According to the linked article, the people who want to ban sexbots see it as part of the effort to eliminate prostitution.
Isn’t that … completely backwards? You’re trying to abolish a whole class of human labor, so you try to ban the technology that might replace that labor?
If sexbots ever get advanced enough to seriously compete with human prostitutes, won’t it be the prostitutes themselves who want to ban them, in order to protect their livelihoods? Or does the sex trade work by reverse economics?
The elimination of a whole class of human labor is incidental to the end goal of the complete eradication of sexual objectification and of anything that even looks like it or could look like it. Part of that is the eradication or at the very least the cultural censure of commercialized sex in every form.
And as mentioned before, until and unless you get a sex android with full self-aware agency, people will prefer to experience their naughty fun with an actual person if they are going to go through the bother. I mean, as it stands, five fingers, a tube of lotion and the Internet or a magazine or DVD are far more economical than the cheapest stripclub or massage parlor, and you know the girl there does not actually dig you, yet people still go there. So abolition of sexwork would be one serious uphill battle.
I even suspect that after there are “fully functional”, as Mr. Data put it, prostidroids, there will still be for a while demand or space for human sexworkers both at the very high end of the market, for people who will pay a premium for a real live human sex queen, and at the very bottom end where a vulgar street pimp can still shake down some poor dropout while requiring lesser capital investment and technical knowledge than for buying and maintaining a handful of secondhand economy-model sexdroids bought off-lease (How’s THAT for objectification!)
This is close - what sexbots would do is make a non-consensual master-slave relationship legal and acceptable. Now, this might not matter to the bot (for a few designs at least), but it would demean and degrade the human. A tool, including a dildo, is not the same think as pseudo-slave.
Unless the AI has that quality of self-aware consciousness we’ve discussed as some hypothetical future, as long as the state of the technology is still just a sort of chimera of Siri and a RealDoll then whether it will “matter to the bot” is as meaningless and “consent” as relevant as if referring to a car or a soda vending machine. There is no self in the vending machine so nothing to which how it is treated “matters”, you do not enslave your car by making it shuttle you around and naming it Brad.
ISTM you may be getting hung up on the form factor of the object and on what you believe are the sentiments of the user thereof, which you believe harm or at least endanger the user. OTOH I believe, as I said, only a tiny fringe minority of robofetishists will be into that precisely because of the robotic aspect (it will not be what corrupts them, if corruption it be) and do not fear an effect to legitimize *slavery *in the culture.
You might have misunderstood me - I appreciate a bot is not a person, does not have free will, and cannot be enslaved (although I can image a sufficiently advanced bot to challenge our concept of personhood).
I am not “hung up on” the form of the bot; I really believe that a bot nearly human in appearance would be easily conflated with humans within the user’s mind, and possibly brain. I think that interacting with a near-human in a situation where a human would be powerless and vulnerable would effect how users viewed both other humans and themselves.
This isn’t some “Eew, icky” reaction; I think our brains just work that way. People thank Siri; they say good-bye to recordings; they get annoyed at cars that tell them they are too close and traffic lights that tell them when to cross the street. People conflate human and human-like now, even with just a disembodied voice.
Totally. You don’t even need a voice. Or moving parts. Slap a heart-shaped sticker on a box, put it in the right context, and you’re good to go.
Speaking for myself, the main reason why I shouldn’t have a sex bot is that I would fall in love with it. I have that problem with potted plants already. I mean, maybe it’s not wrong to love a bot, morally speaking. But is it healthy? Doesn’t seem like it.
Ah, yes, I see your point better now – a process of reverse anthropomorphic conditioning at work in the minds of the users. Instead of the thing being adscribed the attributes of the person, the attributes of the things become considered desirable in the person. Similar to people getting body shape issues due to the exposure to unrealistic media standards, or to a point analogous to PUA theories about specific patterns of communication targeted at getting sex from people, or to how some people out there expect regular sex to work and look like porn sex and boy do they get a surprise.
Still we do not (yet) ban these things outright, we seek to have the industries self-regulate or to educate people as to the risks and/or how they are getting it wrong.
I suppose I just have a greater confidence in my own object/person boundaries (and brain wiring) and in the general population’s.
A low self-squick threshold can be a disadvantage here at the Dope. We ofen contemplate appalling things at the dinner table and with the children in the next room.
Now I’ve got in my mind the germ of a storyline for humanity finding itself in a sexual Rise Of The Machines/Butlerian Jihad scenario, wherein everything sucks but not in the nice sense of the word.
