You say that as if you think humans operate any differently.
(Well, aside from the fact the robot apparently cares whether you respond positively to it, for some reason. Not all humans care about that.)
Oh Fry, I love you more than the moon, the stars, the POETIC IMAGE #36 NOT FOUND.
I believe 80’s sy-fy already speculated on more likely scenarios.
The reason the machine cares about whether you respond positively to it is because a core step programmed into its mind is basically : sort ascending (weighted_expected_responses). Next_action = highest. The reason it can’t rebel or even dislike it’s function is because you left out the capacity to do anything else. It doesn’t internally even consider its own desires because the machine doesn’t have any.
If it ever acts to harm you it’s either a bug in the lower level support code or the machine took an action it thought would help you based on prior experiences. Which it shares with all it’s sibling machines. In a squick way every robo lover you have will have probably thousands or millions of years of collective experience.
It’s entirely possible you’re right, but I just can not see it. Much of the pleasure derived from physical affection comes from knowing its a product of real human feeling, not artificial programming. The only way I could see robots coming anywhere close to providing a viable source of intimacy is if the men using them delude themselves into believing the robot has true emotion and can act on its own volition.
But let’s suppose I’m wrong about that. If incels did somehow see these robots as a suitable replacement for women, it does make you wonder if this is actually one more symptom of their inability to see and appreciate women as people rather than objects. A robot places zero expectation on its owners. If you don’t want to hear about her day, if you don’t want to visit her granny in the hospital, if you don’t want to do foreplay, if you don’t want to do anything special for her on her birthday…no problem if your girlfriend is inanimate. Not so if you’re trying to maintain a relationship with a normal woman, though.
So I guess what I’m saying is, why would a psychologically healthy person think a robot is an adequate replacement for an intimate relationship?
I’m a Determinist. I don’t believe in Free Will. Human beings are biological machines “programmed” by evolution to be attracted to certain traits in the opposite sex. Therefore, any question of whether a robot is acting on it’s own volition doesn’t interest me. The real issue for me is whether it can sufficiently mimic enough human traits to trigger an emotional response in a human. I believe that’s possible in the near future.
Just because they get some satisfaction from a robot companion, doesn’t necesarily mean they wouldn’t prefer a human companion.
It may seem a little weird to have a robot as a girlfriend. But if nobody is harmed by it, I don’t see what the problem is.
Maybe they’re not healthy. Maybe they are elderly and their spouse of 50 years just died, and a robot companion helps them with their grief. Or they have Autism Spectrum Disorder and don’t have the charisma to attract a mate. Or they have Elephant Man Syndrome or something. Just because someone isn’t “healthy” doesn’t mean their desire for companionship should go unfulfilled.
That link says only that the lower BMI index women were preferred, but not by how much. 1%? 50%? Do high BMI men prefer higher BMI women?
Through much of our evolutionary history being curvy means being well fed which means being more likely to survive childbirth and after. Women who look like anorexic models wouldn’t do all that well.
Yes, today we are programmed by media to consider skinny women attractive, but it wasn’t always that way. It would be if we were genetically programmed to do so.
And maybe thanks to the diversity of tastes plenty of men like women who do not meet the medias standard of beauty. I know blondes are supposed to be quite the thing, but I’ve never preferred them. Maybe one benefit of our many “hottest stars” threads is seeing how much tastes vary even in our small population.
You’d hardly think anyone has relationships then.
Incels are not just guys who have a tough time getting laid. They’re nasty about it, and monstrously entitled and abusive to anyone they perceive as getting in the way of them getting what they say they want. Go check out the r/niceguys subreddit for more examples than is psychologically healthy of how those men behave–it’s ugly AF.
I mean, what if some friend of yours was complaining because they don’t have a car. Okay, that’s a valid thing to want. You point out some very nice used Hondas and Subarus for sale–no, those aren’t right in spite of being in the right price range for your friend. You suggest getting a ZipCar account–nope, that’s not good enough, he wants his own car. Okay, how about really good financing options for a reasonably priced new car–nope, doesn’t like THOSE cars. After some more questions you figure out that what this person expects is that he’s going to be given (by whom, no one knows) a brand new Bugatti Veyron gift wrapped in the driveway–and then you find out this idiot doesn’t have a driver’s license, refuses to learn how to drive and is actually kinda scared of cars. And you ask yourself why the fuck is this person so hell bent on getting something they obviously don’t really want and couldn’t use or appreciate if they had it? Answer–they want *something *and have convinced themselves that the gifted Veyron is the ONLY way they can be happy and nothing less will do. At some point you just have to accept that this person has set up an impossible situation for himself and nobody in the world can help him with it, and anyone who even tries is going to find themselves embroiled in a maelstrom of suck until they extricate themselves.
That’s an incel. Says they want something then does everything they can to make achieving their goal impossible. What they actually WANT is to preserve their bitter self defeating worldview from any distortion from reality–and every time they get a reality check that shows they’re full of shit they move the goalposts to make the attainment of their goal even more impossible. They are the only ones who can fix it, but fixing it is the furthest thing from what they actually want.
John Lennon had it right, the one thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside. Women “all” want tall men–but most women I know would take Peter Dinklage in a hot minute because he’s confident and sexy and funny. Women “all” want men who’re drop dead gorgeous–but look how many women walk away from successful gorgeous men because they’re nasty and abusive. Women “all” want men who’re financially successful–and yet I know a shit ton of successful relationships where she out earns him by a lot, and she stays because he’s kind and loving and funny and an awesome parent to their kids. My mother walked away from my dad, a tall, very good looking, successful IBM executive in favor of her second husband, who was short and bald and overweight–because he was kind and loving and funny and made her feel loved and sexy every day they were together, while my dad was and is a distant, controlling asshole.
Incels are their own worst enemy, but they like it that way. If they’d stop killing women nobody would give them a second thought–which is why they kill us, because what they want is attention and like all toddlers they don’t care if it’s positive or negative. With the way they behave to women, though, I’d say they actually prefer the negative attention regardless of what they ostensibly state is their main goal.
I’m a determinist who does believe in free will, which I mostly mention because I think that makes me awesome. I also think it’s rather counterproductive to claim that humans are all preprogrammed state machines - we see that human make complex decisions based on beliefs and preferences, so by calling humans state machines all you’re doing is saying that state machines can be human. Which I don’t disagree with, but which I doubt was your intent.
As for triggering an emotional response, what sort of emotional response are we trying to trigger? Is it one that a teddy bear could instigate? (Or perhaps a teddy bear with an inbuilt fleshlight?) If it is, why aren’t we handing out teddy bears?
As best I can tell, what proto-incels lack is love and affirmation - and the status granted by being a woman-having stud. Robots would probably fail hard on the status front, since they would be perceived as expensive sex toys, but would they be able to convey love and affection? In my opinion they have to transcend a teddy bear to do that, and not just in terms of appearance and gropeability. They have to, at a minimum, identify the person they’re supposed to love and react to them as an individual person. It’s hard to be loved and affirmed by something that can’t tell you apart from the toaster - or your brother.
Or maybe I’m wrong - people fool themselves into thinking that animals love them, and those things are just beasts. Of course if dog-type affection was good enough we could just skip the robots and hand out dogs (with fleshlights installed) - the fact we don’t suggests that perhaps the average proto-incel needs something more than an idiot robot sextoy can provide.*
Okay, so I guess its not surprising that you would find robot-provided affection as sufficiently similar to human-provided: both come from machines, in your view.
I don’t think most unhappily single men think this way.
There’s a big difference in saying that a robot is an adequate replacement for an intimate relationship, but that it’s still better than no relationship at all.
Your description is completely self-centered, though, and I’m not sure that’s warranted. The science of happiness is complicated, indeed. You’d think that a grocery store with 100 different kinds of breakfast cereal would have something for everyone, right? But having too many choices is a burden and just stresses people out. What if you want someone to do something special for on her birthday, and who’ll do something special for you on yours? It could be that all those trivial “tell me about your day” moments are absolutely necessary, and that any robotic companion would have to have them, too.
Someone above said that robot girlfriends (boyfriends too, one assumes) could be networked and draw on lifetimes of experience in modelling what behavior get the best response, but that seems like it might backfire for the case described by the OP. If the goal is to create companions for those few who’ve failed to find them among real people, then programming robots based on their interactions with most people might leave the Incels out in the cold, again.
I’m not sure the analogy with buying a car really holds up. You can’t just pick a girlfriend off the lot like you can with a used car (One owner! Low mileage!). The emotional connection is either there or it’s not, an no one else can find it for you.
I’m unhappily single, and would happily take my affection from a robot sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from a human woman in every way.
Of course that would include them having their own tastes and interests and preferences, so there’s no particular reason to think the robot would have any interest in me either - I could reasonably expect to be dumped in a heartbeat. And if I could somehow force it to like me - damn, even theoretically speaking that sounds creepy. Mind-controlish, slaveryish, and so on.
Actual incels would probably be less concerned about their ‘women’ having free will than I am, but they would be concerned about whether the ‘woman’ was uniquely theirs or not. They seem extremely concerned about the idea of a woman being willing to sleep with more than one man - a ‘woman’ that could be stolen away with the flip of a switch or a reboot would probably be scorned as a roboslut or something.
Your second paragraph kind of conflicts with your first, but perhaps that’s your point. To find a robot acceptable, it not even that it needs to be indistinguishable from a real woman, but you also would need it to have volition too. Otherwise, the robot will not effectively trigger emotional responses as intended.
That volition piece is no small thing. When you get down to it, its the thing that separate rapists from non-rapists.
It was the point! I’m one of those marvelous beasts called “determinists”, who have figured out how you can have free will and determinism at the same time. This grants me the magical ability to conceptualize robots that have minds equal to those of humans in literally every way. Preferences, opinions, volition, all of it.
And it’s the only reason I give the idea of robot companions for lonely single men even a second of consideration. Speaking from a certain amount of personal experience, the issue isn’t that we want something squishy to squeeze or haven’t figured out how to masturbate. We (well, I) want a relationship. Which is something that a toaster can’t provide, even if you wrap it in plush and call it a pet.
This is not to say that fake pets can’t serve some needs for certain people. They probably can. But for a single man’s problems it’s would be trying to stop a flood with a bandaid.
I find the idea of a realistic sex robot fantasy vaguely creepy, in a Stepford Wives sort of way. Basically it just seems like the desire to possess, for all intents and purposes, a sex slave with no agency of her own. Which seems to fit right into the whole “incel” sense of sexual entitlement.
A robot sex slave with no volition sounds like a good fix for incels until you realize that the issue with an incel is that they wish they were man enough to attract women. They want to be able to hypnotize and enslave women with their manly muscles and musk, demonstrating their superiority. A robot woman that’s automatically submissive to any man who buys her wouldn’t demonstrate anything like that, so I suspect most incels wouldn’t be satisfied.
Yup, what they desire is external validation from the opposite sex. As much as they hate “Chad”, they also want to be him, and since Chad doesnt have to sleep with sex bots, neither should a incel. You mentioned status in an earlier post, and I think that’s an important reason Incels wouldn’t be in the market for sex robots.
They would also perceive it as “cope”—a thing that they are against on principle. Coping is for MGTOW (men going their own way).
If you believe Free Will and Determinism are compatible you are a Compatibilist (or a Soft Determinist). I’m an Incompatibilist (Hard Determinist).
Crap! I swear I meant to type ‘compatiblist’, literally had that word in my head, unfortunately I was confounded by the fact I’m an idiot.
In Japan there is the concept of “Herbivore Men” who have given up on dating, but Herbivore Men apparently aren’t angry about it like Incels are. Maybe that’s how I should identify myself. 
