Technology

I want my Lucy Liu Bot as much as the next guy, but I don't see why you feel this challenges the ability of technology to "take over" sex and relationships.

I don't disagree that there will come a day that that will happen, but I think that it may be further away than you might think, if we're talking something that can move around like a human, with human strength.

As far as I'm aware, existing sex dolls, even ones with mechanical components, are akin to industrial robots on car assembly lines. Any significant force they can exert is very mechanically constrained. A sex doll with some embedded offset-cam vibration motors cannot jam those motors into a user's eye socket and turn them on, and a car assembly robot works in a limited space bounded by safety lines on the floor.

Robots that can mechanically physically harm humans -- especially when harder-to-predict machine learning software is driving their actions -- tend to have restrictions on how close humans can get to them. If you look at the Boston Robotics videos, which do have robots doing all sorts of neat cutting-edge stuff, the humans are rarely in close proximity to the robots. They'll have someone else with a remote E-stop killswitch if things look like they're going wrong. In their labs, they have observation areas behind Plexiglass. Even in the cases where they intentionally interact with the robot physically, they're using a hockey stick to create distance. That's a lot of safety safeguards put into the picture.

The problem is that a sex doll capable of moving and acting as a human does, with human-level strength, is also going to be quite able to kill a human. A sex doll is -- well, for most applications -- going to have to be interacted with physically, so Plexiglass or a hockey stick isn't gonna work. And I think that few people are going to want to have someone observing their session with a hand on an E-stop button.

Cars deal with a fairly restricted problem space and are mechanically very limited and doing safe self-driving cars is pretty hard.

Sex chatbots don't have the robotic safety issues. They aren't robotic. But AI-driven sex dolls, at least ones that can physically move like a human...those are another story. My guess is that the robotic safety issues are going to be a significant barrier to human-like sex dolls -- and not just sex dolls, but large, powerful robots in general that interact in close proximity to humans and don't have mechanical restrictions on how they move.

I think we're still a very long way away from the point where the hardware for a life-size realistic sex robot is cheap enough for anyone other than a few rich dudes to afford, let alone one which can offer a better experience than a prostitute

that would be awsome