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What Sex is Your Robot?
Ant writes "Technology Review has an article about how the more robots interact with humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes."
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"...this is gonna be the best prom ever!"
...that i see word "sex" on slashdot. For a second i thought that we geeks are finally getting lives :) But only for a second - then i read the entire subject.
is a hermaphrodite, male on one side, female on the other.
It's another kind of Transformer. More than meets the eye.
This way I can expand my sexual horizon.
by the inability of the quips to come up with any good material in the first minutes after it was posted.
The Roomba, of course, is that clever little house-cleaning robot
Must be a chick.
My robot is an arm and hand only. And since it doesn't have fingernails, there is no way to tell if its a girl or boy.
Honestly, as robot builder I find this a little boring. It has little to do with robotics. You can take the same robot and give it a different costume and maybe a new voice to change it's sex... big deal.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
... because if a household robot is apparently female, the feminists will complain!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Wonder if we're going to see the Robot counterpart to "Furries" in the future? What would they call themselves?
Maybe they already exist.
GROUP HUG!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I don't want to offend anyone, but I'd really love a gay robot. That way I don't have to strain myself over choosing what to wear in the morning - the robot would have that kind of knowledge embedded in him - some say it's genetics, some say it's the way he was raised, but either way he makes a snappy dresser.
And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Considering that a certain portion of the population is willing to have "sex" with a blow-up doll, it's just a matter of time before robots are marketed for the same purpose.
I'm not joking when I say that the "roboporn" industry is likely to be a significant driving force when it comes to creating cheap, lifelike robots.
I don't know if you could even make a female robot. Since the robot's consciousness would have to be controlled by a computer, I assume it would be based on logic and reason. Both of those qualities are sorely lacking in the females that I've known.
Although, I suppose with good enough pseudo-randomness it might work.
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You'd want to have robots of both sex in your cluster. Because then they eventually may reproduce themselves, saving you huge cost if you want to extend it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, you have to ask yourself some questions
Does it have a 'probe'?
Does it have a connector for input devices?
Imho, determining the sex sounds quite easy.
This is an easy one. When its working correctly its male. When it wont do what its suppose to its female.
That's funny, though. The interior kind of smells of blood. And everyone's really secretive about how they actually built these things.
And I'm sure it shouldn't have gone off on its own like that that one time.
Those two times.
OK, those three times. And that one ended up messy. And hang on... that's just armour plating! It's not a robot at all! What's going on here?
OH MY GOD IT'S MY MOTHER! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH! AAAAASUKAAAAAA!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"Whoah, whoah, wait, Bender. As long as we're here, why don't we take in some exotic dancing?"
"Hey, great idea!"
*gasp* "But those girls don't wear cases! You can see their bare circuits!"
My robot regards himself as an "electro-metro-sexual"
the woman robot is the one with the more complicated remote control =)
The research and exploration of space is mainly driven by the prospect of one day having sex with aliens. I think the research on robots has similar motivations.
A song about a broken hearted guy who ends up having sex with a robot that is part vacuum cleaner part robotic pig. He ends up short circuiting it (getting it wet somehow) and going to jail for murder (illegal to harm cyborgs in the futuristic society).
BTW - I'm pretty sure the robot was a male. Anyone remember this?
Great idea! Let us intruduce sexism to robots!
I ask you, is this really a world we want our robots to live in?!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
A class learning French and trying to get to grips with gender wondered if the word "computer" should be masculine or feminine. Split into two groups, men and women, they were asked to say which they considered a computer to be, and to give four reasons for their decision
The women decided that computers are masculine because:
-In order to gain their attention, you have to turn them on.
-They are full of data, but are still clueless.
-They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but most of the time they are the problem.
-As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better one.
The men decided that computers are feminine because:
-No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
-The language they use to communicate with each other is totally incomprehensible.
-Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
-As soon as you commit to them, you spend half your disposable income on buying accesories for them.
$cat
Much better to have female robots. They're much more reasonable and reserved, not going berserk like the males.
Wait, what parallel universe am I talking about?? They're both crazy!! </joke>
I say, leave gender out of the equation. It's kind of creepy if you have robots lamely emulating human characteristics. Also, it's not a good idea to include gender, because it introduces complexity which we don't really need at this point. Perhaps it would be useful for recreational robots, but for robots that actually serve a purpose... No thanks.
The author of the article says that taking on genders will allow them to better interact with humans. I think it would make things more difficult, because gender is such a human construct. We have so many complex psychological issues with our fellow beings. I think it would make things much simpler if we just made perceptions of robots as they are, without intentionally engineering them to appear as a certain gender. Robots should behave like Robots. We don't really know what that is yet, but I think "behavior" of robots is a long way down the road. We're not there yet.
BTW what's the point of having a gender associated with a robot? I don't think Robots have need of those characteristics, or sex for that matter. Well, maybe Infrared port sex. Or maybe Seriel port....yeah...
Well, now that I think of it, I can think of a purpose. Marketing. So, for an assistant robot, you make it abundantly female, and of course, all the guys will want one. Then you make the "security" droid male, (Personally I think a female security robot might be more appealing, but then you've got to play on the typical Male Protector stereotype), and this will get all the females buying one. I think it's a little cheap. But, the markedroids have got to have something to keep them busy, I suppose.
OK I'm thinking about this way too much. Off to finish finals...
Why should the female robots do all the housework? For less pay too? Oh wait, robots do not get paid, they are virtual slaves with no rights. Nevermind. ;)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Only you quivering meatbags worry about such things.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
An important distinction to be made is that sex is not gender. Sex should be used only when referring to the biological nature of the object in question, whereas gender refers to a set of socially-constructed rules governing the objects behavior in society. To quote Everything2: "In anthropology gender is the accepted way to refer to a set of behaviors/beliefes often related to physical sex traits. You can have a gender that is different from your biological sex, if your culture premits."
For reliability reasons, I prefer machines based on eunuchs.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Since selling "sex" was one of the first profitable "businesses" on the 'net, it would make perfect sense for robots to go there too.
Are we going to have people cross-dressing robots to camouflage their sexual preferences?
Would having sex with an anotomically correct robot be cheating on your spouse? (or is that just masturbation?)
Gives new meaning to "Brave New World"!
This is nothing... I read it first as "What Sex is [Best With] Your Robot?" and have even started to write quite an interesting essay on the subject, entitled "Robosexualism and Technofetishism in Modern Academia," only to have it deleted later in utter embarrassment, after one of my coworkers has read what I was just writing... I don't know which part of "No, it is not my diary, for God's sake! It is a scientific anallysis for Slashdot community!" he doesn't understand...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Unix, of course!
(sayonara karma)
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
"Mr Spock, the women on your planet are logical. That's the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim" - Kirk
I want my robot to be... robotic
Seriously. I can't be the only one that finds it really annoying when my Windows XP machine modifies the way it behaves because it is guessing what I want to do. It's damn irritating. Or when it suggests I might want to clean icons off my desktop, or whatever.
I do not want my robot to start cleaning things I haven't told it to clean. Or comment on the fact that it's a nice day. Or try to be funny or cute. Just do as I say. You're a frickin' machine.
I'm sorry but I stopped reading right here, for I am not quite sure whether I want to read about it...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"Most people realize that fundamentally there's nothing going on inside the silicon except the cold calculation of ones and zeros"
Guess he's not running AMD then?
After reading all of the above comments with sincere interestedness, I inevitably came to the following conclusion: we need to get laid. All of us. Otherwise the entire robotics industry might soon become nothing more but a robofetishistic sex shop for sick perverted deviants. Seriously.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I'm sure in the future when robots integrate more easily with our lives and it becomes natural to interact with them perhaps "sex" of the robot will become important for sales, but determining the sex of a Roomba? Come on, thats ridiculous.
And I'm not really sure we need to determine the sex of a robot that has, dum dum DUUUUMM mastered stairs. An impressive achievement true, but not sex assignment worthy.
What can I say? I have a definite preference => the best of both worlds! Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too? -- Jeanette ;>
Man, this looks like we are seeing (yet another) Isaac Asimov's Book: The Robots of Dawn.
AFAIR, there was two robots that looked like humans, and one woman used one as a "boyfriend" (in the biblical sense). No one knew about that, except the guy who was inspecting the case. In the background, a lot of people in that planet (it was a "not so large" one, and a few humans lived there, with lots of robots working as servants) imagined that "that" could be happening in a big house, with a woman and a robot that looked like a human, and worried about the day where robots would replace humans for the more "carnal" things.
Also, I can remember a ST:TNG episode where Data meets Tasha "in the biblical sense".
So, what I mean by all that, is that some people will be worried about the idea of robots that look like humans, as they could "stole" the place of a husband or a wife.
That's an easy one... Good robots are expensive to build, take a lot of maintenance to keep them happy, and frequent trips to the store.
That sounds like a woman to me. And no, I am not single...
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
Disclaimer: I am a very happy Mac owner (iBook) - this is in no way an anti-Mac post.
A while back on *bottomquark, there was an article about a guy who built a belly-dancing robot. Robotics work happened to be his day job, and he was fascinated by the motions. Turns out that belly-dancing, and spine movements in general turn out to be variations of the movements of swimming fish. Not surprising when you think about it, because both are spinal undulations. A little odder to think of erect spinal posture a a variation of spinal undulation, but still reasonable, when you add feedback.
Anyhow, nature has shown remarkable versatility in reusing simple fundamentals to do complex things.
Your robot may not be as difficult as you think.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I seem to recall Anton LaVey forecasting (ie guessing) that a huge industry will develop to produce lifelike humanoid robot slaves, so that instead of wasting our time and energy trying to interact with other people who don't share our sensibilities or views, we'll all be able to gain instant gratification from a robot programmed to respond in the manner that pleases us most.
Not that anyone reading Slashdot would want to disengage from human society and take solace with a bunch of anthropomorphic circuits.
*thinks*
Oh dear.
If my memory of my class in Medieval Literature is correct, the Icelandic people had two terms that had a similar connotation to gender that were used to refer to people, but were closer to 'strong' and 'weak'.
So an an improper translation, a female leader might be refered to as 'he', while an elderly male might be refered to as 'she'.
But in today's context, I think my brother's gone out with women who were more masculine than he was.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
In some languages some constructs bear the mark of the speaker's gender; e.g. in Russian there is no way to say anything in the past or present perfect tense without revealing your gender: "I (male) have said" is "Ya skazal", but "I (female) have said" is "Ya skazala". To assign a gender to a talking robot is therefore a necessity.
Many of you may have read this already, but if you haven't, I highly recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I found its take on gender and how it impacts all aspects of our relationships to be really interesting. And it's a good story, too.
I've already conclusively proven that male robots cannot handle gender-conversion.
I removed my robot's nuts, and it just totally fell apart.
C3PO's gender never was in doubt, according to Topps.
In "Perelandra", C.S. Lewis makes the suggestion that gender is a fundamental reality, of which biological sex is an imperfect reflection. For instance, even the Eldila - alien beings who do not reproduce - have gender. If that is true, then assigning gender to a robot makes perfect sense.