July 7, 2018 • 57 mins
Sex between humans and machines is nothing new in the world of science fiction. Their forms range from angelic mechanoids to victimized humanoids, but the robotic lover is almost always an expression of purely human anxieties. Yet as real-world technology advances, we’re left to ponder the emerging form of the sex bot -- and the possibilities range from mere animate fetishes to therapeutic surrogates. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Christian Sager consider arguments for and against the embrace of synthetic paramours.(Originally published March 30, 2017)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
We are headed vault. Word. What's in the vault today? Well,
this time the vault is full of sex spots. Joe. Yeah.
So this is an episode that I recorded with Christian
back in UHR. And this one was a really interesting
(00:26):
to want to do. This is one that we we've
actually run into cases where someone has suggested it and
then we get to point back and say, ah, actually,
here it is. Here's everything you probably want to know
and a few things you don't want to know about
the idea of robots that are being created, that are
being conceived and maybe created in the future. Uh that
(00:47):
are that are created for human sexual reasons. And I
mean and it really it runs the gamut from from
ideas that are rather exploitive than kind of disturbing to
things that actually sound like they will have a you know,
positive effect on society, the idea of therapeutic robots. So
(01:08):
anyway we we present it to you, let you dive in,
and then you can let us know how you feel
about these ideas. All right, Well, without any further Ado.
Let's get into this vault episode. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
(01:33):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger. So hey,
if this is an episode that you are listening to,
maybe with your kids, or maybe you're concerned about the
company that you're listening to it in, we should just
let you know up front. This is gonna be a
little bit of a more graphic episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. Be uh, based on the title. You
(01:53):
probably know that already, but we just wanted to give
you a heads up because we know that a lot
of families right into us and say, hey, I really
like listening to the show. I listened to it on
the way to school in the morning with my daughter. Um,
this might not be the episode to do that. Yeah,
you might give this one a skip in that case.
Now that being said, we're we're gonna tackle the topic
of sex spots in this episode, and we are, as usual,
(02:16):
we're going to do our best to to demystify the
topic of bit we're gonna explore. Yes, we're gonna talk
about some of the in many cases trashier um examples
of this show up in our science fiction. We're going
to talk about some definite opposition to the idea of
sex spots, but we're also going to explore some territory
that I was really fascinated with that where where we
(02:36):
see a more positive vision of what a sex spot
or sexual interaction between humans and machines might consist, of
visions of this that are beneficial, even therapeutic. Yeah, exactly.
I think that's the real hook here, and the thing
that I didn't know a lot about going into the research,
which is that there are a lot of uh of
(02:58):
these robots being bill and there's a lot of research
going into their construction that's healing basically for human beings
in a variety of ways. And we'll get into that now.
Before we get into the science, we should just take
a few moments to talk about some of the examples
that we've seen, and there are many different examples of
sex spots in science fiction. I mean, whenever we start
(03:20):
thinking about artificial humans, and certainly we've dreamed about artificial
humans since ancient times, they factored into our many of
our myth cycles. We we inherently deal with our anxiety
about technology and our anxiety about human nature in dreaming
up these various examples. So a few that come to mind.
(03:41):
There's a wonderful novel titled The Wind Up Girl. Uh.
And this was by Paulo Baca Galupi. And this is
this coming concerned you know, sort of your sort of
your typical sex bot scenario. We have a pleasure body
of some kind, a feminine robot that is made for
male pleasure, that escapes, goes rogue, you know, has a
(04:03):
has a struggle for independence. It's a really good book. Uh,
but it does explore kind of a classic trope here
that is a very common trope in sci fi now
now that I think about it, and especially looking at
a lot of our examples here with things that are
really kind of popular right now, like Humans or Westworld, right,
like the other shows that are all exploring that same idea. Yeah,
(04:24):
both great shows. And you can and it's obvious why
this is such a powerful trope because you get to
explore not only are concerns about technology and the future
of technology, but also about about what it means to
be to be female in today's world. And and uh
and in various feminine issues that you can explore through this. Uh,
this fantastic vision. Yeah. The other recent one that really
(04:46):
gripped a lot of people's attention. I thought it was
maybe the best movie that came out that year was
XM Gonna Yes. Alex Garland's XM Gonna Wow. Uh definitely
Uh talked about the issues surrounding sex, but was more
about I guess the like emotional availability of AI. And
this is something that like we've actually off air been
(05:07):
kind of talking about, like how it relates to this
topic is um For instance, that Spike Jones movie Her,
which I haven't seen but I don't think, actually features
a robot in it, but it's sort of the same idea.
It's like, can an artificial intelligence convince you that it's
real enough that you have you're an emotionally engaging relationship
(05:29):
with it. Yeah, this is, of course, is the whole
topic undo itself, Like to what degree we in view
a non living thing with life, even if it's not
a robot, even if it is a doll or a
toy painting. I mean, we have this fabulous ability to
anthropomorphize just about anything, to have it lead you put
a smiley face on something and it will create we
(05:51):
will instantly have this smidgeon at least a smidgeon of
investment in that thing as a person. Well, and that
goes way back. You've got notes here to the Greek
myth of Hefestus, right, or as I usually call him, Vulcan,
because I think that's Vulcan's what the Roman version of that. Yeah,
you have Vulcans, the Roman version and uh yeah, and
if you've ever rolled through Birmingham, Alabama, they have a
(06:14):
big statue of Vulcan. Wait, is that right? That's true? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
why because it was like a steel working town. Okay, so,
uh so Vulcan plays a role in in my personal
history as well. But yeah, this in myth, he created
a series of life sized golden maids, among various other models.
So he was kind of a mad scientist of Greek
(06:37):
and Roman myth. But you can see they're like going
that far back that we human beings were thinking about
in our culture and our storytelling, like how we were
going to try to replicate the human experience in machines
or in I believe the terminology that was used referring
to Vulcan and Hefestus was biotechnique. Yeah, yeah, that's right,
(06:59):
and there's a wonderful Ian magazine, aren't on that. I'll
try to include a link to that and some of
the other articles who were mentioning here in the landing
page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot Com. Also, obviously many people out there probably thinking
of Darryl Hannah's character Priss from Blade Runner, which is
referred to as a basic pleasure model. Although so it's funny.
I was reading an Ionine article yesterday that's all about
(07:21):
what what we're talking about right now, the fictionalized versions
of sex spots. There's a lot of argumentation in the
commentary about whether Priss counted because replicants are technically organic individuals.
I think she counts. Yeah, yeah, there there's that whole
Once you get into the whole android replicant thing, it
gets a little, uh, a little hazy. Now, anybody out
(07:41):
there is a fan of Rick and Morty, there was
an episode titled Raising gas Orpazorp that included a sex
spot that I haven't seen that one. Yeah, that that
Morty ends up acquiring and has a brief addiction to.
So we might come back to that vision of a
sex spot here in the future. But that kind of
leads us into some of the more exploited visions. I
guess you can say, the sort of heavy metal visions
(08:04):
of the sex spot. Um, what what was the name
of the artist that you you sent me yesterday? There's
this guy. So heavy Metal Magazine is what we're referring to,
which is, if you're unfamiliar with it, is an American
magazine that specializes in comics that are sort of like
R rated fantasy sci fi comics. Uh. And the cover
(08:26):
art is usually pretty salacious. And Robert found this one
artist who has done quite a number of covers for
them that specializes in sexualized female robots. Oh yeah, this
would be, of course, be Japanese artist Hajjimie Sori Yama. Okay, yeah,
and this is this is one of the Remember when
I first got online really the first year of college,
(08:48):
last year of high school, I ended up introducing myself
to a number of fantasy artists that that I was
instantly taken with. And uh and I remember encountering this
guy's work and it's it's I catch ing, but it's
all of like sexy robot pinop dolls, like that's his
his thing, and that's certainly a vision of the sex spot,
the fimbot that you know, whatever you want to call them,
(09:09):
whatever they're calling your particular uh sci fi property that
we see time and time again. Um, like a property
that I think back to is nineteen eight seven's Cherry
two thousand starring Melanie Griffith. I have never seen that,
and I you know, I've always kind of heard about
it on the fringe of things, but yeah, it really
hit my radar doing the research for this episode. Yeah,
it's it's definitely one that falls more into the you know,
(09:31):
exactly what you'd expect from a nineteen eighties film, so
it has a sex about it. I suppose like she
can't complain too much about her daughter doing these fifties
shades of gray movies. Then if like daughter can just
be like, well you were in Cherry two thousand, Yes,
but she was not Cherry two thousand, Oh she was.
She was just she's like a human bounty hunt. Okay,
I didn't know that, all right, Um, you know what
is not on the list that it just like popped
(09:52):
into my head. I can't believe we forgot about this.
The Stepford Wives Yeah, the Stepford Wives a big one
that and it ties in directly with some of the
fears and eggs ideas they were going to discuss here,
because it's men making robot women to be their perfect wives. Yeah. Uh,
there's Jude Law as Jigglo Joe in the movie AI. Uh,
(10:12):
one of the rare examples of a male sex spot
in popular culture. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they made
several sex spots, including one of Buffy for Spike, which
really there's some really dicey sexual relationship stuff that goes
on in that show towards the end of the later seasons,
(10:33):
and that's one of them. Um. And then the comics, Uh,
there's this comic called Autumn Lends that's coming out right
now that I really enjoy. It's by Kurt Busick and
Benjamin Dewey and Uh. In the second arc, the characters
encounter these statue esque naked robot women who once served
this like long forgotten civilization as sex slaves, and when
(10:54):
one of the characters tries to force himself upon them,
they rebel and it's it's really it's a really interesting
take on this whole thing that we're gonna be talking
about today, but um, I highly recommended if you're into
comics check that out. So obviously, some of these visions
of the sex spot are are more fantastic than others,
and some are more serious than others in their commentary.
But ultimately it's all sort of circling around our our
(11:17):
legitimate concerns about ourselves and technology. So what what are
we afraid of? What? What indeed are we very right
to be concerned about? Uh? You know, we see this
continuing trope of the human abuse of robots mirroring our
own abuse of each other. If we create robots in
our image, then are we destined to exploit them, to
abuse them, and even further objectify and to humanize each
(11:39):
other based on this model? And I also can't help
but feel that female sex spots and fiction especially tend
to serve, as you know, as commentaries on product femininity.
Uh the the all too frequent portrayal of human females
as mere sex objects, devoid of nuanced personality or identity.
And we didn't plan it out this way, but actually
(12:00):
so coming out this week along with this episode, we're
doing an episode on the science of ovulation and how
that plays into marketing femininity. Uh and and so it's
it's interesting to do these two episodes side by side
and sort of see the parallels. Yeah, there's always this
weird synchronicity between the episodes, it seems. So why don't
(12:22):
we get into the current state of you know what.
Some of you out there are probably like, well, wait, what,
Like there's all these pop culture versions that you just mentioned,
but where are these sexpots you speak of now? Right? UM,
I would just first like to very quickly go over
a short history of sex toys in terms of you
(12:44):
know where we're at with that. These are tens of
thousands of years old. You know, most people don't know that.
They probably think it's relatively recent invention. The oldest dildough
is more than twenty thousand years old. Vibrators began as
medical devices that midwives and physicians use to treat illnesses
such as hysteria through what they referred to as pelvic
(13:04):
massage or manual stimulation. The first one of these was
introduced in seventeen thirty four. That's that goes far back. Uh.
And it wasn't into the late eighteen hundreds when powered
vibrators were available to doctors, and then by they were
available directly to consumers. And then you know, nowadays people
think about computer driven sex toys. That goes back to
(13:27):
the mid nineteen seventies. Yes, I mean, certainly, sexuality is
always a huge aspect of human behavior, even if we
want to push it to the background. So it has
a tendency to be at the forefront of any technological
advancement or any kind of new enterprise. I think it's
just yeah, worth like reminding ourselves, like, hey, this isn't new.
(13:48):
This has been around for a long time. What we're
discussing here is really just like the latest iteration of
this and what does that say about us? Yeah, and
it's not a situation where suddenly sexually minded individuals are
at the forefront, uh, you know, pushing and meddling with
the technology. They've always been there. Uh So, just to
(14:08):
give a brief idea of the future so that we
can we can backtrack and discuss the present. There was
an interesting Pew Research Center paper that came out in
two thousand fourteen titled Digital Life in AI Robotics in
the Future of Jobs. Now. For the most part, this
article did not go into the use of sexual robots.
(14:29):
But there is one part where this guy by the
name of Stow Boyd, whose lead researcher for Giga o
M Research futurists. He predicted quote Pizzas will not be
delivered by teenagers hoping for a tip. Food will be
raised by robotic vehicles, even in small plot urban farms.
That will become the norm since so many people will
have lost their jobs to bots. Your X rays will
(14:51):
be reviewed by a battery of Watson Grade A eyes,
and humans will only be pulled in when the machines disagree.
Robotics sex partners will be commonplace. Although the source of
scorn and division the way that critics today bemoans selfies
as an indicator of all that's wrong with the world.
So I think that's an interesting take on it. I
definitely agree with him that on the scorn and division,
(15:15):
and that is going to be a you know, really
the big divide that we're going to speak about today
in terms of what's going on with this technology. I
don't I don't see it as being analogous to selfies,
though I think it's a little more extreme than that. Yeah,
I think time and time again we have to come
back to examples of what the what the current technology is.
(15:36):
So today we have a number of different sexual devices,
sexual toys of your world that are on the market,
and many of them are very high selling. That being said,
sex toys continue and perhaps will always be, uh that
the punchline of many a jail. Yeah right, exactly. Yeah,
we were talking about this earlier that it's like, uh,
you know, this is the stuff of like late night
(15:57):
talk show hosts, like making a throwaway Joe here there.
It's something everybody can kind of relate to and laugh
at and laugh at themselves about. Right, And then at
the same time, many of the people who are laughing
and some that are not laughing are still going to
perhaps go online and order one of these devices for
their personal use. Yeah. So we're a far cry, though,
from having a robotic humanoid body that that moves like
(16:19):
we do, but roboticists continue to make strides in this area.
So everyone's seeing videos of the various of Boston Dynamics robots,
you know, and they're often kind of fearsome. They look
like mechanical jumping horses. I gets. So we should probably
clarify what this is. Maybe not everybody out there is
familiar with this. So this is what the last year
and a half Boston Dynamics is like continually releasing these
(16:39):
kind of like press release videos of these robots that
they're working on that basically look like robot pack mules. Yeah,
and that's kind of the cell, right that there robotic
pack mules that can that would have a military application,
that can go over diverse terraine. So we can look
to those and obviously these are not sexy, these are
not these are not devices where you say, hey, that's
(17:00):
the future of sexual robotics right there, but they do
demonstrate the strides that we're making and creating robots that
can move in reality, that can that can that can
actually interact with the world physically and any of There
are other areas where the technology continues to impress, So
we know robot assisted surgery VR, haptic feedback, and there
(17:24):
is this, uh, this field of that's sometimes referred to
as tele del donis uh where they're utilizing all this
technology for more advanced sexual devices and sex toys. This
is basically across long distances right right. Like one example
of this is uh uh Frixtion, I believe is the
name of how you pronounced the product, and they use
(17:46):
haptic sensors and robotic accessories to enable remote control sex. Okay,
so let's take a quick break and when we get back,
now that we've covered sort of, you know, up to
the current state of affairs with sex spots, we're going
to talk about the off the shelf on the market
robot Roxy. Alright, we're back. So yeah, let's talk about
(18:12):
Roxy a little bit. Roxy is I think a it's
an important example to hit, but it's also such a
uh problematic example because it it represents some of the
more notorious aspects of sexual robot. So we learned about
Roxy from Eon magazine, which if if you're a long
time listener, you know that we read quite a bit
(18:33):
of it. Uh. It's a robot companion. Uh. It doesn't
quite produce the Uncanny Valley effect, you know, unlike um,
those actroids that you sometimes see that are created in
like Japanese commercials or something like that. But they come
Roxy comes in a variety of models, and some of
them actually have personalities. So there's a little bit of
(18:54):
programming that goes into this. Uh. It includes the regular Roxy.
There is also mature Martha Young Yoko and Frigid Farrah.
And that's where I got a little I got a
little creeped out personally, because the idea of frigid fare
is it's like she plays hard to get, she's you know,
not necessarily interested in having sex with you. And that's
(19:18):
a little that's where there's some weird lines. I think, Yeah,
this this is, you know, an obvious example of something
will come back to the idea that you have NNE
creating female robots for a male audience, and they've got
very specific fetish very stereotypical betrayals and um and sort
of male approved models of what a female is, very
(19:40):
simplistic models. Yeah. Oh, and I should clarify to young
Yoko is not although we are going to talk about
pedophile sex spots. Young Yoko is supposed to be over
the age of eighteen personality wise. But basically this roxy
robot sounds kind of like Sirian the way that it
talks back to you. There urpist is to pride more
(20:01):
than sex. The idea is that they're your true companion
and you can talk to them before and after sex. Uh.
And and given that you've got all the personalities chosen here.
You know, what, what does this tell us about the
future proliferation of these sex spots? Uh? And here's where
it gets real weird. Aon says that the person who
(20:22):
created roxy it was originally created as the recreation of
a friend that was lost in nine eleven, and then
that developed into this consumer oriented sex spot. Well, and
then I've also read that that the technology behind Roxy
started out as a as an inquiry into creation of
a robot home care nurse. So now I'm wondering if
(20:46):
there's just like these different urban myths about Roxy. Well, now,
I I I wrote a little bit years ago where
I ended up touching on Roxy and uh, and I
believe the home care nurse thing is is legit. But
I guess it comes down to the evolution of an idea,
the evolution of of figuring out how to commercially apply
your technology. So what starts as an as an intention
(21:09):
to create a robotic nurse, uh, may end up going
through some changes until suddenly you're producing a sex doll. Well,
like you said, with all technological developments, that kind of
the pioneering end of it is sexual in nature. I mean,
look at the Internet. Yeah, exactly. Now we mentioned sex dolls.
Of course, sex dolls have been around for some time,
(21:29):
and it's been proven that individuals can at least find
some sort of detached pleasure or even an imaginative bond
with even just a non robotic semblance of a human.
I always think back to a wonderful BBC documentary titled
Guys and Dolls that came out. God, it must have
been this. I think it maybe ten years old. Now
you can find I think you can find most of
(21:51):
it on YouTube and other such websites. But they profiled
a handful of real doll owners. These are, of course
anatomically correct life size human replicants. So are they built
for the purpose of sexes. They're built with that purpose
exclusively in mind. But is this documentary explored the individuals
(22:13):
in their bond with these things ranged immensely so there
was there's like a there's one guy in it that's
hanging him up on hooks, and another that just seems
to obsessively collect him and has some stack like kindling
and his crawl space, and those are some examples that
you know, maybe hit the creep level of for a
lot of people. But then there's this one guy who
seems to have a largely, if not exclusively, emotional relationship
(22:38):
with his doll, and he's going through like separation, anxiety
over having he's having to move and he's having to
ship it, and so it's it. It doesn't. It does
a good job of just showing you, all right, yeah,
you can have something like a real doll, but then
the varying levels of engagement with it, the way people
anthropomorphize it is going to vary from person to person. Yeah, so,
(23:00):
I mean, I guess like if you want to step
back at it and look at it like a very
simple sense here and and pardon me if this is
a little vulgar, but uh, it sounds like we're somewhere
between that movie her I referred to earlier, where like
nobody is needed. It's just an emotional relationship with an
artificial consciousness and like a fleshlight, right, um, a fleshlight.
(23:22):
Just to explain, because this will come up again, is
a popular sex toy with a male market. Yeah, exactly,
um so, And that's kind of where we're going to
find criticism on both sides about this. Is like arguments
about why we shouldn't make sex spots and arguments about
why we should because there's this broad spectrum, right, um speaking,
(23:45):
which have you seen the movie Dead Girl before? I
have not. I'm familiar with it. I think is one
that would always show up on Netflix formula. Yeah, it's that.
I saw it on Netflix. It's not about sex spots,
but it's, um, it's related to this. I don't want
to give too much away, but a sense actually these
guys find a woman's dead body, but the body doesn't
rot at all, like she's inanimate, but she's not dead.
(24:09):
So it's a zombie film kind of yeah. Uh, and
it goes where you would expect it to go based
on what we're talking about. Anyways, it seemed related to
this alright. Well, on that note, let's get into the
case against sex spots. I feel like this is a
good place to start because it's going to tie in
more directly with some of those sci fi ideas that
we explored already. So you have one individual in particular
(24:33):
with it's worth mentioning here, and that's Dr Kathleen Richardson.
She's a robot ethicist at de Montfort University in Leicester,
and she heads the Campaign Against Sex Robots or c
a s R. And she makes a number of arguments,
basically has a manifesto. Yeah, and so look, we should
clarify like like this appeared to me to start off
(24:56):
as a long academic paper which is, you know, well written,
but now it's like it's this whole web presence with
sort of action items to it. Um And she calls
basically for an organized approach against the development of sex
robots as a necessary response for humanity. And she says
the reason why is that sex robots, in her mind,
(25:18):
reflect human principles of dignity, mutuality, and freedom, and that
by creating these bots, it's a representation of violence, discrimination,
and coercion. So we are manifesting kind of like the
worst parts of ourselves in making these sex spots. And
she also argues that the development of sex spots further
(25:40):
sexually objectifies women and children. She says the vision for
sex spots is underscored by reference to the prostitute John Exchange,
which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of
the buyers of sex, while the sellers of sex are
not attributed subjectively and they're reduced to you know, a
thing and object like a robot. She argues that the
(26:02):
development of sex robots and the ideas to support their
production show the immense horrors still present in the world
of prostitution, which is built on the perceived inferiority of
women and children, and therefore justifies their use of sex objects.
Also that the development of sex robots will further reduce
human empathy and that can only be developed by an
experience of a mutual relationship. And that's a that one
(26:26):
ties in nicely to you and Joe's recent episodes on
animal empathy and the human Absolutely. Yeah. She goes on
to challenge the view that the development of adult and
child sex robot robots will have a positive benefit to
society but instead further reinforced power relations of inequality and violence.
Will get into what she's arguing about in a little bit, Yeah,
And then finally she says, you know, they take issue
(26:50):
with arguments that propose that sex robots could help reduce
sexual exploitation and violence toward prostituted persons. Uh, this is
pointing to all the evidence that shows how technology and
the sex trade co exists and reinforce each other, creating
more demands subsequently for human bodies. And we're gonna talk
about that a little bit too, especially in the case
(27:10):
of pedophilia. Now. Dr Kate Devlin, who's a researcher at
Goldsmith University of London UH their Department of Computing. She
took some issue with this in a September two thousand
sixteen interview with The Guardian. So she countered that that
this argument as a whole dismisses the fact that women,
not men, are quote more likely to purchase artificial non
(27:32):
human substitutes such as vibrators. Yeah. She also says that
the campaign against sex robots this is to distinguish this
is Kate Devlin talking against Kathleen Richardson UH. She says
that it rests on a parallel parallel that's drawn between
sex robots and female sex workers. And Devlin sees sex
(27:52):
robots as being potentially useful, especially if they're using machine
learning and bio feedback, in the sense that they can
quote provide adaptive, personal, fulfilling sexual experiences and in that
way they could be used for therapeutic reasons. She also
says sex look, sex is part of humanity's mental processes
(28:14):
and it's fundamental to our human conditions, so it's worth
considering how our bodily. Interactions like this make changes to
our brain and how that has bearing on our cognitive processes.
So there's a lot here that she's arguing that says like, yeah, like,
I understand your argument, Kathleen Richardson about you know, a
(28:36):
campaign against sexual robots. But there's some potential benefits here
too that you seem to be ignoring. Yeah, yeah, she
I think she makes a strong counter argument here, you know, saying, hey,
would a woman be disinterested in buying a human replica
or just a robotic sexual stimulations system because the the
market information would tend to say no, that women already
(28:58):
buy uh sexual technology, so why not the next generation
of sexual technology? Yeah? Absolutely, Now, indeed, there is this
problem that technology in general is often made by men
for men. Uh. And we can see examples of this
well beyond the scope of of sexual devices. The artificial heart,
(29:18):
for example, uh it's it's sizing has long best fit
the dimensions of an adult human males chest it it
wasn't until later that companies like SynCardia eventually rolled out
a size more suitable for a for adult females and children.
Another thing worth noting here, too is that newer forms
of sex toys are created specifically for sharing between couples,
(29:43):
so it's not necessarily male oriented. But here's the thing.
They're either marketed to couples or two men, not directly
to women, even though, as Devlin says, women are the
ones primarily using sex toys. So sex technology is definitely
being created from a dominant hoosexual male perspective here. And
even if sex spots aren't conscious, they're externally made to
(30:07):
look like people, right uh, specifically women who are owned
by heterosexual men. So maybe if we thought broader about
our sex spots, we could alleviate these long running human
problems the same way I like to think of it,
looking back to the vibrator and how it basically changed completely,
like the way that medicine was approaching things like hysteria. Yeah,
(30:30):
I mean it comes down to the fact that you
can you can go out to buy a sex um
toy and you can get something, Yes, it definitely looks
like a replica of a human body part, but you
can also get things that can easily be mistaken for
other household gadgets totally um. For instance, I U I
travel with an aero press, which is a coffee making device.
But it is a cylindrical gadget. It's like a like
(30:55):
a a French press that like is uh compartmentalized. Yeah,
it's basically like a plastic cylinder with a plunger that
goes in it and to press the coffee out the
other side. And I travel with it because it's a
great way to ensure good coffee on the go. But
it inevitably it looks like something like it could be
some sort of sexual and it's getting scanned through t s. A. Yeah,
(31:16):
our dogs have these toys called go Nuts. The company
is called go Nuts, uh, and they make these like
really sturdy rubbery dog chew toys. Because I've got two
pit bull mixes, so they just like destroy anything I
give them. And one of them is like a long
shaft like looking thing and the other one looks like
(31:38):
a doughnut. And the day that they got sent to
my wife's office, you know, she she works for a
big company security screens all the mail that goes through,
and she's just laughing. She's like, can you imagine with
the security people downstairs think as this stuff is going
through their X ray machine. The good news here, though,
is that this all means plausible deniability for any actual
(31:58):
sex device that has some degree of of of design
ambiguity about it. Now, in two thousand and ten, there
was a Dutch paper that came out and this was
written for the United Nations, and it was titled gender
Dimensions of Product Design and that it highlighted a quote
male gender bias in mini tech products and as well
as just a disconnect from the view of gender as
(32:19):
a spectrum. Uh, and that observationally, um, all of this
is influenced by biology, culture, and situation. So even I
guess the idea here is that even if you get
beyond the fact that it's it's largely men designing technology
for men or men designing technology for women, there's also
not necessarily that nuanced an idea of what what constitutes
(32:43):
gender in the human reality. Yeah, and you know, male
thinking has dominated the development of TVs and GPS devices,
So can we really expect anything better from physical and
conceptual design for sexual robotic systems? And then we've got
David Levy here, uh, and he I'm gonna let you
(33:03):
introduce this, but man, he wrote this really fascinating pieces.
It seems like he's written multiple pieces specifically about ethics
and robots. Yeah, this guy, this would be a good
place if you want to do a deeper dive into
some of these topics. That he's a British author, chess
master and CEO of Intelligent Toys Limited UH and he
wrote about much of these issues in the Ethics of
(33:24):
Robot Prostitutes from his UH that's featured in the book
Robot Ethics, published in two thousand eleven. And he argued
that sex spots only really become a problem when they're
bestowed with artificial consciousness, thus elevating them from mere artifact
to something more, something at least mimicking personhood. Yeah. So
the gist here of Levy's argument is that as long
(33:45):
as sex spots are artifacts without any artificial consciousness, there's
no ethical implications and having sex with them or using
them for prostitution. Now, if we go back, I would
imagine Dr Kathleen Richardson would take umbradge with that. But
he said, as you know, as long as there's no
artificial consciousness, we're okay. But if they do have a consciousness,
(34:06):
then that's when we get into illegal and ethical implications,
and not just for ourselves, but then we've got to
think about the robots. Do they get rights? Do they
have legal and ethical rights that are implied by their consciousness? Yeah,
this isn't This is a whole can of worms here
because on one hand, it gets into the whole question
of what is consciousness. We can't even define what it
(34:28):
is for humans, how do we define in robots? And
then it makes you ask questions about any and everything
where there's a potential like faking of consciousness, Like when
do I start have when I have to start becoming
concerned about MPC characters and video games, um, virtual individuals,
Like if you have if you have an MPC in
a video game that like it has a very realistic
(34:51):
betrayal to your your violence and you're you know, running
around gun toting whatever the behaviors in the video games.
Like at what point does it become kind of creepy?
That essentially I think the argument that West world tries
to make a season, right, Yeah, like insert Westworlds as
potential commentary on that question. One one more thought on this,
uh was reading an article Indian magazine and this is
(35:14):
a sex spot Slaves. Sociologist Lee Reich has this excellent quote,
but even if sex spots are not currently conscious, they
do have the external markings of personhood, and we are
programming them to be person alike. Indeed, we are programming
them to be like a specific type of person, the
type of woman who can be owned by a heterosexual man.
(35:37):
So now we've heard many of the arguments against sex spots,
when we've set up kind of where we're at with
the technology, let's take a quick break and when we
get back, we're gonna come back in on this and
we're gonna talk about the argument for sex spots and
how they could be beneficial to humanity. All Right, we're back,
(36:00):
So in this next little bit, we're going to talk
about the victimization reduction argument for sex spots, And just
a quick warning, we're going to briefly discuss pedophilia here,
So if you really don't want to hear that, you know,
skip ahead a little bit on your device. We're we're
gonna discuss it with decorum here. But it does play
a role in this discussion. So a point of contentions,
(36:24):
as referenced already, is the argument that a robotic sex
spot would absorb the violence and abuse that a human
would otherwise suffer, and this would apply to both well,
really to to all individuals male female, um or a
child or I've also seen the argument, uh for animals
as well. So if you could have a robot stand
in and absorb that abuse, like better a robot than
(36:46):
an actual human like that, that's a problematic argument. Yeah,
but that is an argument that some people make, right.
I don't think there are many people out there who
would who would argue with the statement that if a
robot could suffer something rather than a human that would
be preferable. Well, depending on whether or not it has consciousness. Yeah,
well then then we get into that whole can of worms.
(37:08):
But there's a as I say, it's it's a problematic argument,
but it's it's one worth discussing, especially as it relates
to people with pedophilic impulses um. There's a great deal
of work that has gone into this topic over the years,
and we could easily do a whole episode on it,
though it would be rather down or of an episode.
(37:28):
There's no known medical or psychiatric cure for pedophilia, and
our methods of dealing with such individuals as often crude.
But we do have men such as Shin Takachi who's
abuse a Japanese man profiled in the in the Atlantic
in two thousands sixteen. And this is a guy who
struggles with an attraction to children as well as the
(37:50):
knowledge the resolve that his attraction is just incompatible with reality.
And that's the ultimate tragedy here, right, is that these
are individuals who are born with this, this drive, this inclination,
and it's completely incompatible with our world. It is, it's
completely reprehensible. And some of these individuals realize this enter
(38:14):
and do not act on their impulses. So what um,
what this man, what Takagi is has been working on
is creating sex dolls look like children, shifting them out
around the world to individuals who claim to need them.
But because what are the other options. There's cognitive behavioral therapy,
(38:36):
there's chemical castration, but a two thousand seven meta analysis
from the Mayo Clinic found that no current method can
actually quote alter the pedophiles basic sexual orientation toward children. Right,
So you end up with this argument, which is sort
of like, if you have these child sex spots, is
that a safer outlet for pedophiles or the the the
(38:59):
sort of flip side to that is, is that going
to aggravate their sense of frustration so that they act
out on real human beings even more right, And there's
no evidence to show that his approach works, but it
is difficult to gauge because things I already mentioned. There's
a lot of research, but a lot of the research
is based on actual offenders, not people who managed to
(39:19):
stay off impulses. But what research there is tends to
imply that such a doll might have really a reinforcing effect. Now,
of course, there are several different categories for pedophiles, but
a University of Toronto forensic psychologists and sexologist Michael Setto
speculates that there might be two broader distinctions among pedophiles.
(39:39):
So for one group, a doll or robot might serve
to keep them from seeking out chop pornography or become
abusers themselves. For others, though, it just might aggravate their impulses. Yeah,
so this this is very problematic. Uh, And I think
to like I'm imagining you, the listener, are probably struggling
with one concept here that we're sort of it's sort
(40:01):
of like the unspoken thing in the room, right, which
is the idea that pedophilia is inherent, it's not it's natural,
and it's part of this person's you know, biology, and
not something that's learned. And uh, you know, either way, though,
the research shows that it is different extremely difficult or
(40:23):
if not impossible to cure in the individual. So so
what do you do. We're left without the technology of
the medical expertise to quote unquote fix someone like this.
Then does that mean that a robotic doll would have
a place? And I have to say, you know, like
as sort of creepy as it is to read about
(40:43):
two Kagi, at least seems to be taking his impulses
and doing something productive with them, right, at least he's
trying to like turn it around, uh, into something that
has a benefit I guess to society, or at least
reduces danger to society. Um. But when you, like you
read about in this Atlantic article his workshop. He's got
(41:06):
this mountain workshop that's up in the woods, and all
of his employees have to be former military, specifically because
of the kind of chemicals that he's using in order
to create like, um, like more realistic skin. Uh. And
we should talk about this ceremony. So apparently because they're Japanese. Uh,
there's the special ceremony that's sort of along the lines
(41:28):
of Shinto animism that's performed for the dolls, specifically at
a shrine when their owners don't want them anymore because
they think of them as having I don't know if
soul isn't the right word, but but that there is
some kind of essence to them that you don't just
take this thing and throw it in the trash. Yeah,
he says in the article quote it's a common belief
in Japan that dolls are mirrors, that dolls show their
(41:52):
owners true self. So, again, a problematic scenario to look at,
but one that that is core to both the arguments
for and against sex robots. Right, and then this leads
us right back to Dr Kate Devlin, who was, you know,
the person who originally argued against the case against sex robots. Yeah,
(42:13):
and this brings us into what I think is the
most the most fascinating area, uh, that we're going to
talk about here today, and that's the therapy angle. So
she argues that sex spots would essentially be sex toys
that benefit from machine learning and bio feedback. And she
also points out that despite all of our sci fi
visions of humanoid sex robots. There's no reason they these
(42:34):
things would need to have a human form or a
human face. Again, we've already as we've already said, a
great many sex toys do not even look like parts
of a human, much less a human being. Um she
She points out specifically that for female females, there is
I think it's called the rabbit is u is, a
vibrator device that does not look like a part of
(42:54):
the male or female anatomy. And then the flesh light,
which we already mentioned. There apparently some models that do
look like replicas of human of human anatomy, but others
that don't, others that have more fantastic or abstract appearances.
So you could put these together and you could easily
imagine a sexual robot that either does not look like
(43:15):
a gendered human or even like maybe looks like a
spider or something. Yeah. Yeah, Like it could could sort
of be anything that could be like a rumba. Yeah,
rumba might be something. I don't know why I was
going this way, but like somebody might particularly want like
a kind of whale, like like a smallish whale. Yeah,
and I mean the thing is we can say, oh,
(43:36):
that's repellant. Who would want to have, you know, sexual
contact with an inhuman machine. But again, we are already
doing it. The market research shows that that individuals have
been using non human sexual machines for some time now,
so it's not out of keeping with human behavior. And
so there's a lot of applications here that Devil is saying, right, like,
(43:59):
we could use this to treat a lot of different
ailments that humans are suffering from. That's right. So there's
the treatment of sex offenders, which we've already touched on,
UH couples therapy, which I think is interesting. You made
a point earlier about so many of the current devices
are made for for a couple to UH to use together,
sometimes across vast distances. Then this is a big one,
(44:22):
the restoration of sexual confidence following trauma and or injury. Now,
this is a topic we touched on some in our
our episode that we did where we interviewed Mary Roach
about about the surgical repair of genitalia, specifically soldiers who
have suffered you know, grievous wounds to that area of
the academy. That's an episode we should definitely put in
(44:43):
the links on the Landing page because it's related. Yeah,
and uh and and indeed, I believe Walter Reed Hospital
came up in that episode as well. They have a
sexual health and intimacy service that focuses on education and therapy.
And there's a great Atlantic article about this from last
year that folk this is on the broader topic. But
but the author points out that the department in question
(45:04):
features quote de facto sex classes that include sex toys
aimed at stimulating different parts of the body. So the
main aim here is individuals who have experienced genital or
spinal cord injuries. Uh, they may have lost their ability
to have an orgasm themselves, and they have to adapt
to their new bodies and a new approach to physical
intimacy with with their spouse or with you know, with
(45:28):
with new relationships in their lives. Now, in this case,
we're talking specifically about veterans who are maybe lost a
limb or something like that, or or but there's there's
some cases where sex therapy like this is needed for
other people as well. Yeah, and indeed, also memory impairing
injuries and just basic trauma that stems from combat can
(45:49):
disrupt an individual sex lift. So you need not even
have a physical injury for this kind of therapy to
be necessary. And so the question is could a sex
robot aid in this kind of of work as well. Now,
Delvin also hits on general sex therapy and says that,
you know, VR therapy is already a big deal. And
she also mentions that VR therapy is already already a
(46:12):
thing and it is only going to become more of
a of a big deal in the future. And uh.
And then there's this idea of the use of of
sex spots to potentially allow individuals to explore gender or
sexual orientation or just sexuality um as a whole. And
in this the role of the sex spot would very
closely mimic the role of a sex surrogate. So this
(46:34):
is a thing that already exists. Uh. And you can
look this up. Uh, this is not prostitution. Surrogates are
members of the International Professional Surrogates Association and they only
work with people who have been referred to them by psychotherapist.
According to an interview in the two thousand three Salon article,
I was a middle aged version Los Angeles surrogate partner
(46:57):
Dr Vina Blanchard. Uh. He works generally works with older virgins.
They account for her practice. And these patients are, you know,
are men who have encountered limiting obstacles to experiencing sex.
They didn't develop the interpersonal skills necessary, etcetera. And the
exact reasons, you know, very quite a bit, encompassing everything
(47:17):
from extreme shyness to history of sexual abuse. They're often
played by feelings of shame and that they need someone
to help them break through it all. All right, So
I've got a personal story here that I can absolutely
see applications. Okay, uh, I had a nightmarish temp job
(47:39):
in my early twenties. I don't think I've told you
about this before. Um So, I was tempting in my
early twenties. This was when I was living in Boston,
and one of my assignments was to work for a
week for a psychotherapist whose job it was to basically
review and interview sex offenders and decide whether or not
(48:00):
they should be released from prison into the general population,
like whether or not their sentence was was up, they
had been quote unquote reformed, and the job that was
assigned to me was to This was a while ago.
I literally listened to Cassette tapes that they would record
of their sessions and transcribe everything. And so I did
(48:22):
this for a week straight in the middle of a
very cold winter in Boston. It's a long community. It
was in Quincy, and uh wow, like it was just
like getting like this toxic sludge dumped into your head,
you know. And I remember that last day, like knowing
it was over, just standing there at the end of
the day, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up
(48:43):
to take me to the train and just crying. Uh.
And so I think about you know, not not just
virgins or or maybe pedophiles or even veterans who need
some help with you know, these potentially debilitating sexual I
don't know issues that they're having, but but all of
this stuff is it's very real in my head based
(49:06):
on that one week experience. Yeah, yeah, I mean that
sounds like it definitely definitely, I mean I had an
impact on your your psyche to to have to absorb
all that. Yeah, yeah, but it Yeah, I can see
that the definitely applications uh here as well. Now surrogates,
as we've been talking about, their their intimacy coaches and therapists,
(49:27):
and they don't always have sex with clients. So there
is much about imparting relationship skills, providing human combassion, and
also just creating an open, honest line of communication, breaking
through in the case of especially in the case of
the virgins, breaking through the shame. And I can see
where this could this could definitely be an area for
(49:49):
sex robots in the future. You know, So sexual abuse
or any kind of sort of sexual dysfunction as we
see it, especially in sort of psychoanalytical terms, right are
it seems to be something that sort of breeds a
vicious cycle. Uh, you know, like the people who are
(50:10):
hurt or tend to then go on to hurt others.
So in this instance, like I'm I'm seeing like the surrogates,
you wouldn't want to be in that situation. But the
sex robots, again, as long as they're not artificially conscious,
they could serve a role to sort of put a
halt to that vicious circle. Yeah. Yeah. And and also
(50:32):
just the idea you think about this idea that there
are people out there who have trouble developing relationships, that
they don't have the social tools perhaps or there there's
some sort of trauma holding them back from having the
kind of interpersonal relationships that can lead to sexual contact
when they are their individual Should they should they just
live out their lives without sexual contact? Are they aren't?
(50:54):
Do they have like on some level, do they have
a right to have sex with a robotic device or
machine or robotic humanoid if such a thing can be
made available within an ethical framework that works well. And
let's remember, let's go back to what we said earlier,
which is that sexuality and sex are part of the
human condition and our brains are absolutely affected by them.
(51:19):
So why not have this technology that would allow those
people to experience the human condition like the rest of us. Yeah,
and this this all forces me to sort of try
to imagine this future sex spot. Like on one hand,
imagine like a purely the therapeutic one. So you have
to go to a therapist, to human therapist to be
(51:40):
you know, prescribed your sex spot and they come to
you and it's not about just simply fulfilling some physical
need or even an emotional need, but allowing a transformation,
like getting you to a point to where you are
comfortable with your own sexuality, comfortable comfortable with just human
sexuality in general, that you are more capable of of
(52:03):
healthy human sexual relationships and on the other hand, like
a purely hedonistic level, a mechanical room. But we're Spider
that just when when called, you know, crawls out of
a box in your closet and does what needs to
be done and sleep at night. Right, that's very transmetropolitan.
I'm imagining Spider Jerusalem has something like that in his closet. Yeah, yeah,
(52:24):
but not too far from you know, other topics that
we've talked about in the past, especially when you add
in sort of like a bioengineering into the mix. Yeah, alright,
so there you have it. Sex spots again, something we
just see time and time again in sci fi. That's
really become part of our pop culture. But I don't
think most of us take time to really break it
(52:46):
down and think about the components, think about the pros
and the cons. Certainly some of these I thought about before,
but other aspects, especially the whole therapeutic aspect, I've never
really given any consideration. I think with the surge of
Westworld last year, like this kind of thing has become
maybe water cooler talk, but not to the extent of
like the research that we did here really looking at
(53:08):
like the pros and cons and how it's beneficial or
how the theory, the philosophical approach to it, of how
it could potentially sort of show the worst of humanity
as well. That's the part I think that like West
World's really honing in on. But I don't know, like
has West World? I can't really remember, and I don't
think this is spoilers, but like, was there an instance
of somebody who visited the park who needed that kind
(53:30):
of therapeutic help and going to one of the brothels.
I feel like it might have come up, just you know,
in the margins, but I don't remember it being a
major character of all because because ultimately, like how how
dramatic is that? Right? Right? You want? You wanted to
explore the cases of of abuse or the cases of love,
(53:52):
because that those are the two big trends we see.
Either someone either is abusive to a feminine sexual robot
or they fall in love with it. Uh, there's not
a lot of in Obviously, there's a lot more space
in the human condition for sexual contact to take place
as a broader spectrum, so it seems like it should
be present as well in our consideration of sex spots.
(54:14):
Maybe that's something Season two will get into. I mean,
I'm not sure. All right, Well, everyone listening to this
episode is a human being, so I'm sure everyone has
thoughts on the current technology, uh where we're headed with it,
as well as all the various fantastic and and maybe
even more hard boiled sci fi visions of what sex
(54:35):
spots might consist of. Yeah, and we hope we didn't,
you know, disturb you too much with getting into some
graphic territory here, but this seemed like a topic that
was worth really diving into and relevant to not only
popular culture but modern technology. All right, Now, as we
close out here, we've been we we like to highlight
various nonprofits and and and helpful organizations. Given the some
(54:57):
of the subject matter we've talked about here, we just
wanted to mention RAIN. That's r ai N in there,
the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. You can find
them online, but you can also call them seven on
your phone at one eight hundred six five six hope
or hundred six five six four six seven three. And
also we're still celebrating Tripod month here at how stuff works.
(55:20):
If you're not familiar with what that is, podcasts around
the world are sharing one another's feeds, and the way
that they're doing that is on social media, letting everybody
know what they're listening to using the hashtag tripod that's
t r y pod uh. And the one that I'd
like to include here is I just got back from
south By Southwest and I saw a couple of live
performances of the podcast Recode Decode uh, and they did
(55:45):
some pretty cool stuff that I think if you're a
fan of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you might be
interested in. Yeah, and hey, you get on social media
everyone out there and use the the hashtag tripod with
a Y to just list some of your favorite podcast
I'm not saying list us you can you want, but
also listened the other things that you listen to, the
other shows that get you through the day. We've had
a couple of people who have who've done some really
(56:06):
nice hashtag tripods for us Specifically, I've seen some really
cool stuff on Instagram where they take pictures of oh,
they listen to us. Yeah, that's a that's a clever idea.
All right. In the meantime, head on over to stuff
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(56:30):
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(56:56):
Bla Busy Presents or footbot prop
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
We are headed vault. Word. What's in the vault today? Well,
this time the vault is full of sex spots. Joe. Yeah.
So this is an episode that I recorded with Christian
back in UHR. And this one was a really interesting
(00:26):
to want to do. This is one that we we've
actually run into cases where someone has suggested it and
then we get to point back and say, ah, actually,
here it is. Here's everything you probably want to know
and a few things you don't want to know about
the idea of robots that are being created, that are
being conceived and maybe created in the future. Uh that
(00:47):
are that are created for human sexual reasons. And I
mean and it really it runs the gamut from from
ideas that are rather exploitive than kind of disturbing to
things that actually sound like they will have a you know,
positive effect on society, the idea of therapeutic robots. So
(01:08):
anyway we we present it to you, let you dive in,
and then you can let us know how you feel
about these ideas. All right, Well, without any further Ado.
Let's get into this vault episode. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
(01:33):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger. So hey,
if this is an episode that you are listening to,
maybe with your kids, or maybe you're concerned about the
company that you're listening to it in, we should just
let you know up front. This is gonna be a
little bit of a more graphic episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. Be uh, based on the title. You
(01:53):
probably know that already, but we just wanted to give
you a heads up because we know that a lot
of families right into us and say, hey, I really
like listening to the show. I listened to it on
the way to school in the morning with my daughter. Um,
this might not be the episode to do that. Yeah,
you might give this one a skip in that case.
Now that being said, we're we're gonna tackle the topic
of sex spots in this episode, and we are, as usual,
(02:16):
we're going to do our best to to demystify the
topic of bit we're gonna explore. Yes, we're gonna talk
about some of the in many cases trashier um examples
of this show up in our science fiction. We're going
to talk about some definite opposition to the idea of
sex spots, but we're also going to explore some territory
that I was really fascinated with that where where we
(02:36):
see a more positive vision of what a sex spot
or sexual interaction between humans and machines might consist, of
visions of this that are beneficial, even therapeutic. Yeah, exactly.
I think that's the real hook here, and the thing
that I didn't know a lot about going into the research,
which is that there are a lot of uh of
(02:58):
these robots being bill and there's a lot of research
going into their construction that's healing basically for human beings
in a variety of ways. And we'll get into that now.
Before we get into the science, we should just take
a few moments to talk about some of the examples
that we've seen, and there are many different examples of
sex spots in science fiction. I mean, whenever we start
(03:20):
thinking about artificial humans, and certainly we've dreamed about artificial
humans since ancient times, they factored into our many of
our myth cycles. We we inherently deal with our anxiety
about technology and our anxiety about human nature in dreaming
up these various examples. So a few that come to mind.
(03:41):
There's a wonderful novel titled The Wind Up Girl. Uh.
And this was by Paulo Baca Galupi. And this is
this coming concerned you know, sort of your sort of
your typical sex bot scenario. We have a pleasure body
of some kind, a feminine robot that is made for
male pleasure, that escapes, goes rogue, you know, has a
(04:03):
has a struggle for independence. It's a really good book. Uh,
but it does explore kind of a classic trope here
that is a very common trope in sci fi now
now that I think about it, and especially looking at
a lot of our examples here with things that are
really kind of popular right now, like Humans or Westworld, right,
like the other shows that are all exploring that same idea. Yeah,
(04:24):
both great shows. And you can and it's obvious why
this is such a powerful trope because you get to
explore not only are concerns about technology and the future
of technology, but also about about what it means to
be to be female in today's world. And and uh
and in various feminine issues that you can explore through this. Uh,
this fantastic vision. Yeah. The other recent one that really
(04:46):
gripped a lot of people's attention. I thought it was
maybe the best movie that came out that year was
XM Gonna Yes. Alex Garland's XM Gonna Wow. Uh definitely
Uh talked about the issues surrounding sex, but was more
about I guess the like emotional availability of AI. And
this is something that like we've actually off air been
(05:07):
kind of talking about, like how it relates to this
topic is um For instance, that Spike Jones movie Her,
which I haven't seen but I don't think, actually features
a robot in it, but it's sort of the same idea.
It's like, can an artificial intelligence convince you that it's
real enough that you have you're an emotionally engaging relationship
(05:29):
with it. Yeah, this is, of course, is the whole
topic undo itself, Like to what degree we in view
a non living thing with life, even if it's not
a robot, even if it is a doll or a
toy painting. I mean, we have this fabulous ability to
anthropomorphize just about anything, to have it lead you put
a smiley face on something and it will create we
(05:51):
will instantly have this smidgeon at least a smidgeon of
investment in that thing as a person. Well, and that
goes way back. You've got notes here to the Greek
myth of Hefestus, right, or as I usually call him, Vulcan,
because I think that's Vulcan's what the Roman version of that. Yeah,
you have Vulcans, the Roman version and uh yeah, and
if you've ever rolled through Birmingham, Alabama, they have a
(06:14):
big statue of Vulcan. Wait, is that right? That's true? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
why because it was like a steel working town. Okay, so,
uh so Vulcan plays a role in in my personal
history as well. But yeah, this in myth, he created
a series of life sized golden maids, among various other models.
So he was kind of a mad scientist of Greek
(06:37):
and Roman myth. But you can see they're like going
that far back that we human beings were thinking about
in our culture and our storytelling, like how we were
going to try to replicate the human experience in machines
or in I believe the terminology that was used referring
to Vulcan and Hefestus was biotechnique. Yeah, yeah, that's right,
(06:59):
and there's a wonderful Ian magazine, aren't on that. I'll
try to include a link to that and some of
the other articles who were mentioning here in the landing
page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot Com. Also, obviously many people out there probably thinking
of Darryl Hannah's character Priss from Blade Runner, which is
referred to as a basic pleasure model. Although so it's funny.
I was reading an Ionine article yesterday that's all about
(07:21):
what what we're talking about right now, the fictionalized versions
of sex spots. There's a lot of argumentation in the
commentary about whether Priss counted because replicants are technically organic individuals.
I think she counts. Yeah, yeah, there there's that whole
Once you get into the whole android replicant thing, it
gets a little, uh, a little hazy. Now, anybody out
(07:41):
there is a fan of Rick and Morty, there was
an episode titled Raising gas Orpazorp that included a sex
spot that I haven't seen that one. Yeah, that that
Morty ends up acquiring and has a brief addiction to.
So we might come back to that vision of a
sex spot here in the future. But that kind of
leads us into some of the more exploited visions. I
guess you can say, the sort of heavy metal visions
(08:04):
of the sex spot. Um, what what was the name
of the artist that you you sent me yesterday? There's
this guy. So heavy Metal Magazine is what we're referring to,
which is, if you're unfamiliar with it, is an American
magazine that specializes in comics that are sort of like
R rated fantasy sci fi comics. Uh. And the cover
(08:26):
art is usually pretty salacious. And Robert found this one
artist who has done quite a number of covers for
them that specializes in sexualized female robots. Oh yeah, this
would be, of course, be Japanese artist Hajjimie Sori Yama. Okay, yeah,
and this is this is one of the Remember when
I first got online really the first year of college,
(08:48):
last year of high school, I ended up introducing myself
to a number of fantasy artists that that I was
instantly taken with. And uh and I remember encountering this
guy's work and it's it's I catch ing, but it's
all of like sexy robot pinop dolls, like that's his
his thing, and that's certainly a vision of the sex spot,
the fimbot that you know, whatever you want to call them,
(09:09):
whatever they're calling your particular uh sci fi property that
we see time and time again. Um, like a property
that I think back to is nineteen eight seven's Cherry
two thousand starring Melanie Griffith. I have never seen that,
and I you know, I've always kind of heard about
it on the fringe of things, but yeah, it really
hit my radar doing the research for this episode. Yeah,
it's it's definitely one that falls more into the you know,
(09:31):
exactly what you'd expect from a nineteen eighties film, so
it has a sex about it. I suppose like she
can't complain too much about her daughter doing these fifties
shades of gray movies. Then if like daughter can just
be like, well you were in Cherry two thousand, Yes,
but she was not Cherry two thousand, Oh she was.
She was just she's like a human bounty hunt. Okay,
I didn't know that, all right, Um, you know what
is not on the list that it just like popped
(09:52):
into my head. I can't believe we forgot about this.
The Stepford Wives Yeah, the Stepford Wives a big one
that and it ties in directly with some of the
fears and eggs ideas they were going to discuss here,
because it's men making robot women to be their perfect wives. Yeah. Uh,
there's Jude Law as Jigglo Joe in the movie AI. Uh,
(10:12):
one of the rare examples of a male sex spot
in popular culture. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they made
several sex spots, including one of Buffy for Spike, which
really there's some really dicey sexual relationship stuff that goes
on in that show towards the end of the later seasons,
(10:33):
and that's one of them. Um. And then the comics, Uh,
there's this comic called Autumn Lends that's coming out right
now that I really enjoy. It's by Kurt Busick and
Benjamin Dewey and Uh. In the second arc, the characters
encounter these statue esque naked robot women who once served
this like long forgotten civilization as sex slaves, and when
(10:54):
one of the characters tries to force himself upon them,
they rebel and it's it's really it's a really interesting
take on this whole thing that we're gonna be talking
about today, but um, I highly recommended if you're into
comics check that out. So obviously, some of these visions
of the sex spot are are more fantastic than others,
and some are more serious than others in their commentary.
But ultimately it's all sort of circling around our our
(11:17):
legitimate concerns about ourselves and technology. So what what are
we afraid of? What? What indeed are we very right
to be concerned about? Uh? You know, we see this
continuing trope of the human abuse of robots mirroring our
own abuse of each other. If we create robots in
our image, then are we destined to exploit them, to
abuse them, and even further objectify and to humanize each
(11:39):
other based on this model? And I also can't help
but feel that female sex spots and fiction especially tend
to serve, as you know, as commentaries on product femininity.
Uh the the all too frequent portrayal of human females
as mere sex objects, devoid of nuanced personality or identity.
And we didn't plan it out this way, but actually
(12:00):
so coming out this week along with this episode, we're
doing an episode on the science of ovulation and how
that plays into marketing femininity. Uh and and so it's
it's interesting to do these two episodes side by side
and sort of see the parallels. Yeah, there's always this
weird synchronicity between the episodes, it seems. So why don't
(12:22):
we get into the current state of you know what.
Some of you out there are probably like, well, wait, what,
Like there's all these pop culture versions that you just mentioned,
but where are these sexpots you speak of now? Right? UM,
I would just first like to very quickly go over
a short history of sex toys in terms of you
(12:44):
know where we're at with that. These are tens of
thousands of years old. You know, most people don't know that.
They probably think it's relatively recent invention. The oldest dildough
is more than twenty thousand years old. Vibrators began as
medical devices that midwives and physicians use to treat illnesses
such as hysteria through what they referred to as pelvic
(13:04):
massage or manual stimulation. The first one of these was
introduced in seventeen thirty four. That's that goes far back. Uh.
And it wasn't into the late eighteen hundreds when powered
vibrators were available to doctors, and then by they were
available directly to consumers. And then you know, nowadays people
think about computer driven sex toys. That goes back to
(13:27):
the mid nineteen seventies. Yes, I mean, certainly, sexuality is
always a huge aspect of human behavior, even if we
want to push it to the background. So it has
a tendency to be at the forefront of any technological
advancement or any kind of new enterprise. I think it's
just yeah, worth like reminding ourselves, like, hey, this isn't new.
(13:48):
This has been around for a long time. What we're
discussing here is really just like the latest iteration of
this and what does that say about us? Yeah, and
it's not a situation where suddenly sexually minded individuals are
at the forefront, uh, you know, pushing and meddling with
the technology. They've always been there. Uh So, just to
(14:08):
give a brief idea of the future so that we
can we can backtrack and discuss the present. There was
an interesting Pew Research Center paper that came out in
two thousand fourteen titled Digital Life in AI Robotics in
the Future of Jobs. Now. For the most part, this
article did not go into the use of sexual robots.
(14:29):
But there is one part where this guy by the
name of Stow Boyd, whose lead researcher for Giga o
M Research futurists. He predicted quote Pizzas will not be
delivered by teenagers hoping for a tip. Food will be
raised by robotic vehicles, even in small plot urban farms.
That will become the norm since so many people will
have lost their jobs to bots. Your X rays will
(14:51):
be reviewed by a battery of Watson Grade A eyes,
and humans will only be pulled in when the machines disagree.
Robotics sex partners will be commonplace. Although the source of
scorn and division the way that critics today bemoans selfies
as an indicator of all that's wrong with the world.
So I think that's an interesting take on it. I
definitely agree with him that on the scorn and division,
(15:15):
and that is going to be a you know, really
the big divide that we're going to speak about today
in terms of what's going on with this technology. I
don't I don't see it as being analogous to selfies,
though I think it's a little more extreme than that. Yeah,
I think time and time again we have to come
back to examples of what the what the current technology is.
(15:36):
So today we have a number of different sexual devices,
sexual toys of your world that are on the market,
and many of them are very high selling. That being said,
sex toys continue and perhaps will always be, uh that
the punchline of many a jail. Yeah right, exactly. Yeah,
we were talking about this earlier that it's like, uh,
you know, this is the stuff of like late night
(15:57):
talk show hosts, like making a throwaway Joe here there.
It's something everybody can kind of relate to and laugh
at and laugh at themselves about. Right, And then at
the same time, many of the people who are laughing
and some that are not laughing are still going to
perhaps go online and order one of these devices for
their personal use. Yeah. So we're a far cry, though,
from having a robotic humanoid body that that moves like
(16:19):
we do, but roboticists continue to make strides in this area.
So everyone's seeing videos of the various of Boston Dynamics robots,
you know, and they're often kind of fearsome. They look
like mechanical jumping horses. I gets. So we should probably
clarify what this is. Maybe not everybody out there is
familiar with this. So this is what the last year
and a half Boston Dynamics is like continually releasing these
(16:39):
kind of like press release videos of these robots that
they're working on that basically look like robot pack mules. Yeah,
and that's kind of the cell, right that there robotic
pack mules that can that would have a military application,
that can go over diverse terraine. So we can look
to those and obviously these are not sexy, these are
not these are not devices where you say, hey, that's
(17:00):
the future of sexual robotics right there, but they do
demonstrate the strides that we're making and creating robots that
can move in reality, that can that can that can
actually interact with the world physically and any of There
are other areas where the technology continues to impress, So
we know robot assisted surgery VR, haptic feedback, and there
(17:24):
is this, uh, this field of that's sometimes referred to
as tele del donis uh where they're utilizing all this
technology for more advanced sexual devices and sex toys. This
is basically across long distances right right. Like one example
of this is uh uh Frixtion, I believe is the
name of how you pronounced the product, and they use
(17:46):
haptic sensors and robotic accessories to enable remote control sex. Okay,
so let's take a quick break and when we get back,
now that we've covered sort of, you know, up to
the current state of affairs with sex spots, we're going
to talk about the off the shelf on the market
robot Roxy. Alright, we're back. So yeah, let's talk about
(18:12):
Roxy a little bit. Roxy is I think a it's
an important example to hit, but it's also such a
uh problematic example because it it represents some of the
more notorious aspects of sexual robot. So we learned about
Roxy from Eon magazine, which if if you're a long
time listener, you know that we read quite a bit
(18:33):
of it. Uh. It's a robot companion. Uh. It doesn't
quite produce the Uncanny Valley effect, you know, unlike um,
those actroids that you sometimes see that are created in
like Japanese commercials or something like that. But they come
Roxy comes in a variety of models, and some of
them actually have personalities. So there's a little bit of
(18:54):
programming that goes into this. Uh. It includes the regular Roxy.
There is also mature Martha Young Yoko and Frigid Farrah.
And that's where I got a little I got a
little creeped out personally, because the idea of frigid fare
is it's like she plays hard to get, she's you know,
not necessarily interested in having sex with you. And that's
(19:18):
a little that's where there's some weird lines. I think, Yeah,
this this is, you know, an obvious example of something
will come back to the idea that you have NNE
creating female robots for a male audience, and they've got
very specific fetish very stereotypical betrayals and um and sort
of male approved models of what a female is, very
(19:40):
simplistic models. Yeah. Oh, and I should clarify to young
Yoko is not although we are going to talk about
pedophile sex spots. Young Yoko is supposed to be over
the age of eighteen personality wise. But basically this roxy
robot sounds kind of like Sirian the way that it
talks back to you. There urpist is to pride more
(20:01):
than sex. The idea is that they're your true companion
and you can talk to them before and after sex. Uh.
And and given that you've got all the personalities chosen here.
You know, what, what does this tell us about the
future proliferation of these sex spots? Uh? And here's where
it gets real weird. Aon says that the person who
(20:22):
created roxy it was originally created as the recreation of
a friend that was lost in nine eleven, and then
that developed into this consumer oriented sex spot. Well, and
then I've also read that that the technology behind Roxy
started out as a as an inquiry into creation of
a robot home care nurse. So now I'm wondering if
(20:46):
there's just like these different urban myths about Roxy. Well, now,
I I I wrote a little bit years ago where
I ended up touching on Roxy and uh, and I
believe the home care nurse thing is is legit. But
I guess it comes down to the evolution of an idea,
the evolution of of figuring out how to commercially apply
your technology. So what starts as an as an intention
(21:09):
to create a robotic nurse, uh, may end up going
through some changes until suddenly you're producing a sex doll. Well,
like you said, with all technological developments, that kind of
the pioneering end of it is sexual in nature. I mean,
look at the Internet. Yeah, exactly. Now we mentioned sex dolls.
Of course, sex dolls have been around for some time,
(21:29):
and it's been proven that individuals can at least find
some sort of detached pleasure or even an imaginative bond
with even just a non robotic semblance of a human.
I always think back to a wonderful BBC documentary titled
Guys and Dolls that came out. God, it must have
been this. I think it maybe ten years old. Now
you can find I think you can find most of
(21:51):
it on YouTube and other such websites. But they profiled
a handful of real doll owners. These are, of course
anatomically correct life size human replicants. So are they built
for the purpose of sexes. They're built with that purpose
exclusively in mind. But is this documentary explored the individuals
(22:13):
in their bond with these things ranged immensely so there
was there's like a there's one guy in it that's
hanging him up on hooks, and another that just seems
to obsessively collect him and has some stack like kindling
and his crawl space, and those are some examples that
you know, maybe hit the creep level of for a
lot of people. But then there's this one guy who
seems to have a largely, if not exclusively, emotional relationship
(22:38):
with his doll, and he's going through like separation, anxiety
over having he's having to move and he's having to
ship it, and so it's it. It doesn't. It does
a good job of just showing you, all right, yeah,
you can have something like a real doll, but then
the varying levels of engagement with it, the way people
anthropomorphize it is going to vary from person to person. Yeah, so,
(23:00):
I mean, I guess like if you want to step
back at it and look at it like a very
simple sense here and and pardon me if this is
a little vulgar, but uh, it sounds like we're somewhere
between that movie her I referred to earlier, where like
nobody is needed. It's just an emotional relationship with an
artificial consciousness and like a fleshlight, right, um, a fleshlight.
(23:22):
Just to explain, because this will come up again, is
a popular sex toy with a male market. Yeah, exactly,
um so, And that's kind of where we're going to
find criticism on both sides about this. Is like arguments
about why we shouldn't make sex spots and arguments about
why we should because there's this broad spectrum, right, um speaking,
(23:45):
which have you seen the movie Dead Girl before? I
have not. I'm familiar with it. I think is one
that would always show up on Netflix formula. Yeah, it's that.
I saw it on Netflix. It's not about sex spots,
but it's, um, it's related to this. I don't want
to give too much away, but a sense actually these
guys find a woman's dead body, but the body doesn't
rot at all, like she's inanimate, but she's not dead.
(24:09):
So it's a zombie film kind of yeah. Uh, and
it goes where you would expect it to go based
on what we're talking about. Anyways, it seemed related to
this alright. Well, on that note, let's get into the
case against sex spots. I feel like this is a
good place to start because it's going to tie in
more directly with some of those sci fi ideas that
we explored already. So you have one individual in particular
(24:33):
with it's worth mentioning here, and that's Dr Kathleen Richardson.
She's a robot ethicist at de Montfort University in Leicester,
and she heads the Campaign Against Sex Robots or c
a s R. And she makes a number of arguments,
basically has a manifesto. Yeah, and so look, we should
clarify like like this appeared to me to start off
(24:56):
as a long academic paper which is, you know, well written,
but now it's like it's this whole web presence with
sort of action items to it. Um And she calls
basically for an organized approach against the development of sex
robots as a necessary response for humanity. And she says
the reason why is that sex robots, in her mind,
(25:18):
reflect human principles of dignity, mutuality, and freedom, and that
by creating these bots, it's a representation of violence, discrimination,
and coercion. So we are manifesting kind of like the
worst parts of ourselves in making these sex spots. And
she also argues that the development of sex spots further
(25:40):
sexually objectifies women and children. She says the vision for
sex spots is underscored by reference to the prostitute John Exchange,
which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of
the buyers of sex, while the sellers of sex are
not attributed subjectively and they're reduced to you know, a
thing and object like a robot. She argues that the
(26:02):
development of sex robots and the ideas to support their
production show the immense horrors still present in the world
of prostitution, which is built on the perceived inferiority of
women and children, and therefore justifies their use of sex objects.
Also that the development of sex robots will further reduce
human empathy and that can only be developed by an
experience of a mutual relationship. And that's a that one
(26:26):
ties in nicely to you and Joe's recent episodes on
animal empathy and the human Absolutely. Yeah. She goes on
to challenge the view that the development of adult and
child sex robot robots will have a positive benefit to
society but instead further reinforced power relations of inequality and violence.
Will get into what she's arguing about in a little bit, Yeah,
And then finally she says, you know, they take issue
(26:50):
with arguments that propose that sex robots could help reduce
sexual exploitation and violence toward prostituted persons. Uh, this is
pointing to all the evidence that shows how technology and
the sex trade co exists and reinforce each other, creating
more demands subsequently for human bodies. And we're gonna talk
about that a little bit too, especially in the case
(27:10):
of pedophilia. Now. Dr Kate Devlin, who's a researcher at
Goldsmith University of London UH their Department of Computing. She
took some issue with this in a September two thousand
sixteen interview with The Guardian. So she countered that that
this argument as a whole dismisses the fact that women,
not men, are quote more likely to purchase artificial non
(27:32):
human substitutes such as vibrators. Yeah. She also says that
the campaign against sex robots this is to distinguish this
is Kate Devlin talking against Kathleen Richardson UH. She says
that it rests on a parallel parallel that's drawn between
sex robots and female sex workers. And Devlin sees sex
(27:52):
robots as being potentially useful, especially if they're using machine
learning and bio feedback, in the sense that they can
quote provide adaptive, personal, fulfilling sexual experiences and in that
way they could be used for therapeutic reasons. She also
says sex look, sex is part of humanity's mental processes
(28:14):
and it's fundamental to our human conditions, so it's worth
considering how our bodily. Interactions like this make changes to
our brain and how that has bearing on our cognitive processes.
So there's a lot here that she's arguing that says like, yeah, like,
I understand your argument, Kathleen Richardson about you know, a
(28:36):
campaign against sexual robots. But there's some potential benefits here
too that you seem to be ignoring. Yeah, yeah, she
I think she makes a strong counter argument here, you know, saying, hey,
would a woman be disinterested in buying a human replica
or just a robotic sexual stimulations system because the the
market information would tend to say no, that women already
(28:58):
buy uh sexual technology, so why not the next generation
of sexual technology? Yeah? Absolutely, Now, indeed, there is this
problem that technology in general is often made by men
for men. Uh. And we can see examples of this
well beyond the scope of of sexual devices. The artificial heart,
(29:18):
for example, uh it's it's sizing has long best fit
the dimensions of an adult human males chest it it
wasn't until later that companies like SynCardia eventually rolled out
a size more suitable for a for adult females and children.
Another thing worth noting here, too is that newer forms
of sex toys are created specifically for sharing between couples,
(29:43):
so it's not necessarily male oriented. But here's the thing.
They're either marketed to couples or two men, not directly
to women, even though, as Devlin says, women are the
ones primarily using sex toys. So sex technology is definitely
being created from a dominant hoosexual male perspective here. And
even if sex spots aren't conscious, they're externally made to
(30:07):
look like people, right uh, specifically women who are owned
by heterosexual men. So maybe if we thought broader about
our sex spots, we could alleviate these long running human
problems the same way I like to think of it,
looking back to the vibrator and how it basically changed completely,
like the way that medicine was approaching things like hysteria. Yeah,
(30:30):
I mean it comes down to the fact that you
can you can go out to buy a sex um
toy and you can get something, Yes, it definitely looks
like a replica of a human body part, but you
can also get things that can easily be mistaken for
other household gadgets totally um. For instance, I U I
travel with an aero press, which is a coffee making device.
But it is a cylindrical gadget. It's like a like
(30:55):
a a French press that like is uh compartmentalized. Yeah,
it's basically like a plastic cylinder with a plunger that
goes in it and to press the coffee out the
other side. And I travel with it because it's a
great way to ensure good coffee on the go. But
it inevitably it looks like something like it could be
some sort of sexual and it's getting scanned through t s. A. Yeah,
(31:16):
our dogs have these toys called go Nuts. The company
is called go Nuts, uh, and they make these like
really sturdy rubbery dog chew toys. Because I've got two
pit bull mixes, so they just like destroy anything I
give them. And one of them is like a long
shaft like looking thing and the other one looks like
(31:38):
a doughnut. And the day that they got sent to
my wife's office, you know, she she works for a
big company security screens all the mail that goes through,
and she's just laughing. She's like, can you imagine with
the security people downstairs think as this stuff is going
through their X ray machine. The good news here, though,
is that this all means plausible deniability for any actual
(31:58):
sex device that has some degree of of of design
ambiguity about it. Now, in two thousand and ten, there
was a Dutch paper that came out and this was
written for the United Nations, and it was titled gender
Dimensions of Product Design and that it highlighted a quote
male gender bias in mini tech products and as well
as just a disconnect from the view of gender as
(32:19):
a spectrum. Uh, and that observationally, um, all of this
is influenced by biology, culture, and situation. So even I
guess the idea here is that even if you get
beyond the fact that it's it's largely men designing technology
for men or men designing technology for women, there's also
not necessarily that nuanced an idea of what what constitutes
(32:43):
gender in the human reality. Yeah, and you know, male
thinking has dominated the development of TVs and GPS devices,
So can we really expect anything better from physical and
conceptual design for sexual robotic systems? And then we've got
David Levy here, uh, and he I'm gonna let you
(33:03):
introduce this, but man, he wrote this really fascinating pieces.
It seems like he's written multiple pieces specifically about ethics
and robots. Yeah, this guy, this would be a good
place if you want to do a deeper dive into
some of these topics. That he's a British author, chess
master and CEO of Intelligent Toys Limited UH and he
wrote about much of these issues in the Ethics of
(33:24):
Robot Prostitutes from his UH that's featured in the book
Robot Ethics, published in two thousand eleven. And he argued
that sex spots only really become a problem when they're
bestowed with artificial consciousness, thus elevating them from mere artifact
to something more, something at least mimicking personhood. Yeah. So
the gist here of Levy's argument is that as long
(33:45):
as sex spots are artifacts without any artificial consciousness, there's
no ethical implications and having sex with them or using
them for prostitution. Now, if we go back, I would
imagine Dr Kathleen Richardson would take umbradge with that. But
he said, as you know, as long as there's no
artificial consciousness, we're okay. But if they do have a consciousness,
(34:06):
then that's when we get into illegal and ethical implications,
and not just for ourselves, but then we've got to
think about the robots. Do they get rights? Do they
have legal and ethical rights that are implied by their consciousness? Yeah,
this isn't This is a whole can of worms here
because on one hand, it gets into the whole question
of what is consciousness. We can't even define what it
(34:28):
is for humans, how do we define in robots? And
then it makes you ask questions about any and everything
where there's a potential like faking of consciousness, Like when
do I start have when I have to start becoming
concerned about MPC characters and video games, um, virtual individuals,
Like if you have if you have an MPC in
a video game that like it has a very realistic
(34:51):
betrayal to your your violence and you're you know, running
around gun toting whatever the behaviors in the video games.
Like at what point does it become kind of creepy?
That essentially I think the argument that West world tries
to make a season, right, Yeah, like insert Westworlds as
potential commentary on that question. One one more thought on this,
uh was reading an article Indian magazine and this is
(35:14):
a sex spot Slaves. Sociologist Lee Reich has this excellent quote,
but even if sex spots are not currently conscious, they
do have the external markings of personhood, and we are
programming them to be person alike. Indeed, we are programming
them to be like a specific type of person, the
type of woman who can be owned by a heterosexual man.
(35:37):
So now we've heard many of the arguments against sex spots,
when we've set up kind of where we're at with
the technology, let's take a quick break and when we
get back, we're gonna come back in on this and
we're gonna talk about the argument for sex spots and
how they could be beneficial to humanity. All Right, we're back,
(36:00):
So in this next little bit, we're going to talk
about the victimization reduction argument for sex spots, And just
a quick warning, we're going to briefly discuss pedophilia here,
So if you really don't want to hear that, you know,
skip ahead a little bit on your device. We're we're
gonna discuss it with decorum here. But it does play
a role in this discussion. So a point of contentions,
(36:24):
as referenced already, is the argument that a robotic sex
spot would absorb the violence and abuse that a human
would otherwise suffer, and this would apply to both well,
really to to all individuals male female, um or a
child or I've also seen the argument, uh for animals
as well. So if you could have a robot stand
in and absorb that abuse, like better a robot than
(36:46):
an actual human like that, that's a problematic argument. Yeah,
but that is an argument that some people make, right.
I don't think there are many people out there who
would who would argue with the statement that if a
robot could suffer something rather than a human that would
be preferable. Well, depending on whether or not it has consciousness. Yeah,
well then then we get into that whole can of worms.
(37:08):
But there's a as I say, it's it's a problematic argument,
but it's it's one worth discussing, especially as it relates
to people with pedophilic impulses um. There's a great deal
of work that has gone into this topic over the years,
and we could easily do a whole episode on it,
though it would be rather down or of an episode.
(37:28):
There's no known medical or psychiatric cure for pedophilia, and
our methods of dealing with such individuals as often crude.
But we do have men such as Shin Takachi who's
abuse a Japanese man profiled in the in the Atlantic
in two thousands sixteen. And this is a guy who
struggles with an attraction to children as well as the
(37:50):
knowledge the resolve that his attraction is just incompatible with reality.
And that's the ultimate tragedy here, right, is that these
are individuals who are born with this, this drive, this inclination,
and it's completely incompatible with our world. It is, it's
completely reprehensible. And some of these individuals realize this enter
(38:14):
and do not act on their impulses. So what um,
what this man, what Takagi is has been working on
is creating sex dolls look like children, shifting them out
around the world to individuals who claim to need them.
But because what are the other options. There's cognitive behavioral therapy,
(38:36):
there's chemical castration, but a two thousand seven meta analysis
from the Mayo Clinic found that no current method can
actually quote alter the pedophiles basic sexual orientation toward children. Right,
So you end up with this argument, which is sort
of like, if you have these child sex spots, is
that a safer outlet for pedophiles or the the the
(38:59):
sort of flip side to that is, is that going
to aggravate their sense of frustration so that they act
out on real human beings even more right, And there's
no evidence to show that his approach works, but it
is difficult to gauge because things I already mentioned. There's
a lot of research, but a lot of the research
is based on actual offenders, not people who managed to
(39:19):
stay off impulses. But what research there is tends to
imply that such a doll might have really a reinforcing effect. Now,
of course, there are several different categories for pedophiles, but
a University of Toronto forensic psychologists and sexologist Michael Setto
speculates that there might be two broader distinctions among pedophiles.
(39:39):
So for one group, a doll or robot might serve
to keep them from seeking out chop pornography or become
abusers themselves. For others, though, it just might aggravate their impulses. Yeah,
so this this is very problematic. Uh, And I think
to like I'm imagining you, the listener, are probably struggling
with one concept here that we're sort of it's sort
(40:01):
of like the unspoken thing in the room, right, which
is the idea that pedophilia is inherent, it's not it's natural,
and it's part of this person's you know, biology, and
not something that's learned. And uh, you know, either way, though,
the research shows that it is different extremely difficult or
(40:23):
if not impossible to cure in the individual. So so
what do you do. We're left without the technology of
the medical expertise to quote unquote fix someone like this.
Then does that mean that a robotic doll would have
a place? And I have to say, you know, like
as sort of creepy as it is to read about
(40:43):
two Kagi, at least seems to be taking his impulses
and doing something productive with them, right, at least he's
trying to like turn it around, uh, into something that
has a benefit I guess to society, or at least
reduces danger to society. Um. But when you, like you
read about in this Atlantic article his workshop. He's got
(41:06):
this mountain workshop that's up in the woods, and all
of his employees have to be former military, specifically because
of the kind of chemicals that he's using in order
to create like, um, like more realistic skin. Uh. And
we should talk about this ceremony. So apparently because they're Japanese. Uh,
there's the special ceremony that's sort of along the lines
(41:28):
of Shinto animism that's performed for the dolls, specifically at
a shrine when their owners don't want them anymore because
they think of them as having I don't know if
soul isn't the right word, but but that there is
some kind of essence to them that you don't just
take this thing and throw it in the trash. Yeah,
he says in the article quote it's a common belief
in Japan that dolls are mirrors, that dolls show their
(41:52):
owners true self. So, again, a problematic scenario to look at,
but one that that is core to both the arguments
for and against sex robots. Right, and then this leads
us right back to Dr Kate Devlin, who was, you know,
the person who originally argued against the case against sex robots. Yeah,
(42:13):
and this brings us into what I think is the
most the most fascinating area, uh, that we're going to
talk about here today, and that's the therapy angle. So
she argues that sex spots would essentially be sex toys
that benefit from machine learning and bio feedback. And she
also points out that despite all of our sci fi
visions of humanoid sex robots. There's no reason they these
(42:34):
things would need to have a human form or a
human face. Again, we've already as we've already said, a
great many sex toys do not even look like parts
of a human, much less a human being. Um she
She points out specifically that for female females, there is
I think it's called the rabbit is u is, a
vibrator device that does not look like a part of
(42:54):
the male or female anatomy. And then the flesh light,
which we already mentioned. There apparently some models that do
look like replicas of human of human anatomy, but others
that don't, others that have more fantastic or abstract appearances.
So you could put these together and you could easily
imagine a sexual robot that either does not look like
(43:15):
a gendered human or even like maybe looks like a
spider or something. Yeah. Yeah, Like it could could sort
of be anything that could be like a rumba. Yeah,
rumba might be something. I don't know why I was
going this way, but like somebody might particularly want like
a kind of whale, like like a smallish whale. Yeah,
and I mean the thing is we can say, oh,
(43:36):
that's repellant. Who would want to have, you know, sexual
contact with an inhuman machine. But again, we are already
doing it. The market research shows that that individuals have
been using non human sexual machines for some time now,
so it's not out of keeping with human behavior. And
so there's a lot of applications here that Devil is saying, right, like,
(43:59):
we could use this to treat a lot of different
ailments that humans are suffering from. That's right. So there's
the treatment of sex offenders, which we've already touched on,
UH couples therapy, which I think is interesting. You made
a point earlier about so many of the current devices
are made for for a couple to UH to use together,
sometimes across vast distances. Then this is a big one,
(44:22):
the restoration of sexual confidence following trauma and or injury. Now,
this is a topic we touched on some in our
our episode that we did where we interviewed Mary Roach
about about the surgical repair of genitalia, specifically soldiers who
have suffered you know, grievous wounds to that area of
the academy. That's an episode we should definitely put in
(44:43):
the links on the Landing page because it's related. Yeah,
and uh and and indeed, I believe Walter Reed Hospital
came up in that episode as well. They have a
sexual health and intimacy service that focuses on education and therapy.
And there's a great Atlantic article about this from last
year that folk this is on the broader topic. But
but the author points out that the department in question
(45:04):
features quote de facto sex classes that include sex toys
aimed at stimulating different parts of the body. So the
main aim here is individuals who have experienced genital or
spinal cord injuries. Uh, they may have lost their ability
to have an orgasm themselves, and they have to adapt
to their new bodies and a new approach to physical
intimacy with with their spouse or with you know, with
(45:28):
with new relationships in their lives. Now, in this case,
we're talking specifically about veterans who are maybe lost a
limb or something like that, or or but there's there's
some cases where sex therapy like this is needed for
other people as well. Yeah, and indeed, also memory impairing
injuries and just basic trauma that stems from combat can
(45:49):
disrupt an individual sex lift. So you need not even
have a physical injury for this kind of therapy to
be necessary. And so the question is could a sex
robot aid in this kind of of work as well. Now,
Delvin also hits on general sex therapy and says that,
you know, VR therapy is already a big deal. And
she also mentions that VR therapy is already already a
(46:12):
thing and it is only going to become more of
a of a big deal in the future. And uh.
And then there's this idea of the use of of
sex spots to potentially allow individuals to explore gender or
sexual orientation or just sexuality um as a whole. And
in this the role of the sex spot would very
closely mimic the role of a sex surrogate. So this
(46:34):
is a thing that already exists. Uh. And you can
look this up. Uh, this is not prostitution. Surrogates are
members of the International Professional Surrogates Association and they only
work with people who have been referred to them by psychotherapist.
According to an interview in the two thousand three Salon article,
I was a middle aged version Los Angeles surrogate partner
(46:57):
Dr Vina Blanchard. Uh. He works generally works with older virgins.
They account for her practice. And these patients are, you know,
are men who have encountered limiting obstacles to experiencing sex.
They didn't develop the interpersonal skills necessary, etcetera. And the
exact reasons, you know, very quite a bit, encompassing everything
(47:17):
from extreme shyness to history of sexual abuse. They're often
played by feelings of shame and that they need someone
to help them break through it all. All right, So
I've got a personal story here that I can absolutely
see applications. Okay, uh, I had a nightmarish temp job
(47:39):
in my early twenties. I don't think I've told you
about this before. Um So, I was tempting in my
early twenties. This was when I was living in Boston,
and one of my assignments was to work for a
week for a psychotherapist whose job it was to basically
review and interview sex offenders and decide whether or not
(48:00):
they should be released from prison into the general population,
like whether or not their sentence was was up, they
had been quote unquote reformed, and the job that was
assigned to me was to This was a while ago.
I literally listened to Cassette tapes that they would record
of their sessions and transcribe everything. And so I did
(48:22):
this for a week straight in the middle of a
very cold winter in Boston. It's a long community. It
was in Quincy, and uh wow, like it was just
like getting like this toxic sludge dumped into your head,
you know. And I remember that last day, like knowing
it was over, just standing there at the end of
the day, waiting for the shuttle to pick me up
(48:43):
to take me to the train and just crying. Uh.
And so I think about you know, not not just
virgins or or maybe pedophiles or even veterans who need
some help with you know, these potentially debilitating sexual I
don't know issues that they're having, but but all of
this stuff is it's very real in my head based
(49:06):
on that one week experience. Yeah, yeah, I mean that
sounds like it definitely definitely, I mean I had an
impact on your your psyche to to have to absorb
all that. Yeah, yeah, but it Yeah, I can see
that the definitely applications uh here as well. Now surrogates,
as we've been talking about, their their intimacy coaches and therapists,
(49:27):
and they don't always have sex with clients. So there
is much about imparting relationship skills, providing human combassion, and
also just creating an open, honest line of communication, breaking
through in the case of especially in the case of
the virgins, breaking through the shame. And I can see
where this could this could definitely be an area for
(49:49):
sex robots in the future. You know, So sexual abuse
or any kind of sort of sexual dysfunction as we
see it, especially in sort of psychoanalytical terms, right are
it seems to be something that sort of breeds a
vicious cycle. Uh, you know, like the people who are
(50:10):
hurt or tend to then go on to hurt others.
So in this instance, like I'm I'm seeing like the surrogates,
you wouldn't want to be in that situation. But the
sex robots, again, as long as they're not artificially conscious,
they could serve a role to sort of put a
halt to that vicious circle. Yeah. Yeah. And and also
(50:32):
just the idea you think about this idea that there
are people out there who have trouble developing relationships, that
they don't have the social tools perhaps or there there's
some sort of trauma holding them back from having the
kind of interpersonal relationships that can lead to sexual contact
when they are their individual Should they should they just
live out their lives without sexual contact? Are they aren't?
(50:54):
Do they have like on some level, do they have
a right to have sex with a robotic device or
machine or robotic humanoid if such a thing can be
made available within an ethical framework that works well. And
let's remember, let's go back to what we said earlier,
which is that sexuality and sex are part of the
human condition and our brains are absolutely affected by them.
(51:19):
So why not have this technology that would allow those
people to experience the human condition like the rest of us. Yeah,
and this this all forces me to sort of try
to imagine this future sex spot. Like on one hand,
imagine like a purely the therapeutic one. So you have
to go to a therapist, to human therapist to be
(51:40):
you know, prescribed your sex spot and they come to
you and it's not about just simply fulfilling some physical
need or even an emotional need, but allowing a transformation,
like getting you to a point to where you are
comfortable with your own sexuality, comfortable comfortable with just human
sexuality in general, that you are more capable of of
(52:03):
healthy human sexual relationships and on the other hand, like
a purely hedonistic level, a mechanical room. But we're Spider
that just when when called, you know, crawls out of
a box in your closet and does what needs to
be done and sleep at night. Right, that's very transmetropolitan.
I'm imagining Spider Jerusalem has something like that in his closet. Yeah, yeah,
(52:24):
but not too far from you know, other topics that
we've talked about in the past, especially when you add
in sort of like a bioengineering into the mix. Yeah, alright,
so there you have it. Sex spots again, something we
just see time and time again in sci fi. That's
really become part of our pop culture. But I don't
think most of us take time to really break it
(52:46):
down and think about the components, think about the pros
and the cons. Certainly some of these I thought about before,
but other aspects, especially the whole therapeutic aspect, I've never
really given any consideration. I think with the surge of
Westworld last year, like this kind of thing has become
maybe water cooler talk, but not to the extent of
like the research that we did here really looking at
(53:08):
like the pros and cons and how it's beneficial or
how the theory, the philosophical approach to it, of how
it could potentially sort of show the worst of humanity
as well. That's the part I think that like West
World's really honing in on. But I don't know, like
has West World? I can't really remember, and I don't
think this is spoilers, but like, was there an instance
of somebody who visited the park who needed that kind
(53:30):
of therapeutic help and going to one of the brothels.
I feel like it might have come up, just you know,
in the margins, but I don't remember it being a
major character of all because because ultimately, like how how
dramatic is that? Right? Right? You want? You wanted to
explore the cases of of abuse or the cases of love,
(53:52):
because that those are the two big trends we see.
Either someone either is abusive to a feminine sexual robot
or they fall in love with it. Uh, there's not
a lot of in Obviously, there's a lot more space
in the human condition for sexual contact to take place
as a broader spectrum, so it seems like it should
be present as well in our consideration of sex spots.
(54:14):
Maybe that's something Season two will get into. I mean,
I'm not sure. All right, Well, everyone listening to this
episode is a human being, so I'm sure everyone has
thoughts on the current technology, uh where we're headed with it,
as well as all the various fantastic and and maybe
even more hard boiled sci fi visions of what sex
(54:35):
spots might consist of. Yeah, and we hope we didn't,
you know, disturb you too much with getting into some
graphic territory here, but this seemed like a topic that
was worth really diving into and relevant to not only
popular culture but modern technology. All right, Now, as we
close out here, we've been we we like to highlight
various nonprofits and and and helpful organizations. Given the some
(54:57):
of the subject matter we've talked about here, we just
wanted to mention RAIN. That's r ai N in there,
the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. You can find
them online, but you can also call them seven on
your phone at one eight hundred six five six hope
or hundred six five six four six seven three. And
also we're still celebrating Tripod month here at how stuff works.
(55:20):
If you're not familiar with what that is, podcasts around
the world are sharing one another's feeds, and the way
that they're doing that is on social media, letting everybody
know what they're listening to using the hashtag tripod that's
t r y pod uh. And the one that I'd
like to include here is I just got back from
south By Southwest and I saw a couple of live
performances of the podcast Recode Decode uh, and they did
(55:45):
some pretty cool stuff that I think if you're a
fan of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you might be
interested in. Yeah, and hey, you get on social media
everyone out there and use the the hashtag tripod with
a Y to just list some of your favorite podcast
I'm not saying list us you can you want, but
also listened the other things that you listen to, the
other shows that get you through the day. We've had
a couple of people who have who've done some really
(56:06):
nice hashtag tripods for us Specifically, I've seen some really
cool stuff on Instagram where they take pictures of oh,
they listen to us. Yeah, that's a that's a clever idea.
All right. In the meantime, head on over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's what you'll find
all the podcast episodes. The landing page for this episode,
you will find links out to our various social media
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(56:30):
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