The Gaming Den

Shrapnel wrote:Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, an' all that.

And sometimes the cigar has a foot fetish or is a black dude who screws white women while a man pretending to be her husband tearfully masturbates. Shit be weird and it's folly not to expect people to have questions about it.

I've already conceded the point, man. Cheesus.

Kaelik wrote:
No one said at any point that you should take sex lessons from porn. People said you should take porn lessons from porn.

It seems that I've misunderstood the conversation then.

I've just learned that Latex Starfleet uniforms exist.
http://io9.com/5983097/lady-data-cospla ... et-uniform

I'll be in my bunk.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:"If a labia doesn't look like this it's deformed: \|/ " (I'm looking at you Australia)

Australia? They do a lot of labiaplasties or something?

RobbyPants wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:"If a labia doesn't look like this it's deformed: \|/ " (I'm looking at you Australia)

Australia? They do a lot of labiaplasties or something?

Everything's upside down there.

RobbyPants wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:"If a labia doesn't look like this it's deformed: \|/ " (I'm looking at you Australia)

Australia? They do a lot of labiaplasties or something?

Shooping is considered an acceptable alternative.

The Australian censorship Classification Board has weird ideas about what is and is not acceptable pornography. One of the weirdest is the thing where they ban all porn that has women who "look like" they are under 18, regardless of their actual age (sucks to be a small breasted porn star in Australia, I guess). But the weirdest idea they have about porn is that if a woman's inner lips are showing it automatically is classified as hard core rather than soft core, which since most women have their inner lips poking through the outer lips, is exactly as bonkers as it sounds.

It's like when Japan's ban on showing public hair or penises gave us tentacle molestations of prepubescent girls.

-Username17

So they like huge boobs but think most vaginas are icky?

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:So they like huge boobs but think most vaginas are icky?

Sexy!

I suppose we may as well cut to the chase.

"Don't date robots!" - the Space Pope

I like the article's splicing there to evoke ironic concern trolling.

"we're building AIs for sex robots" and two paragraphs later the objection raised is that "sex robots reduce relationships to just the physical". Uh, if that was the case, there would be no AI necessary.

https://vimeo.com/12915013

But seriously, how intelligent are we talking? Are we talking AI like my scaley Skyrim waifu Shahvee, or are we talking full sentience, like Bender? I would have no problems making the former into a robot sex toy but the latter I'd have issues with... And where would you draw the line? Or is it simply impossible to have a sentient robot?

I'd guess the intelligence target is whatever's "good enough" to be beneficial to the end user. Like, if you view a sex robot as akin to an appliance, you don't want to have to negotiate with your coffeemaker, refrigerator, or vacuum in order for them to do their thing. You do want your coffeemaker robot to remember your preferred settings and what time you want it to brew. You want your vacuum robot to learn the layout of your place, not vacuum up any pets or children, and plug itself in when it's low on battery power.

You probably want your sex robot to ask about your day and remember that Saturdays are when you want it to pretend to be a 1920s flapper or whatever.

How ambulatory are these things supposed to be anyway? Can it move at all? Are they imagining that eventually it can get up and walk around and do stuff?

Whining about whether it's okay or not to make human-like AIs with preset priorities is offensively stupid handwringing. We don't have human-like AIs, we don't know how the specifics of how they will operate, and whether or not it's okay to make them extra sexy will of course depend on these specifics, because how can it not?

Oh and whoever says sex dolls are inherently sexist and demeaning to women had better take a good look in the mirror, because what they're saying is essentially "oh noes, women will be totally cast adrift after they're deprived of their primary role as sperm receptacles".

Personally, I'd prefer my sex bot to have a very complex program, rather than a true artificial intelligence (as people typically use the term). A machine, even a very complex machine that can mimic human emotion, is made to be used. A truly intelligent being gets to make its own decisions, and I'd feel really weird if that intelligence was in a sex bot, because one of two things then happens- one, those intelligences are hindered and are not allowed to make a true choice as regards sex, or two, those intelligences do have full choice, and your probably several thousand sex bot wants nothing to do with your dick.

Or hell! If we're making truly intelligent bots, wouldn't they have their own sexualities and orientations? Could a "sex bot" be asexual?

Or am I confusing sapience and intelligence at this point?

Starmaker wrote:We don't have human-like AIs, we don't know how the specifics of how they will operate

I have no idea what the sex bot company plans are.

But we finally, much later than expected have some (sort of) AI promise on the horizon.

It's pretty shitty "AI", but it could be passably convincing for human conversation.

As far as I understand it. All it really is is giant databases and a complex statistical guess as to what to say in response to input. Basically a parrot program like ELIZA with something like the entire Google database to reference.

While it, might, "soon" generate good enough conversation to say, let people emotionally relate to a robot largely immobile creepy looking doll, very few ethicists are going to call a very marginally evolved parrot program the turning point for the dilemma of AI rights/slavery.

Starmaker wrote:Oh and whoever says sex dolls are inherently sexist and demeaning to women had better take a good look in the mirror, because what they're saying is essentially "oh noes, women will be totally cast adrift after they're deprived of their primary role as sperm receptacles".

I am also not sure how sex-bots/sophisticated companion-bots are supposed to be a threat specifically to women. Briefly setting aside the whole "women are paid less money and targeted less by producers of fancy widgets" problem, I'm pretty sure in the distant future of robot hanky panky when you can order whatever you think your perfect partner is online, human relationships in general are going to become considerably trickier.

It's almost like there's some implicit assumption here that women are the passive objects of relationships who become worthless if they can be replaced, and not active participants equal to their male counterparts.

Prak wrote:A truly intelligent being gets to make its own decisions, and I'd feel really weird if that intelligence was in a sex bot, because one of two things then happens- one, those intelligences are hindered and are not allowed to make a true choice as regards sex, or two, those intelligences do have full choice, and your probably several thousand sex bot wants nothing to do with your dick.

We have had this exact thread before in which you said the exact same thing and I spent several walls of text attempting to disabuse you of your notions. It apparently did not stick. Round 2! Fight!

For simplification purposes, we are going to divide decision-making into two parts; an analytical component and a utility function.

The purpose of the analytical component is to assess situations, list possible actions, and predict outcomes. If you see someone smoking near an audibly hissing propane tank, the analytical component should recognize that the hissing is likely a leak, that propane is flammable, that a cigarette is a flame, and that the cigarette might light the propane leaking into the air. The analytical component should propose a list of actions, like "shout at the dude" or "run the fuck away" or "hug the propane tank," and it should also predict the results of these various actions (respectively that would be you might save the guy's life, you are escaping any potential danger, and you are putitng yourself in potential danger). But here's the thing: the universe does not give a shit which of those you choose. There is no objectively corrent answer. Hugging the propane tank and waiting for the sweet, fiery embrace of death is exactly as valid as shouting at the guy to warn him to stop smoking which is exactly as valid as running for your life because every man for himself. You, as a person with preferences and emotions and opinions, do not find all of those options equally appealling. But that is because you have preferences, emotions, and opinions.

So where the fuck do those preferences, emotions, and opinions come from? Well, that's the utility function. The utility function's purpose is to look at the outcomes predicted by your analytical component and rank them, so that it's actually possible for you to give a shit about your actions and make meaningful choices. Without some method of preferring certain outcomes to other outcomes, you can't make any choices that aren't random choices. Alright, so where the fuck does the utility function come from then? Well, in your case, it comes from millions of years of circumstance and random chance. The reason you prefer to not hug exploding propane tanks is because suicidal creatures are evolutionary dead-ends and your utility function was built over a very long time by a slow, brute force search for evolutionarily successful organisms. Again, there's no objective validity to that. It is the way it is because cold hard math, and math does not judge and does not give shits about anything.

A sophisticated AI sex-bot would operate on the exact same principles; there's an analytical component and a utility function. Except instead of having the utility function designed by millions of years of die rolls in the quest for organisms which won't kill themselves off, it'd be designed by a team of engineers for a specific purpose. That does not make it any less valid or any more forced than your utility function. That does not mean the sex-bot's choices aren't true choices. That does not mean the sex-bot's intelligence is hampered. It means a really boring fucking tautology alongside a really boring observation - people (and sex-bots) like to do the things that they like to do, and people (and sex-bots) don't like to do the things that they don't like to do, and different people (and sex-bots) like and don't like different things. If a sex-bot is a "slave to their programming," then so are you, because you too were programmed by forces completely out of your control.

Now, there is a weird ethical question here, but it concerns the ramifications of holding the power to decide what makes another intelligent being happy. That's kind of an interesting discussion, but it is unrelated to what you are saying.