Thoughts from Diana Fleischman on the upcoming replacement of (some) women by artificial ones who won’t abuse men:
Men high in conscientiousness, who are sensitive to social disapproval but who nonetheless have difficulty reading subtle social cues, could make good husbands for women. These men are unlikely to want to take the risk of approaching women. As substitutes like sex robots and virtual companions become better and cheaper, they will monopolize the attention of such men.
Think of an introverted engineer with Asperger’s syndrome who wasn’t sure how to broach a conversation with a woman back in 2015 and definitely isn’t sure how to do that in today’s climate. In 10 years he could have a beautiful robot companion (indeed, he could have one that could emulate the experience of having sex with dozens of different women) that has a lower barrier to entry than the mating market and that keeps him satisfied enough to remain a happy bachelor. Some woman misses out on a conscientious guy with a good income who might not know exactly how to respond when she says “nothing’s wrong,” but will definitely keep the cars tuned up to get the kids to their mathematics championships. The world might miss out on his sons and daughters and their analytical approaches to some of the world’s problems.
The kinds of men described above, who have difficulty reading social signals but who are nonetheless strongly sexually motivated, have a characteristic that means they’ll be less put off by sex robots than the average person: resistance to perceiving the uncanny valley. “The uncanny valley” is the way that representations that fall just short of looking like humans often look “creepy.” Anthropomorphized robots are more relatable and trustworthy than machine-like robots. It’s also difficult to imagine that many people would want to have sex with a conglomeration of gears and wheels.
My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.
Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.
Easy to understand why gender feminists hate this.
[Update a few minutes later]
And here’s an interesting question:
Men have much greater variance of reproductive success than women. Sometimes they get cues that they have nothing to lose you have everything to gain from taking risks through violence, sexual or otherwise. This is one reason that pornography decreases the rate of sexual assault. When men get cues that women are interested in them, even if those women are mere representations, their evolved psychology leads them to less risky ways of attempting to achieve reproductive success. How many teenaged boys would be able to build up the resentment to commit mass shootings or suicide if they had a beautiful sex robot at home?
Far fewer, I’m guessing. But of course the gender feminists will claim it’s their fault they’re not getting laid and they have no one to blame but themselves.
I suggest you take an hour and watch the campy sci-fi film Cherry 2000(1987). Sex Androids. Bar scenes with lawyers negotiating the “Consent Forms”. very tongue in cheek but there is a definite satire under the campinesss…
Most prophetic movie ever.
The first three paragraphs of the quoted text could have come from a review of the series “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”. Not many people watched it when it was being made, which I suspect was in part because it was more “hard” than most TV science fiction.
Amusingly, “TSCC” was cancelled because the executive responsible was only allowed to keep either it or “Dollhouse”, in which the sexbot theme was far more explicit.
A society in which relations between men and women have broken down to such a degree that a significant number of men rely on machines for both physical and emotional gratification would be a society in the throes of collapse. Indeed, once that technology existed it would increasingly be used to meet every emotional need of men and women alike. Real human relationships would be automated out of existence, replaced with artificial substitutes that were guaranteed to never be complex, messy or disappointing.
But a machine that can fully satisfy a person’s emotional needs is also the most perfect tool of psychological manipulation ever devised. It would monitor your face, voice and body language for signs of satisfaction or dissatisfaction and adjust its behaviour until it obtained whatever response it was programmed to elicit. In doing so, it would subtly manipulate you into giving that response in a predictable manner. Just imagine all the ways in which that power could be exploited by the government or corporate interests which controlled how the machines were programmed.
Fleischman is describing the beginnings of something incredibly dangerous.
“But a machine that can fully satisfy a person’s emotional needs is also the most perfect tool of psychological manipulation ever devised.”
You appear to be describing my psycho ex-girlfriend. And I don’t think she was a bot.
While Western men sit at home with their sexbots, and Western women sit at home with their cats, Muslim men and women will be outbreeding us.
“While Western men sit at home with their sexbots, and Western women sit at home with their cats, Muslim men and women will be outbreeding us.”
Precisely…as they already are out-breeding them in Europe; understand something like 8X time the birth rate or some such. In the end natural selection wins out; regardless of whether said Muslim men are actually “happier” in the sex lives (or lives in general) than Western men. Nature doesn’t give a rat’s ass how happy you are. The “smart” salmon who doesn’t swim upstream to spawn may (or may not) have a happier, longer Salmonly life than the “suckers” who made the swim. But the later is the species future and the former (happy or not) is a path to racial extinction.
By the time we have viable sexbots, we’ll also have artificial wombs.
Ultimately, demographics is a short-term problem, and largely due to governments giving votes to everyone with a pulse (and, in America, to many people without one).
“By the time we have viable sexbots, we’ll also have artificial wombs.”
Even if we had viable “artificial wombs” right now we would be competing with a younger population of billion(s) of natural wombs in the third world. Not sure if our collapsing birthrate would be reversed even with them (artificial wombs). Too many educated western women just don’t want to have/raise kids; they rather spend their time/money on themselves. Its not just pregnancy and the rigors of childbirth it is the cost of raising them in a western style standard of living; not an issue for those in the third world. Welfare state or not perhaps encouraging it they seem to just have greater fecundity than we have.
If not for Western money and technology, the population of Africa would return to its natural level of… a heck of a lot less than it is today.
Besides which, it’s only an issue because Western governments refuse to protect their borders because the left need immigrants to do the votes the natives won’t do. That’s something that can change almost overnight, given the will to do so.
“If not for Western money and technology, the population of Africa would return to its natural level of… a heck of a lot less than it is today.”
No offense Ed…but you are willfully dodging the actual problem. Low fecundity among western nations well below replacement rate and a rapidly aging population. Cut-off all foreign aid to Africa and yes death tolls would increase but African (and Asia–China, India, Indonesia) pop/birth rate dwarfs ours; they will bury us. When you declare war on nature (abortion on demand; birth control; war on the very concept of traditional family/gender roles) nature bites back hard. The third war didn’t cause this problem we did it to ourselves.
“Besides which, it’s only an issue because Western governments refuse to protect their borders because the left need immigrants to do the votes the natives won’t do. That’s something that can change almost overnight, given the will to do so.”
Even if they stayed in their own countries that wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem. The screwed up immigration policies in say Germany were Merkel’s solution (arguably not a very good one) to Germany’s imploding demographic. Even assuming that Europeans per capita IQ’s are higher than Africa’s (& that IQ’s measure accurately genetic intelligence) they are lower than Asia’s I believe. Either way with 5X times your population greater fecundity vs the west’s collapsing population demographic they will eventually inherit the world (& maybe the solar system/stars).
There’s no reason for a growing population in a post-industrial world. The population growth of the last hundred years was driven at first by the demand for new workers in factories, and then by the demand for more votes for socialist governments, who took money from the smart middle-class men to give to low-IQ women to breed socialist voters.
In a world of pervasive robotics, AI and enhanced longevity, we should be reducing the population. We’re not far from the point where you’ll need 100 IQ to have any economic value, and that will rapidly increase as AI progresses.
IMHO, by the end of the century, the human population will be measured in millions, not billions. And that will be a good thing, aside from all the deaths in the wars between now and then.
“There’s no reason for a growing population in a post-industrial world. The population growth of the last hundred years was driven at first by the demand for new workers in factories, and then by the demand for more votes for socialist governments..”
No there is no need for growth; even in the third world fecundity is greatly slowing down (thankfully). The pop explosion was driven more by the mass introduction of modern medicine/science to the world as a whole, lowering the death rate with mostly relatively cheap hygiene/vaccinations. There are advantages to them of having their demographic (third world) grow to even more of majority (even if the world’s overall population stabilizes/declines) while the 1st world’s share declines; especially as global democracy/possible world guv happens.
” In a world of pervasive robotics, AI and enhanced longevity, we should be reducing the population.”
As long as the AI’s don’t decide to reduce it for us….to zero.