaign would fail on the coasts, in Europe, parts of Latin America, Japan, and Korea - where men don't have these "problems".

 

But given that sex-toys for women are already popular and largely socially acceptable, I don't think this one would make any major waves. It's just a talking vibrator with legs and arms.

 

The exact same robot, as a female, might very well face legal challenges, or at least extreme scorn (consider that there is a male version of a vibrator, and after you stop snickering over the idea... think of why you find it so 'pathetic and silly' and yet don't do that with what women buy - and no, I am not an advocate of either kind of product, I just note the double standard).

 

 

Now... consider that the major business today in organized crime is sex slavery. Women and children are being shipped across global lines at an unprecedented scale - the pure numbers probably rival the old African slave trade, although the percentages are much lower. The major source of the problem is that many countries refuse to legalize easily economical access to sex. While you can find slave brothels in the alleys of every American city, you will be harder pressed to find them in Germany - where the sex workers are liscensed, unionized, and given regular health checks.

 

Why do I seem to side track like that?

 

Because it's really on point. A toy like this goes to that same demand. If you think women don't like sex as much as men, consider that DNA keeps showing in almost every culture on Earth that 33% of children do not have the father the mother claims is the father... Further, go read the book 'Chicken' - an autobiography of a male -HETROSEXUAL- prostitute...

 

The demand is there. A robot toy would lesson that demand. It might help prevent a lot of men from being 'cuckolded'. In fact, a female version should be made to help meet the demand of the male or lesbian consumer.

 

It is however, not a relationship. No matter how well it seems to parrot emotion - it is not a living being and not a true care taker. Much of infidelity is driven by a need for additional companionship, and it will do nothing to stem that. The only thing that could drive that down would be a re-examination of artificial concepts like marriage and monogamy.

 

 

In my own science fiction setting these multiple demands where met by the bioware industry. In effect the genetically engineered 'sub-human' slaves. Bioroids and Anthropomorphs that could be rapid grown, worked to death, and recycled (use the biomass of the old as food for the next generation). Such creatures were placed in a number of less ethical nations as well as in extra-territorial regions such as 'off shore platform' and space stations.

 

The setting in fact revolves around the struggle of these creatures to throw off their masters in a successful revolution in the outer solar system, and then to struggle against the 'slave mind' programming that was used to attempt to make them compliant.

 

A bioroid has an advantage over a robot in that it will have an organic brain. It is therefore capable of intuition, original ideas, and emotion. It is not simulating or parroting communication, but actually communicating. It is not limited to only what it has been taught to do. It can learn to love and truly understand the needs of its owner. And when you're done with it, you can have it birth and then raise it's replacement, and then feed it to the upgrade...

 

 

But back to the robot hypo. I don't see it as making any waves of any notice. It would be just a 'shrug' and move on sort of thing. NPR the other day announced some research that managed to clone sperm cells from other cells in, I think, mice or rats. The idea is to move the tech to humans to allow infertile men to have children. But the announcer noted that it would also allow lesbian couples to have a child with both women as biological parents.

 

Scientificially, we are probably only a decade from no longer needing males. Of course even if culture ever shifted to not desire them, they would still be a good thing to have around in case of a technology failure.

 

But if you coupled that science with this robot - you could mimic some of the concepts. But it's never going to give you much more than you already get with a vibrator.

[David Johnston]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

It is however, not a relationship. No matter how well it seems to parrot emotion - it is not a living being and not a true care taker. Much of infidelity is driven by a need for additional companionship, and it will do nothing to stem that.

 

It's a bit rigid to assume that inorganic emotion is impossible. There's no particularly clear reason why someone couldn't make a network of computing nodes that duplicate the function of synapses which respond to stimuli the way our synapses respond to our hormones. However it is an awful lot of trouble to go to and the result would be more useful for pure experimentation than mass market slaves who really feel pain and the impulse to rebel.

The only thing that could drive that down would be a re-examination of artificial concepts like marriage and monogamy.

 

Monogamy is not an artificial concept. It is naturally emergent as a concept from our biology and self-interest.

[Lucius]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

It is however, not a relationship. No matter how well it seems to parrot emotion - it is not a living being and not a true care taker. Much of infidelity is driven by a need for additional companionship, and it will do nothing to stem that.

 

It's a bit rigid to assume that inorganic emotion is impossible. There's no particularly clear reason why someone couldn't make a network of computing nodes that duplicate the function of synapses which respond to stimuli the way our synapses respond to our hormones. However it is an awful lot of trouble to go to and the result would be more useful for pure experimentation than mass market slaves who really feel pain and the impulse to rebel.

The only thing that could drive that down would be a re-examination of artificial concepts like marriage and monogamy.

 

Monogamy is not an artificial concept. It is naturally emergent as a concept from our biology and self-interest.

 

 

Hm, then how do you explain its relative rarity in Human cultures?

 

On the other hand, yes, marriage is not an "artificial concept." Or no more so than any other "concept." It may be defined differently in different cultures, but you can usually find SOMETHING that answers to the name wherever you go. But don't confuse marriage with monogamy.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary observes a sign of the times: Right Lane Ends. Wrong Lane Goes on Forever.

[OddHat]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Hm' date=' then how do you explain its relative rarity in Human cultures?[/quote']

 

Helen Fisher's research found serial monogamy + cheating to be the single most common pattern in humans world wide, both historically and today, with polygamy much less common and polyandry and similar fairly rare. She suggests that a mix of survival strategies tend to contribute to this. Her books "Why We Love" and "Anatomy of Love" both touch on this. Worth reading, if you're interested in the subject.

[MilkmanDan]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

But given that sex-toys for women are already popular and largely socially acceptable, I don't think this one would make any major waves. It's just a talking vibrator with legs and arms.

I don't think that's accurate here. Vibrators don't listen, pretend to be sympathic, converse, give emotional support, or do anything else. The posting isn't talking about a sex toy, it's a partner-substitute, capable of realistically mimicking human emotion and response. This is about finding a replacement for all the work of a real relationship, not about getting off (at least how I read this).

 

Fully operable on/off sex dolls are a real possibility but I think they'll suffer the same stigma as inflatable love dolls do today. People who use those sorts of things are universally seen as creepy as hell, while vibrators are perfectly acceptable, largely because vibrators aren't seen as a replacement for a partner and those creepy-ass Real Dolls are. Nobody's going to get rid of real people in order to bang a robot because there won't be the excitement or emotional connection you get from actually interacting with a human being.

[David Johnston]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Hm, then how do you explain its relative rarity in Human cultures?

 

 

Simple. It isn't rare. Don't mistake me, universal adherence to a single monogamous relationship until death doesn't exist in any human culture. But people spending years having sex only with each other is very common indeed.

[keithcurtis]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

For some more classic thought, try reading Marionettes, Inc., by the masterful Ray Bradbury.

 

Keith "Loves me my SF classics" Curtis

[wrestlinggeek]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Wouldn't see myself using one as a replacement partner, or recommending such to anyone else. However, if we could afford it, I could see the wife and me getting one of the female models for use as housekeeper and (together) ultimate sex toy.

[Ocelot]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy.

 

Good book.

[tkdguy]

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial)

 

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22578725-13762,00.html?