Sex with robots is unethical, researcher claims

[Phanuel]

Actually, I recently read an article that indicated that in most parts of the U.S. the ratio of college-educated heterosexual women to college-educated heterosexual men was significantly greater than 1:1.

Just did a web-search and found this:



This extends to those seeking just relationships (as opposed to marriage), too. At least for the college-educated war-of-the-sexes, single men increasingly have the advantage.

That doesn't help men get relationships. It just continues to adopt game theory realities.

Additionally, let's look at the graduating women's degrees;

Source; http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/...egrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/

Uh, not really useful degrees for most of that. But many will argue that non-stem degrees have a place in society.

 

[Nebor]

I'm saying that limited context is only that, a limited context. It barely explores the vast ripples that a change to this foundational dynamic of humanity would have.

Maybe I am seeing it as too incredible a change, but humanity + sexbots seems like such a monumental change, that I could see it going utopia or dystopia just as easily over a couple generations.

People easily forget that the way our society is now isn't how it always was. When the common man is deprived of basic essentials for too long, be it food, shelter, sex, etc. then there's usually a revolt and things get shaken up for a while.

Take it back far enough, and you saw one alpha male (the king, the chief, even the biggest caveman) keeping all the women & resources to himself. But then all the rest of the guys (the common man) band together and kill him.

So now we're entering an era where once again the very very few are getting everything, material goods, medical treatment, women, etc. But the common man has been sated with pleasurable substitutes that trick his brain with seratonin. A bag of cheetos, a can of Pepsi, a video game and a porno have his brain pretty much fully engaged and satisfied. And those tricks are getting better and better: Mega 3d flavor cheetos, better, more realistic video games that you can take everywhere, 3D high def-porn (or even sex robots.) Men become virtually enslaved by these creature comforts and lose the drive to strive for more.

The problem is, while a few industries are making big money off the bread & circuses, men are overall attaining less education, making less money, taking fewer career risks, getting married less and having fewer children. When their basic needs are met elsewhere, they lose the desire to compete and better themselves in order to attain a woman.

I posit that the better these distractions get, the more men will "drop out" of not just dating, but the economy. This is already has and will continue to have progressively more drastic implications for Western society.

Women are of course targetted by marketers for various industries as well, providing many distractions in other forms, but those distractions don't tend to derail women's basic biological desires as badly as they do men.

I'm not saying I have all the answers or can predict exactly what happens next, but I'd say it goes something like:
1) Western men continue to gradually disengage from traditional societal roles in the face of increasingly effective creature comfort distractions.
2) Birth rates fall below replacement rates (already there if you subtract 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.)
3) Single motherhood becomes even more common (already above 50% of all births here.)
4) Obesity rates continue to skyrocket since men who fuck robots don't need to be attractive, and average women continue to push "fat acceptance." The current trend of "fit lifestyle" people only interacting with each other continues to escalate, though the pool of participants shrinks.
5) Either the economy is allowed to contract due to falling birth rate and low participation (mainly by men) or massive immigration is encouraged. Either way, the Western world's reign of dominance comes to an end, unable to sustain itself without the traditional family structure.
6) We might see a "bachelor tax" instituted to try to encourage men to be more productive or marry\reproduce. There will undoubtedly be many Jezebel articles demanding that men "man up" and do what women want (those are already here.)

I'm not some kind of doomsayer. This'll probably take a hundred years. Maybe we'll have drowned from global warming or perished in a nuclear war with Iran by then. But it seems like we're on a pretty clear path of consumerism & hedonism in place of traditional family values.

 

[Nebor]

Actually, I recently read an article that indicated that in most parts of the U.S. the ratio of college-educated heterosexual women to college-educated heterosexual men was significantly greater than 1:1.

Just did a web-search and found this:



This extends to those seeking just relationships (as opposed to marriage), too. At least for the college-educated war-of-the-sexes, single men increasingly have the advantage.

I don't disagree with any of this. Have you been to Charleston, SC? One of my fraternity brothers from college took me there during Halloween last year and it was insane. The whole city is like 70% female and the women are competitive.

But as more and more colleges swing that way, there are fewer and fewer marriageable men. Educated black women have been dealing with this forever (google it.) Women typically want to marry someone with as much or more education than them, who makes as much or more money than them.

This leads us to the "top 20%" argument that some have made in this thread. You wind up with a small percentage of guys that women would even consider dating either because they're very attractive or very educated\successful (or both.) The other 80% of men are left with Xbox, mountain dew and porn. The 20% of men can pretty much run wild and treat women however they want, since there's essentially an endless supply of them, vying for the attention of relatively few men.

Eventually this leads to the majority of women being unhappy, and the majority of men being unhappy. But men seem far more effectively medicated with substitutes\distractions when women aren't available to them. Women, almost universally, want to have babies, and there's not really a substitute for that (other than cats for the crazy ones.) Fortunately for the women, both the top 20% and the bottom 80% of men are willing to throw it in them in a couple times and get them pregnant. And then you're left with a ton of single mothers because either she doesn't want to be with a bottom 80% guy or the top 20% guy doesn't want to be with her. Either way society as a whole usually ends up bearing some of the cost of those children born to single mothers, and the lifetime outcomes for both the mother and child are significantly worse than they would be were the mother in a traditional monogomous relationship.

 

[BoberFett]

People easily forget that the way our society is now...

Interesting thoughts Nebor, and I suspect you might be on the right track.

 

[Exophase]

Porn Stars replaced by VR ?

Porn doesn't need robots, just good CG. We're probably most of the way there to being able to replace a lot of porn without people noticing, it's just not cost effective enough.

 

[jackstar7]

I'm not saying I have all the answers or can predict exactly what happens next, but I'd say it goes something like:

Thank you. This is the kind of next-level implications that I was contemplating and imagining.

I do think that "single" motherhood could go another way, where friends might join into partnerships to raise children sans men. Effectively the sister-wives without the need of a father in the dynamic. If they are not competing over men, that would eliminate a huge source of friction between women. The scaling of joint resources towards their nu-family ways could lead to homes growing into some kind of hybrid commune-school structure as well.

My mind boggles over it all.


Also, waiting for the refurbs to show up in Amazon Warehouse. I'll still want the Prime shipping, but as long as the factory hoses it off, it should be good to go.

 

[Nebor]

Also, waiting for the refurbs to show up in Amazon Warehouse. I'll still want the Prime shipping, but as long as the factory hoses it off, it should be good to go.

That's a little gross to think about. But I'd definitely buy one if it were available.

 

[Jeff7]

Can you stick a device to some access point and read out it's next action? = no free will.
Same for the other stuff, if it's code and you can see what trigers what by reading that code than it's not real.

I work with PIC chips, and I can implement a feature in them that makes them unreadable by a debugger, which is something that's built to permit a programmer to peer directly at what the chip is going to do next.
So if I no longer have access to the PIC's "mind," is it now free-willed? (As an occasional programmer, it's surprisingly often that simple processors do really seem to think on their own. Goddamn bugs.)

You realize, I hope, that you are a machine made of atoms, like any other robot. A woma is also a machine.

There are at least two issues here. One is how we experience machines, how we internally define them, our unconscious attitudes toward them, eat. Serial killers, it appears from psychological profiles of them, do not experience any sense that people are alive, that they are only things like we normally experience machines. Children, however, can experience dolls and action figures as if they were alive. The ethical question, from this, I think, is which experience has the greatest emotional pay off. Which brings joy to life. I will take the child over the serial killer every time.

Yup, this. We're organic computers that are the result of a very long, undirected development process. There's just no debugging interface available yet, so we still get to hang onto what we call free will.

Secondly, what are the mechanisms by which we impute value to things. I believe we do so when we see ourselves in the other. Sex with love between two conscious beings is to be preferred to sex with machines.

I find that if I espouse a value system where one thing brings greater emotional reward than another, I will inevitably be attacked for being a prude. I don't really care if somebody loves their toaster. I know without any doubt or reservation whatsoever, that sex with the beloved, another person who reciprocates, is better. I will always posh for peek experience rather than simple sexual reliease.

And in this case, "conscious being" could be an artificial intelligence. At some point, our ancient primate brains will be perfectly comfortable and satisfied with the companionship of a sufficiently advanced and capable AI.


I guess I don't think of the human brain as being all that special. It happens to be a very advanced one as far as this point in Earth's history is concerned. It's a huge collection of cells that's capable of storing information and continuously encoding and decoding it, drawing both from external and stored experiences. It's also stored in a body that's fairly small by comparison, which affords it the luxury of not having to devote as large a portion of its processing power to basic sensory input and mobility.

Why haven't our computers caught up yet?
We've had computers for several decades. Nature's been refining and spit-shining this brain design for millions of years.
I think we've done pretty damn well in a fraction of the time, given that we're capable of making new iterations with significant changes very quickly.
Computers were also made to be predictable, though as we see on a regular basis, once they get sufficiently complex, the behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable. Oh look, another Flash security update.

 

[JSt0rm]

People easily forget that the way our society is now isn't how it always was. When the common man is deprived of basic essentials for too long, be it food, shelter, sex, etc. then there's usually a revolt and things get shaken up for a while.

Take it back far enough, and you saw one alpha male (the king, the chief, even the biggest caveman) keeping all the women & resources to himself. But then all the rest of the guys (the common man) band together and kill him.

So now we're entering an era where once again the very very few are getting everything, material goods, medical treatment, women, etc. But the common man has been sated with pleasurable substitutes that trick his brain with seratonin. A bag of cheetos, a can of Pepsi, a video game and a porno have his brain pretty much fully engaged and satisfied. And those tricks are getting better and better: Mega 3d flavor cheetos, better, more realistic video games that you can take everywhere, 3D high def-porn (or even sex robots.) Men become virtually enslaved by these creature comforts and lose the drive to strive for more.

The problem is, while a few industries are making big money off the bread & circuses, men are overall attaining less education, making less money, taking fewer career risks, getting married less and having fewer children. When their basic needs are met elsewhere, they lose the desire to compete and better themselves in order to attain a woman.

I posit that the better these distractions get, the more men will "drop out" of not just dating, but the economy. This is already has and will continue to have progressively more drastic implications for Western society.

Women are of course targetted by marketers for various industries as well, providing many distractions in other forms, but those distractions don't tend to derail women's basic biological desires as badly as they do men.

I'm not saying I have all the answers or can predict exactly what happens next, but I'd say it goes something like:
1) Western men continue to gradually disengage from traditional societal roles in the face of increasingly effective creature comfort distractions.
2) Birth rates fall below replacement rates (already there if you subtract 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.)
3) Single motherhood becomes even more common (already above 50% of all births here.)
4) Obesity rates continue to skyrocket since men who fuck robots don't need to be attractive, and average women continue to push "fat acceptance." The current trend of "fit lifestyle" people only interacting with each other continues to escalate, though the pool of participants shrinks.
5) Either the economy is allowed to contract due to falling birth rate and low participation (mainly by men) or massive immigration is encouraged. Either way, the Western world's reign of dominance comes to an end, unable to sustain itself without the traditional family structure.
6) We might see a "bachelor tax" instituted to try to encourage men to be more productive or marry\reproduce. There will undoubtedly be many Jezebel articles demanding that men "man up" and do what women want (those are already here.)

I'm not some kind of doomsayer. This'll probably take a hundred years. Maybe we'll have drowned from global warming or perished in a nuclear war with Iran by then. But it seems like we're on a pretty clear path of consumerism & hedonism in place of traditional family values.

This is all good stuff.

 

[Jeff7]

People easily forget that the way our society is now isn't how it always was. When the common man is deprived of basic essentials for too long, be it food, shelter, sex, etc. then there's usually a revolt and things get shaken up for a while.

Take it back far enough, and you saw one alpha male (the king, the chief, even the biggest caveman) keeping all the women & resources to himself. But then all the rest of the guys (the common man) band together and kill him.

So now we're entering an era where once again the very very few are getting everything, material goods, medical treatment, women, etc. But the common man has been sated with pleasurable substitutes that trick his brain with seratonin. A bag of cheetos, a can of Pepsi, a video game and a porno have his brain pretty much fully engaged and satisfied. And those tricks are getting better and better: Mega 3d flavor cheetos, better, more realistic video games that you can take everywhere, 3D high def-porn (or even sex robots.) Men become virtually enslaved by these creature comforts and lose the drive to strive for more.

The problem is, while a few industries are making big money off the bread & circuses, men are overall attaining less education, making less money, taking fewer career risks, getting married less and having fewer children. When their basic needs are met elsewhere, they lose the desire to compete and better themselves in order to attain a woman.

I posit that the better these distractions get, the more men will "drop out" of not just dating, but the economy. This is already has and will continue to have progressively more drastic implications for Western society.

Women are of course targetted by marketers for various industries as well, providing many distractions in other forms, but those distractions don't tend to derail women's basic biological desires as badly as they do men.

I'm not saying I have all the answers or can predict exactly what happens next, but I'd say it goes something like:
1) Western men continue to gradually disengage from traditional societal roles in the face of increasingly effective creature comfort distractions.
2) Birth rates fall below replacement rates (already there if you subtract 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.)
3) Single motherhood becomes even more common (already above 50% of all births here.)
4) Obesity rates continue to skyrocket since men who fuck robots don't need to be attractive, and average women continue to push "fat acceptance." The current trend of "fit lifestyle" people only interacting with each other continues to escalate, though the pool of participants shrinks.
5) Either the economy is allowed to contract due to falling birth rate and low participation (mainly by men) or massive immigration is encouraged. Either way, the Western world's reign of dominance comes to an end, unable to sustain itself without the traditional family structure.
6) We might see a "bachelor tax" instituted to try to encourage men to be more productive or marry\reproduce. There will undoubtedly be many Jezebel articles demanding that men "man up" and do what women want (those are already here.)

I'm not some kind of doomsayer. This'll probably take a hundred years. Maybe we'll have drowned from global warming or perished in a nuclear war with Iran by then. But it seems like we're on a pretty clear path of consumerism & hedonism in place of traditional family values.

I think it was something on Cracked.com that said that the holodeck would mean the collapse of society. People would only spend the absolute minimum necessary amount of time outside of the holodeck, and would do so only to ensure more holodeck time.


And those "traditional" family values, a term which seems to have an immense variety of definitions, may also have come about as a result of those times of greater scarcity, something of an outgrowth of our ancient tribal nature that helped us survive in a difficult environment.


It's bizarrely amusing though. It's like we're trending toward a utopia that people of the past would have laughingly dreamed about, but finding that there are problems even there. At least in the first world, food and clean water is available easily. Basic needs are met pretty effectively. But our ancient instincts aren't compatible with that sort of environment where survival isn't constantly threatened. Some people still feel a powerful need to dominate others, and many feel the need to gather and hoard as much as they can for themselves, even in fairly trivial situations. (Example: Fights over lightly-discounted gadgets Black Friday.)

Actually, I recently read an article that indicated that in most parts of the U.S. the ratio of college-educated heterosexual women to college-educated heterosexual men was significantly greater than 1:1.

Just did a web-search and found this:

As financial reporter and author of Date-Onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, Jon Birger puts it, “It’s not that He’s Just not That Into You. It’s that There Aren’t Enough of Him.”

In his book, Birger eloquently explains, in terms that even the non-statistically-literate can comprehend, that the gender ratios of college graduating classes in the past few decades reveal that there really aren’t enough single guys. The “man deficit” is real for the graduate set. The current college class breakdown of women to men is 57:43, which means that there will be about one-third more women than men with college degrees when graduation arrives.

If we assume these women will want to marry college-educated men—a desire that Birger convincingly argues should and will change—there’s simply not enough men to make all those trips down the aisle a reality.

This extends to those seeking just relationships (as opposed to marriage), too. At least for the college-educated war-of-the-sexes, single men increasingly have the advantage.

The gap’s impact on dating for straight, single women is exacerbated, Birger explains, because men with college degrees are consciously or subconsciously aware that they are in scarce supply.

Hang on.....
How about "completely unaware?"

 

[WhipperSnapper]

As the number of women who are fanatical feminists increases, the number of men who prefer sex robots will also increase.