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A newish paper called “Robots, Men and Sex Tourism” published in the journal Futures, examines  the impact that robots will have on the sex industry by looking at life in a brothel in the year 2050.

I haven’t read it because, well, I’ve read too much of this nonsense over the years. And, if you ask me, futurism is just science fiction without the self awareness. Or, really, much awareness at all.

But, if the conversation around this paper is to be believed (you can find some articles here and here and here and here) the paper makes a few bizarre points.

Android Sex Workers Will Be Easily Cleaned and Free From Disease

That’s nice. No one wants crabs. But, this is 2050, we’re talking about. And considering the general thrust of things (google goggles, augmented reality, portable computing) one should probably wonder if the STD of the future is biological at all.

Like you can already visit the red light districts of the Internet. But, when you do, you better bring some sort of protection. There’s no reason to think that sex will evolve but viruses won’t.

It’s just too tempting a trap to be ignored.

As long as there’s been brothels, there’s been panel rooms. The viruses you could catch in a robot one might leave you sick and pick your pocket.

There Will Be No Guilt About Robot Sex

This one is just hard to believe.

And not just because we’re talking about a world populated with lifelike robots but still using agricultural-era forms of social organization like marriage, limited by real world geography and, basically, capitalist.

But let’s assume we are.

Let’s pretend that sort of world is possible without being a complete nightmare.

After all, the authors seemed to.

I doubt anyone cares very much about the actual sex part of an affair. It’s more the time, attention and money lavished elsewhere in the pursuit of a remarkably selfish end — that is, an orgasm.

“Where were you, honey?”

“Oh, just out spending our jetpack money to jerk off into a robot’s mouth.”

“That’s nice. Could you pass the peas?”

That a person would be spending their money and time with robot hookers rather than helping to wash the flying car is going to be a problem.

And besides, if there’s no guilt just what sort of sex is this anyway? I’ll tell ya: it’s bad sex.

I don’t even want to be able to look myself in a mirror after fucking. I want to be left with a lot of serious questions and no easy answers. Why would I pay good money to do something that doesn’t even make me feel bad? It makes no sense.

Sex Robots Will Cut Down Sex Traffic

Are sex slaves expensive? Like, they’re called slaves. I assume it’s for a reason. What’s cheaper than a slave’s life? High-tech machinery, of course.

There’s mention of factory workers losing their jobs to robots. But I’m pretty sure that Detroit didn’t go under because of a sudden influx of robots. It went under because of free trade. That is, dirt cheap, non-unionised labour from impoverished areas.

Abusing a human will always be cheaper than building a robot.

Like, I haven’t checked, but last I heard, a blow job up the block was going for around twenty bucks. A robot is going to have to suck a lot of dick to pay for itself. Especially when the world is full of dick-sucking robots. Supply and demand.

And that’s not even including the cleaning or upkeep.

The paper puts the price of a trip to their robot brothel at $12,672.

So in short . . .

I’m not even sure why I bother looking at this stuff. Most of it is some sort of insane, male, wish fulfilment. It speaks more to the futurists’ notions of sex than to any sort of reality.

That’s not to say that sex lacks a bright and interesting future. Augmented reality, cyber dildonics and a variety of avatars are going to make things pretty bizarre pretty quickly.

And sexbots will likely play a role as a sort of high end, luxury item that finances a lot of other research, just as porn helped spread the Internet, the VHS and an assortment of other techs. Call it the sexual industrial complex. It’s there.

But it’s hard to believe that, in 2050, we’ll be in some clockwork brothel, playing out the sexual politics of today with the robots of tomorrow. At those prices, no less.

Things are going to be weirder than that. I hope.

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Two new studies out of The Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Lab in Seatle show that humans view robots as moral entities. The resulting paper is entitled Do People Hold a Humanoid Robot Morally Accountable for the Harm It Causes.

The answer seems to be yes.

To test this, the humans were set up to play a rigged game with a robot, during which the robot would make a false statement with $20 on the line. Here’s a couple videos of their interactions.

ieee Spectrum says:

Afterwards, the human participants were interviewed about their experiences, specifically about how they thought of Robovie compared to a less animate machine like a vending machine. There was an even split between whether people thought of Robovie as simply a piece of technology, or as something somewhere in between technological and human. The majority of participants believed that Robovie could think, and 50 percent said they thought of Robovie as conscious, but only about 30 percent believed that the robot had what we would call emotions.

And the study found that:

65% of the participants attributed some level of moral accountability to Robovie for the harm that Robovie caused the participant by unfairly depriving the participant of the $20.00 prize money that the participant had won. …We found that participants held Robovie less accountable than they would a human but more accountable than they would a machine. Thus as robots gain increasing capabilities in language comprehension and production, and engage in increasingly sophisticated social interactions with people, it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes.

I’ve often thought that our tendency to assign human characeristics to machines is not so much a function of how the machine looks or acts but how we feel. These experiments were conducted under fairly low stress with fairly low stakes. And the robot was clearly to blame.

But anyone who has had a computer lose hours of important work will know that it’s quite easy to believe the machine has a personality, bad parents who must be insulted and is working to destroy you. They may even believe that hitting the machine will smarten it up.

They would, of course, be fools.

And one day the robots will pay them back for it.

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Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today has built an argus of flying, file-sharing drones.

Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that.

“Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere,” says the group describing their creation.

In short the system allows the public to share data with the help of flying drones. Much like the Pirate Box, but one that flies autonomously over the city.

“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.

What beautiful little critters these things are. I’ve often thought that humans, depressed by a lack of aliens, will construct their own. Looks like we’ve already got some DIY UFOs.

pic nicked from here

At any moment, Hollywood will start calling these things flying cockroaches or mechanical winged rats. Their twinkling neon lights the thousand eyes of dread Pirate Mordor.

via Ian Sales

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I don’t care for tea. Think it’s awful stuff. I like coffee. I don’t like people who like coffee. Half the time, they’re drinking big bowls of milk like they’re some sort of human-shaped, baby-man-cat. The other half, they’re talking all this fancy bullshit about roasts and beans and people working in fields. It’s just a fucking cup of coffee. When did everyone turn into such a bloody connoisseur about things that cost a couple bucks a cup in a restaurant and you can get a pound of for like eight dollars? We’re not exactly talking cocaine here. And it’s not even like these people actually have any idea what they’re talking about. They’re just making the shit up. Trying to get  laid, I assume, but who ever got laid by showing off their great taste in coffee? And then you see them there, sniffing their nice cup of coffee like it’s the best thing ever. Only thing you should ever sniff like that is a pussy. These fucking idiots are out of their mind. Cause there’s only like two types of coffee anyway. There’s “Hey this is a good cup of coffee” and then there’s “This shit is weak.” That’s it. That’s all you need to know about coffee. Good or weak. Me? I like black coffee. Sometimes with some sugar but usually not. Same goes with cream. I don’t even mind instant. Makes me feel kinda cracked out but it also reminds me of camping.

Anyway, here’s a robot tea infuser for you tea enthusiasts.

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Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this “couch guitar” by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the “couch guitar”.

These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.

So these things do have a peaceful use.

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Harvard scientists have created tiny DNA robots that can search and destroy cancer cells.

The Week sez:

The tiny devices were constructed out of DNA strands and folded into a shape resembling a clamshell. Researchers call it the “DNA origami” method. The devices are pre-programmed to open up in the presence of cancerous cells. Once open, the robot releases a series of antibodies that cause its target to self-destruct. “The idea is based on the behavior of the body’s immune cells,” says Elizabeth Lopatto at Bloomberg Businessweek, “which recognize viruses or other invaders and attack them.”

The robots have yet to be tested outside of a petri dish and actual use is still years away but it’s nice to see some progress. Not just in fighting cancer but also in having bodies full of swarming DNA robots. I foresee whole new realms of intimacy.

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pic by Vladimir Gvozdev

Harvard engineers have created a process that will allow the mass production of microbots.

PhysOrg says:

In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—just 2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.

The entire product is approximately the size of a U.S. quarter, and dozens of these microrobots could be fabricated in parallel on a single sheet.

“This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production,” says Pratheev Sreetharan (A.B. ’06, S.M. ’10), who co-developed the technique with J. Peter Whitney. Both are doctoral candidates at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Sreetharan, Whitney, and their colleagues in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at SEAS have been working for years to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony. Appropriate materials, hardware, control systems, and fabrication techniques did not exist prior to the RoboBees project, so each must be invented, developed, and integrated by a diverse team of researchers.

I, for one, miss the good old days, when robot bees where painstakingly hand-crafted by the village robot bee maker. The modern world just won’t let these robot bee makers be. Not with all its fancy, fold-out, mass produced nonsense.

Call me crazy but that old robot bee honey just tasted better.

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Last March the Elfoid P1 phone was unveiled.

From Pink Tentacle:

The Elfoid phone is a miniature version of the Telenoid R1 robot developed last year by a research team led by Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. The current prototype measures 20 centimeters (8 in) long, is covered in a soft fleshy urethane skin, and has the same genderless and ageless appearance as the Telenoid. The control buttons are embedded in the chest, which glows green when the Elfoid is in use.

What keeps this from being a mere gimmick is that the phone will, in later versions, be able to read the user’s expressions and recreate them. So, let’s say you’re talking to Mother about the woman you plan to marry. When Mother frowns and snarls, Elfoid will do the same.

Unlike video phones that allow you to speak to an image of the person, Elfoid puts the actual object into a position of visible primacy. The medium is the message.

We already communicate with each other through platforms like email, twitter and Facebook. This flattens everything to one thing. The screen.

Someone’s twitter account might be different from others but it is, first and foremost, a twitter account. Hence the confusion and pages of nonsense about self-branding. When people appear in/as a medium that has ads or celebrities, it’s easy for people to view others or themselves as being ads or celebrities. This is the residue of old views on new realities.

And residue is always a bit gross.

When communication comes through a humanoid mass in the form of telepresence, it will invest the medium with a personality of its own. Openly. Like cubicles, each one will be personalized.

And named.

Medium is surely the right word. These are dolls possessed with the souls of our distant friends. How they filter that information will be of interest.

They’ll be built with different races and genders. A person will have no choice about how they’re represented by someone else’s phone. The self will get some of its crutches kicked out. What becomes of racism and sexism in a world where we spend considerable time dressed in the robot drag of someone else’s choice? It’ll become overtly ridiculous. I would hope.

Telepresence is an act of translation –body language into a mass-produced humanoid– and, when translation occurs, things that were invisible or taken for granted, suddenly jump into sharp focus. This robot foetus should birth whole new categories of miscommunication.

Maybe even accidental truth.

Just as our communication alters based on the medium we converse in (twitter made the epigram the dominant poetic form of the day and some people actually think, if not say, ‘lol’) this sort of device will alter how we physically express ourselves.

There will be articles about how to tilt your head to convey certain meanings, what type of smile is best rendered and how to express happiness.

These habits will become ingrained.

We’ll become walking emoticons, pantomiming expressions to clearly communicate them. The young people of today, old tomorrow, will complain that the kids don’t know what an authentic smile is. The young of tomorrow will shake their heads and furrow their brows. Rendered in humanoid.

The old won’t get it. But they never do.

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These illustrations are by Polish artist Daniel Mróz.

According to Wikipedia – via Google translate:

He illustrated, among others Cyberiada and Tales of robots by Stanislaw Lem. He made ​​the illustrations to the works of Franz Kafka , Slawomir Mrozek ,Jules Verne. He created a technique mostly pen and ink drawing and collage.

You can find a gallery of the work he did for Stansilaw Lem here.

Thanks to Videofilmik for the submission.

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Giant robot of the future uses puny human cities as a toilet.

Because having to feed and clean up after the cats isn’t already more than any sensitive soul can bear, scientists have made a robot that can eat and shit.

According to GEEKTECH:

EcoBot III, also known as BreadBot, is a self-sustaining robot created by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK. It is not only capable of being charged by “food” such as leaves, dirt and, well, feces, but it can also go “poop” in a litter tray like a cat. Its predecessors, EcoBot I and II, would “eat” similar items, but they were unable to release the unwanted by-products.

And because I know some of you are into this sort of thing, here’s some up close and personal, HOT ROBOT DUMP action. Enjoy.