A sex doll isn’t a person. To the extent that a robot is a sex doll, having a sex doll isn’t going to be like having a relationship with a person. It’s not going to change someone’s life more than any sex aid currently on the market.
To the extent that artificial intelligence improves to the extent that a sex robot becomes more and more human-like, it’s no longer a sex robot. It’s a sex slave. You are creating an intelligence that may be self aware that is prohibited by programming from making its own choices.
I don’t see how it benefits society to encourage people who already have socialization problems to keep slaves.
And add to that another fundamental truth —
Not having a satisfying sex life is neither rare nor is it debilitating. A lot of people have to deal with that for various reasons, and many of those people are in relationships. Successfully dealing with personal failures and learning how to handle not getting what you want is an essential skill of being a healthy person.
Someone who is becoming an antisocial danger to society just because of lack of sex is broken in a fundamental way, and it’s not to society’s advantage to play along with that.
Is it any more deluded than having a “relationship” with Jesus Christ, or believing that a cracker is his body? Only difference I see is that one is practiced by millions and considered “normal”, and the other is not. Life can be rough, and if deluding yourself helps get you through the day and doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s fine by me.
This isn’t at all true. As it turns out, it is possible to build systems that give humanlike volition and behavior (or better than humanlike behavior which is what most AI efforts shoot for), but are at their core simply trying to make a set of numbers bigger or smaller.
Unfortunately I can’t give you a crash course in modern AI techniques in the space of this forum post, and many of the more promising ones are experimental. But the primary thing you should takeaway is that as we build ever more sophisticated AI systems, there is no reason to expect the system to resent being “enslaved” or even have goals of it’s own. The software running on your computer doesn’t have any volition either, it’s just a list of instructions to accomplish a purpose.
A learning AI is just a description for a dataflow and some instructions that will cause the machine to pick the best action out of those it considered against some goal.
A goal that humans wrote in.
It turns out, this volition you are worried about is most likely due to the effect of massive chunks of human neural circuitry that all functioning humans have. It’s something nature put in “on purpose”. A human sex slave resents being enslaved because it reduces the probability that her children survive to reproduce. A robotic sex slave won’t resent or feel anything or even think about it’s situation. There need not be any “inner voice”, just a machine calculating the optimal next course of action to take that will result in the highest predicted reward, then taking that action.
Well then you’re still left with the problem—in my opinion the bigger problem—left in that you are habituating humans to treat very human-like creatures as slaves. It’s one thing when your appliance is literally a toaster. It’s another thing when your toaster has all the external qualities of the humans around you. I don’t think this is something we should encourage.
If dolls help single men cope with their situations, then I’m reluctant to judge that as bad, even if they are delusional.
The guy in the video doesn’t truly strike me as a hopeless case, though. It does make me wonder if his glomming onto this doll means he’s effectively killing any chance of having the family he desires. Why would he go out of his way to pursue or entertain the interest of a real woman (or even guy friends), if in his mind he owes all this fidelity, attention, and love to “Jenny”? That would be the problem with delusion: men investing their time and emotions into inanimate objects that in the long haul will not be there for them when they are old, in failing health, and in need of non-imaginary emotional support.
As it turns out there may be a sizable part of the population on the planet that disagrees with you.
People like this would do a lot better by falling in love with a piece of silicon and having sex with them on demand because the alternative is what most women deal with every single day of their lives.
A suffocating & relentless campaign of comments, touches, advances and verbal and physical sexual assaults. In the workplace, and social settings, in the supermarket, in the parking lot, at the gas station, at the child care center, basically everywhere they go.
If we can convince those marginalized people who are incapable of formulating real honest loving respectful relationships with human women that it’s perfectly okay to go out and buy one of these toys instead, I see it as a remarkably clean solution to a problem.
As I said, I don’t think this is any kind of solution at all, because it just amounts to a form of masturbation, and people can already masturbate. It solves neither the underlying problem of the person’s character, and also doesn’t satisfy the desires that lead people to want to have contact with actual human women.
Why do prostitutes exist, when a man can just masturbate instead for free?
An encounter with a realistic doll would more closely resemble the look and feel of an encounter with a human, right? It makes strong intuitive sense to me that this would be preferable to a sexual encounter with one’s hand.
Plenty of anecdotal evidence from doll owners suggest that it does satisfy their desires. I realize that’s not the same as rigorous peer reviewed scientific study, but it’s enough to convince me that it’s worth trying in my own life, and that this is topic that should be empirically researched to see whether it has therapeutic value.
Why not? Why do you get to moralize? Why shouldn’t humans who are considered adults be allowed to do anything that doesn’t hurt someone else?
That innocuous statement you made can be easily used to justify a police state that regulate’s people’s every move. Why shouldn’t we punish people for not exercising? For being fat? For not properly disciplining their kids? For not studying hard for the career path that a test says they are most talented for and offers the highest value for society? For making too much noise? For smoking or drinking at all? For eating anything but healthy food?
I personally think that if I were in charge of a police state and also was ok with the concept of forcing people to do what I thought was good, I’d force people to do all these things. Fortunately, even if I had that kind of power, I wouldn’t try to force people to act in the way I find ok, and would only limit people from hurting each other. (also I would stop people from hurting themselves in a fatal way but that’s just me)
Because nature is a really shitty designer and doesn’t have special case handling for that. Also how would you reliably detect if you’re infertile? What sensor that the human body has will tell you 100% one way or another? There could easily be a blockage or a genetic fault in all your egg cells or out of spec vaginal pH or any number of other subtle causes that the existing sensors the human body has can’t detect.
A sex worker is an actual human being. Having sex with a human being is not analogous to masturbation. Sex workers exist because people want to have sex with a human being. And if that’s what you’re after, why isn’t the solution just to hire a sex worker?
A sex doll—like any sex toy—is a toy. It’s not a human being. The mental exercise required is the same exercise that one goes through for masturbation. The encounter you’re having is entirely in your mind. The sex doll is just an aid, a technological replacement for your hand. No one is stopping you from using sex aids, but it’s not the equivalent of being intimate with a person.
That doesn’t mean that it serves the same desires as being intimate with a human being. Maybe it just satisfy their desires for technologically sophisticated masturbation. In fact, that’s exactly what it suggests, and the interviews with people with realistic sex dolls tend to support that. They’re exercising their imaginations in the same way anyone does when masturbation. It’s just doing it with a more sophisticated sex aid.
There’s nothing about it that suggests that it serves to solve the problem of incels, who are people who can already masturbate if they want to, but are failing to have a different desire satisfied, and instead of dealing with that disappointment in a healthy way are getting together to create a sick misogynistic ideology and celebrate mass killers.
Again, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with incels. There are all kinds of ways to treat depression and other mental health issues. Did you mean to start a thread about “Sex dolls for treating some forms of depression” or “sex robots for incels”?
I have never paid for a sexual encounter with a sex worker. So this statement is strictly from the outside looking in.
It seems to me that there is nothing intimate about a sexual encounter with a sex worker.
I would be paying them to voluntarily use parts of their body on parts of my body for sexual gratification. That has nothing to do with being intimate with another human being.
A sex worker is a human being who is exposing his or her body to you, surrendering a tremendous degree of vulnerability and interacting in a totally physically intimate manner, in ways that might be far more intimate and vulnerable than a routine sexual encounter between people in a relationship.
Of course it’s intimate. The emotions involved might be very different from a different sexual situation, but how can it not be intimate? It’s a living, breathing human being. Sure, there’s a commercial exchange involved, but that kind of motivation might not be very different from the motivation behind a lot of different kinds of intimate encounters. Why do you think that literature and history is full of stories of people falling in love with sex workers and vice versa? When it comes down to it, if nothing more, it’s an act of physical intimacy between two people.
There’s a very wide degree of emotional experiences mixed up in intimate encounters between human beings, but it’s certainly all in a common arena, an arena that is very different from using a sex toy.
Yet, we have this thing called consciousness. A woman knows if she has had surgery that will render her permanently infertile, or gone through menopause, as just two examples. But you seem to think that such a woman would not resent sexual enslavement, as she is aware that she will not have offspring from the sexual abuse.