From homemade dildos to Harmony, the AI sex robot
"...amid an economic crisis, with restaurants and retailers closing their doors and larger companies laying off and furloughing employees, the sex tech industry is booming."
A Bustle article published in April 2020, weeks after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, explored the drastic boost in the sex tech industry. According to the research, Dame Products (a popular sex toy retailer) experienced a 30 percent increase in sales between the months of February to April, and popular sexual wellness brand Unbound reported selling twice as many toys as normal in this period.
While the new coronavirus was crashing the economy in other ways, the sex tech industry was one of the few that actually saw improvements, likely due to people all over the world being advised, encouraged, and in some instances forced to stay at home.
Something similar happened in 2008, during the recession: the sex toy industry was one of the only industries at the time that didn't gravely suffer.
The evolution of sex tech from stone dildos to artificial intelligence.
The history of sex toys is quite interesting. A 28,000-year-old siltstone dildo was uncovered in Germany in 2005. Luxury bronze dildos have also been found in China that are at least 2,000 years old.
Aside from various materials being shaped into dildos, there has always been an interest in how to advance sex technology, even before it involved actual technology at all.
- The 1700s: Steam-powered vibrators (such as the Manipulator).
- The 1800s—1900s: The invention of the first electric vibrator (the Pulsoson) and "beauty tools" being used for sexual satisfaction (such as the Polar Cub massager)
- The 1920s—1940s: The introduction of hand-held massagers (the Andis Vibrator) and compact devices (such as the Oster Stim-U-Lax)
- The 1940s—1960s: Japan introduced the "Cadillac of Vibrators" (The Hitachi Magic Wand), which eventually made it's way to America.
- 1965: The invention of silicone, which most modern sex toys are made of.
- The 1980s—1990s: The invention of the rabbit-style vibrator, made more popular with one of the first showings of a sex toy on television ("Sex and the City").
- The 2000s: Visual porn website Pornhub launched and sex toys became increasingly popular. Erotic literature also became more common and popular, with "50 Shades of Grey" and others like it.
- The 2010s and beyond: Sex toys and technology start to blend, and the world's first internet-controlled sex toy was launched in 2010 by Lovense.
In 2016, "Harmony", the world's first AI sex robot was designed by a tech firm called Realbotix.
From television shows to real-life applications, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more popular in all areas of human life.
Credit: Willyam Bradberry on Shutterstock
In 2020, more than one in five Americans (22 percent) say they would consider having sex with a robot. YouGov conducted a study in February 2020 that compared results from a similar study from 2017.
According to the results, 6 percent more people in 2020 are comfortable with the idea of having sex with a robot than in 2017.
YouGov points out that the increase in consideration is particularly significant among American adults between the ages of 18-34 years old. Additionally, how people feel about having sex with a robot has also changed. In 2020, 27 percent of Americans said they would consider it cheating if they had a partner who had sex with a robot during the relationship, compared to the 32 percent reported in 2017.
"If you had a partner who had sex with a robot, would you consider it cheating?"
The results from this interesting study also reveal that many people (42 percent) believe having sex with a robot is safer than having sex with a human stranger.
Robots (and robotic tech) already play a vital role in speeding up manufacturing, packaging, and processing across various industries. From television shows to real-life applications, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more popular in all areas of human life.
According to YouGov, "a Bloomberg report outlining Amazon's plans for an Alexa-powered robot that follows and helps you around the home may redefine how these machines service humans in the near future."
A likely result is that we will soon have A.I. approximately as cognitively sophisticated as mice or dogs. Now is the time to start thinking about whether, and under what conditions, these A.I.s might deserve the ethical protections we typically give to animals.
Discussions of "A.I. rights" or "robot rights" have so far been dominated by questions of what ethical obligations we would have to an A.I. of humanlike or superior intelligence – such as the android Data from Star Trek or Dolores from Westworld. But to think this way is to start in the wrong place, and it could have grave moral consequences. Before we create an A.I. with humanlike sophistication deserving humanlike ethical consideration, we will very likely create an A.I. with less-than-human sophistication, deserving some less-than-human ethical consideration.
We are already very cautious in how we do research that uses certain nonhuman animals. Animal care and use committees evaluate research proposals to ensure that vertebrate animals are not needlessly killed or made to suffer unduly. If human stem cells or, especially, human brain cells are involved, the standards of oversight are even more rigorous. Biomedical research is carefully scrutinised, but A.I. research, which might entail some of the same ethical risks, is not currently scrutinised at all. Perhaps it should be.
You might think that A.I.s don't deserve that sort of ethical protection unless they are conscious – that is, unless they have a genuine stream of experience, with real joy and suffering. We agree. But now we face a tricky philosophical question: how will we know when we have created something capable of joy and suffering? If the AI is like Data or Dolores, it can complain and defend itself, initiating a discussion of its rights. But if the AI is inarticulate, like a mouse or a dog, or if it is for some other reason unable to communicate its inner life to us, it might have no way to report that it is suffering.
A puzzle and difficulty arises here because the scientific study of consciousness has not reached a consensus about what consciousness is, and how we can tell whether or not it is present. On some views – 'liberal' views – for consciousness to exist requires nothing but a certain type of well-organised information-processing, such as a flexible informational model of the system in relation to objects in its environment, with guided attentional capacities and long-term action-planning. We might be on the verge of creating such systems already. On other views – 'conservative' views – consciousness might require very specific biological features, such as a brain very much like a mammal brain in its low-level structural details: in which case we are nowhere near creating artificial consciousness.
It is unclear which type of view is correct or whether some other explanation will in the end prevail. However, if a liberal view is correct, we might soon be creating many subhuman AIs who will deserve ethical protection. There lies the moral risk.
Discussions of "A.I. risk," in needless vivisections, the Nazi medical war crimes, and the Tuskegee syphilis study). With AI, we have a chance to do better. We propose the founding of oversight committees that evaluate cutting-edge A.I. research with these questions in mind. Such committees, much like animal care committees and stem-cell oversight committees, should be composed of a mix of scientists and non-scientists – A.I. designers, consciousness scientists, ethicists and interested community members. These committees will be tasked with identifying and evaluating the ethical risks of new forms of A.I. design, armed with a sophisticated understanding of the scientific and ethical issues, weighing the risks against the benefits of the research.
It is likely that such committees will judge all current A.I. research permissible. On most mainstream theories of consciousness, we are not yet creating A.I. with conscious experiences meriting ethical consideration. But we might – possibly soon – cross that crucial ethical line. We should be prepared for this.
John Basl & Eric Schwitzgebel
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Cornell University engineers have created an artificial material that has three key traits of life — metabolism, self-assembly and organization. The engineers were able to pull off such a feat by using DNA in order to make machines from biomaterials that would have characteristics of alive things.
Dubbing their process DASH for "DNA-based Assembly and Synthesis of Hierarchical" materials, the scientists made a DNA material that has metabolism — the set of chemical processes that convert food into energy necessary for the maintenance of life.
The goal for the scientists is not to create a lifeform but a machine with lifelike characteristics, with Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering, pointing out "We are not making something that's alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before."
The major innovation here is the programmed metabolism that is coded into the DNA materials. The set of instructions for metabolism and autonomous regeneration allows the material to grow on its own.
In their paper, the scientists described the metabolism as the system by which "the materials comprising life are synthesized, assembled, dissipated, and decomposed autonomously in a controlled, hierarchical manner using biological processes."
To keep going, a living organism must be able to generate new cells, while discarding old ones and waste. It is this process that the Cornell scientists duplicated using DASH. They devised a biomaterial that can arise on its own from nanoscale building blocks. It can arrange itself into polymers first and into mesoscale shapes after.
The DNA molecules in the materials were duplicated hundreds of thousands of times, resulting in chains of repeating DNA that were a few millimeters in length. The solution with the reaction was injected into a special microfluidic device that facilitated biosynthesis.
This flow washed over the materials, causing DNA to synthesize its own strands. The material even had its own locomotion, with the front end growing while the tail end was degrading, making it creep forth.
This fact allowed the researchers to have portions of the materials competing against each other.
"The designs are still primitive, but they showed a new route to create dynamic machines from biomolecules. We are at a first step of building lifelike robots by artificial metabolism," explained Shogo Hamada, the lead and co-corresponding author of the paper as well as a lecturer and research associate in the Luo lab. "Even from a simple design, we were able to create sophisticated behaviors like racing. Artificial metabolism could open a new frontier in robotics."
Generated DASH patterns.Credit: Shogo Hamada / Cornell University
The material that was created lasted for two cycles of synthesis and degradation but the longevity can be extended, think the researchers. This could lead to more generations of the material, eventually resulting in a "lifelike self-reproducing machines," said Hamada.
He also foresees that the system can result in a "self-evolutionary possibility."
Next for the material? The engineers are looking at how to get it to react to stimuli and be able to seek out light or food all on its own. They also want it to be able to avoid harmful stimuli.
Check out the video of Professor Luo explaining their achievement here —
You can check out the new paper "Dynamic DNA Material With Emergent Locomotion Behavior Powered by Artificial Metabolism," in the April 10th issues of Science Robotics.
