Monday, June 19, 2006

She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy

Issac Asimov's world is closer yet to becoming a reality.

With all of the advances being made in the world of robotics, scientists and engineers around the world are debating the ethics surround the industry, and are considering ways to encode a certain set of ethics and rules into the robotic AI, remiscent (if not an exact copy) of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

Now, all of this sounds incredibly noble and exciting, doesn't it? Then comes this little tidbit:

The analysis culminated at a meeting recently held in Genoa by the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) that examined the problems likely to arise as robots become smarter, faster, stronger and ubiquitous.

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group.

Excuse me? Did they just say...sex?

"How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?"

This is what happens when you let sex-deprived nerd-boys create dolls. First they make them physically good looking, like the japanese. Then they make them soft to the touch, like the koreans did. Now the euros are already considering how to turn them into sex slaves. Amsterdam, here we come!

“People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” Christensen said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys? The greatest danger, however, is likely to lie with robots that are able to learn from their “experiences”. As systems develop, robots are likely to have much more sophisticated self-learning mechanisms built into them and it may become impossible to predict exactly how they will behave.

It's like having your vibrator tell you what IT likes. "Mmmm yeah baby, rotate me around, like that yeah, oh oh oh!"

Of course, then the problem is it might have an orgasm before you do.

1 comment:

Ariq the Moor said...

More potential problems with sex robots:

- when things get a little wild, a human will just cramp up. a robot will blow a gasket and give you a hernia
- body fluids + electronics= new meaning to the need to "wear a rubber";
- that squeaking you hear isn't the bed;
- the term "do the robot" takes on a whole new meaning;
- when they say she could suck the chrome off a fender...
- they're ALWAYS faking it