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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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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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Looks like this drone fad is catching on.

From Singularity Hub:

According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, nearly one in three US warplanes are drones…and those machines are changing the way the world wages war. US soldiers in Afghanistan rely more and more upon intelligence gathered from drones, and President Obama recently lauded the precision and success of deadly drone-strikes against top terrorist targets in Pakistan. Meanwhile all advanced militaries in the world, from Israel to Russia, seem to be improving their own drone capabilities.

And the military isn’t the only one getting in on the action.

According to a New Scientist article called Civilian Drones to Fill the Sky After Law Shake-Up:

For the moment, the law stands in the way. The US Federal Aviation Administration allows for recreational use of remote-controlled air vehicles, but the Columbia Packing case blurs the line because the UAV became a surveillance tool. Commercial use is also illegal – last week real estate agents in Los Angeles, California, were ordered to stop using helicopter drones to shoot aerial movies of properties they are selling. “Although the FAA allows hobbyists to fly model airplanes for recreational purposes, that authority does not extend to operators flying unmanned aircraft for business purposes,” the Air Division of the Los Angeles police department reminded the California Association of Realtors.

That could soon change. The FAA plans to unveil a new set of rules this year that will cover the burgeoning interest in flying commercial and private UAVs.

New Scientist’s editorial is ”High time to welcome the friendly drones.”

Our eye in the sky.

Has there ever been a time when people could, in their backyard, build something that comprised 30% of a superpower’s air-force?

We’re in uncharted territory.

This is, doubtless, old hat to many of my readers. But, during a recent conversation about what the collective noun for drones should be ["an argus of drones" -- book it]  it was brought to my attention that many people have never heard anything about the civilian uses of this technology.

Here’s a stark outline:

The police buy drones. Not cheap – $50,000 for one.

The people build their own. Very cheap. Out of a Polish RoboCopter kit and a video camera.

You can build something similar for $199.

The only comparison that really springs to my mind is how the British Navy, by adopting steel ships rendered their wooden fleet suddenly obsolete. It sacrificed years of naval supremacy and engaged itself in an arms race. Just by the power of its new advance. Power sometimes overthrows itself.

Technological power often does.

(This is why a lot of countries refused to engage in biological weapons research. Not out of the goodness of their hearts but, because, like the nuclear bomb, it costs a fortune to be the first to develop the tech and not nearly so much to steal or reverse engineer it.)

But even they –at that time– were in competition with other nation states. This is the military power of the state in conflict with the power of backyard inventors and hobbyists.

It reminds one of the ongoing struggles between old media and new.

If you thought old media was slow to adapt to the DIY challenges from filesharing, blogs and whathaveyou, just remember — their corporate model is held to be the picture of efficiency, adaptability and quick thinking when compared to government bureaucracy.

The skies are getting strange. And just wait until these happy little fellows are flying down your street.

You won’t be waiting as long as you think.

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DARPA funded researchers have made some paper robots powered by air.

Wired reports:

Powered by nothing more than puffs of air, robots molded from paper and silicone rubber can bend, twist, grip and even lift more than 100 times their weight.

Lifting 100 times their weight is impressive because they’re made out of paper and air. It also sounds kinda useless because paper and air are very light. These things would have to be huge before they can carry your luggage.

Nonetheless . . .

“If you want to go through a winding tube or rubble or some other tough environment that’s difficult to reach, you need to be flexible,” said chemist Xin Chen of Boston University, member of a team who describes their work in a Feb. 9 Advanced Functional Materials paper.  “Soft robots can go a lot of places where hard robots cannot go.”

What’s with robotics and rubble? Every time a scientist describes what his robot/cyborg can or will do, it always seems to be about crawling through rubble. But I’ve been outside. I’m not even seeing a lot of robots on the sidewalk. Rubble? Just what do these guys have planned? Why do they all expect so much rubble?

Then one remembers the DARPA funding. The military is in the rubble creation business. There even seems to be a robot rubble industrial complex. Robots to create rubble, robots to work in rubble. Every bot measured against a post-apocalyptic  wasteland.

This is a shame. Because, these paper bots are pretty. Just look at the video.

Instead of having them go through a bunch of rubble, they should be sent to David Cronenberg for some tweaks and become slightly functional household decorations.

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"We will no longer lick the crumbs from your table, puny human."

For the interested, here’s a paper on Robot Vacuum Cleaner Personality and Behavior.

Abstract: In this paper we report our study on the user experience of robot vacuum cleaner behavior. How do people want to experience this new type of cleaning appliance? Interviews were conducted to elicit a desired robot vacuum cleaner personality. With this knowledge in mind, behavior was designed for a future robot vacuum cleaner. A video prototype was used to evaluate how people experienced the behavior of this robot vacuum cleaner. The results indicate that people recognized the intended personality in the robot behavior. We recommend using a personality model as a tool for developing robot behavior.

I love this sort of brass tacks research into human robot interactions.

It reminds me of this old paper that I’ve lost. It was some sort of study about robot child interactions that, I think, veered into a study about manufacturing cute.

Can you guess what country that was out of?

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BBC Reports:

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies.

It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

I’m surprised that these things have cameras and sensors rather than machine guns. It’s almost like South Korea is ignoring the robot script.