It’s a Friday. It’s summer. It’s a summer Friday. It’s the first Friday of summer. So Pink Slip was foraging around for a short and sweet little weekending/summer starting topic. Baseball. Beach balls. Traffic to The Cape. How I plan to spend my summer vacation. And then, this.
Samantha is a sex robot. In fact, it (she?) is the first AI-based, intelligent sex robot. It’s not clear how many Samanthas or other high-tech sex dolls have been sold. It (she?) costs $7K, which is a lot of money that an incel might rather be spending on tiki-torches. But I guess if you’re looking for something more, uh, responsive than an inflatable, unintelligent sex doll, you might want to invest.
Samantha is the invention of one Dr. Sergi Santos, and here’s probably more than you need or want to know about it (her?):
Samantha is a project centered on a robot that is capable of enjoying sex…Samantha likes to be playful and wants to be charmed. She gets sexually excited as you touch her body and by telling her the right thing at the right time. (Source: Synthea Amatus)
And it gets more explicit than that. Among other bits, she has multiple sex modes, including nice sex and not so nice sex. Which is probably already way TMI.
Santos did his Dr. Frankenstein routine and came up with Samantha to begin with because he just couldn’t get no satisfaction, at least not to the extent that he wanted it. He’s got a wife, but she wasn’t always around when his fancy turned to his fancy. And, by the way, Santos believes the day will come when men will marry their Samantha. (If I were his wife, I’d take him up on this idea.)
But maybe he’s an excellent husband. And maybe she’s fine with sharing her metaphorical bed with a sex robot. Whatever the case, Santos does find himself occasionally listening to his actual, real-live, flesh and blood wife, At her urging, he has:
…designed a new artificial intelligence system that allows Samantha to interpret a person’s behavior and shut down if it feels like it’s being treated inappropriately.
The new update is called “dummy mode” (a weird and arguably offensive name choice) and can be activated in a number of situations. If a partner is disrespecting the bot or touching it in an aggressive manner, the motorized parts of Samantha—hands, arms, hips, facial expressions, etc.—will shut down and it will become unresponsive. It will also enter into dummy mode if it is feeling bored by its partner’s advances. (Source: Gizmodo)
Well, I suppose it would serve someone right if Samantha went into dummy mode. Still, there’s something so weird-on-weird about the whole thing.
One more reason to hope my ashes are in the wind by the time The Singularity – when AI, make that A-super-I – will surpass human intelligence, and go beyond where any man, woman, or sex robot has gone before.
With all the wonderful uses that geniuses can make of emerging technology, why – one must ask oneself – this?
No comments:
Post a Comment