Rise of the Sexbots?

In a post yesterday, @taskmaster4450 was talking about consciousness as it relates to robotics and artificial intelligence and mentioned developments in Japan:

Over there, they have robots that are programmed to take care of the elderly. They are seeing that these people are forming bonds with the robots. They are projecting their human emotions onto the non-conscious being.

Smartass me responded with a flippant comment:

What’s going to happen when sexbots with adaptive AI go mainstream? Lars and the Real Girl on steroids?

But then I started wondering about that what if? And eventually came up with an idea for a story. Hollywood-ready with sex and violence:

In the not-distant future, robotics and A.I. having made great strides, the owner of a Nevada brothel buys a bleeding edge technology sexbot as his newest “employee”. The bot proves to be wildly popular with the Johns in large part because its adaptive A.I. has powerful machine learning that enables it to quickly learn each John’s predilections and provide them with exactly what they want. The sexbot starts taking away customers from the human prostitutes, one of whom utilizes a different A.I. to hack the sexbot and make it “accidentally” attack a John she particularly disliked. The noir mystery later of course solved by another prostitute with the requisite heart of gold.

Yeah, I’ll never actually write the full story. Feel free to do so. If you sell your script to the highest bidder, make sure that I get Inspired by an idea by credit. 😁

But what might happen if sexbots do go mainstream? On a small scale, it’s already happening. This recent BBC story is about a company in China that’s making sex dolls with “A.I. inspired voices”, so dolls rather than bots per se. Like the one Denny Crane had in the closet of his Boston Legal office, but with a “voice”. (I really need to watch some of that show again. Even more than James T. Kirk, Denny Crane is the character that William Shatner was born to play.)

One of the founders of the company mentioned the incredulity they’d heard when they’d first tried to raise capital (“rich people don’t need them and poor people can’t afford them”). But they’re selling like crazy. Maybe that says something about a country with a significant gender imbalance due to years of its One Child policy that encouraged gender-selective abortions, infanticide, and the placing of only girls for international adoptions. For young men in China, finding a wife can be quite difficult. This artificial option doesn’t float my boat, probably doesn’t float yours, but flies off the shelves. Go figure.

But extrapolate to include a dozen or so years of advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3D- and 4D- printing, and mass customization. Maybe not sentience like in Humans, but the façade of sentience that advanced A.I. might represent.

Sex sells is not a new idea. In a more prudish time, there were widespread concerns about new technologies like the telephone and the automobile enabling the loosening of society’s “moral standards”. How many estimates have you seen saying that the internet is 50% porn, 40% cat videos, and 10% all other?

Maybe it’ll be moot. In a generation or two, humans might have so many prosthetics, enhancements, and internal nanobots that the line between human and machine may become blurred.

I sure don’t have any answers here. Just an idea for a story that I’ll never write.

Pixabay image