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Man Builds 'Scarlett Johansson' Robot From Scratch (mirror.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: 42-year-old product and graphic designer Ricky Ma has spent more than $50,000 building a replica Scarlett Johansson robot from scratch. The robot, named Mark 1, responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions. Ricky said, "When I was a child, I liked robots. Why? Because I liked watching animation. All children loved it. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots. After I grew up, I wanted to make one. But during this process, a lot of people would say things like, 'Are you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? It's really hard.'" Ricky has dressed Mark 1 in a crop top and grey skirt. A 3D-printed skeleton lies beneath Mark 1's silicone skin, covering its mechanical and electronic interior.
...is creepy as fuck.
What we're all asking...
It's exactly as expressionless and personality-free as the real thing!
Was it any good?
I want a Scarlett sex bot that's indistinguishable from the real one! Give it to me now!!!
I'd order the 'Ghost world' (2001) version of Ms Johansson. When robot girlfriends become a reality, not only will men choose celebrity lookalikes (see 'Futurama', 'I, dated a robot'.), but teen-aged celebrities.
"anatomically correct"?
don't want any STD references, please.
The robot, named Mark 1
Isn't Mark a male name?
Now THIS is news for nerds.
I don't want to read the article, because it might be something lame, but I like to think I live in a universe where there is such a thing as a Scarlett Johansson robot. Does anyone know if they're selling them yet? Asking for a friend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This scratch stuff is pretty versatile. Food, interesting objects, and now pretty women.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Not me man.. I prefer a real live woman. pretty soon I'm going to bed with my wife. that's a heck of a lot better than an automated suckbot
I love the binary scores and user id's. Special for April 1?
Have you actually tried both?
...of sexbots when they become uh significantly functional?
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
How many of men and boys that start out wanting a sexbot will grow out of it and learn to appreciate the real thing and how many will be permanently spoiled and never be able to adjust to the give and take of a relationship with another real human?
How many older men, who have had relationships with women, even relatively successful ones, will just decide it ain't worth the work anymore and go for a sexbot?
How many women will want sexbots?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Is there a kit?! I'm asking for a friend...
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Are they customizable? I'll order 3 of these.
Table-ized A.I.
Ectogenesis, artificial wombs is expected to be here in twenty years.
Assuming that one day. they can create robots that are indistinguishable from human beings with regards to outward appearance, to tactile sensation, and with respect to how they would interact with people, I expect that the ultimate consequence of robots that can effectively function as complete companions, including as a romantic partner, would be that the only people that would seek romantic relationships with other real people are those that want to procreate.
Oh, and to answer your last question, probably most of them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
All I thought, when I saw the video, is the old ride "Its a Small World" Like those 40 year old animatronics that sing and try to open that damn prison. Don't get me wrong, its amazing he did this at all, especially for the budget. I am sure now that he knows what he is doing he could do it even at half the cost or less. While, at-least for me, its on the low end of the Uncanny valley, it just feels/sounds/looks so robotic for me to consider it even real.
Still, the 3D print of the rib-cage and pelvis was cool, even if that itself felt creepy:P
That's one way to get people to sign up to Obamacare
As it is, greater options/concealable birth control for men will probably be the most disruptive, finally separating sex from procreation across the board, which will really be unprecedented. The sexes will be on fairly equal footing I believe for the first time in history. No idea of how that plays out.
As far as sex robots, etc. it is just the continued automation of labor. As more societies are moving towards a post-feminism model, I don't think it changes much as those places continue to adjust social norms. As it is, a growing percentage of men are opting out of relationships without sexbots, so I don't see any significant changes to what is already in play.
Those societies will ultimately succumb to those who will outbreed them, so in the grand scheme, it doesn't matter anyway.
I'm sure you could build one without the bitch-eyes...unless you are into that kind of thing.
ANYTHING that looks remotely like Scarlett Johansson...
We'll worry about that when there is a bona fide robot that feels and acts exactly like a women.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
... minus all the bitchy parts that people usually make jokes about.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
Women will no doubt complain about it as they already are with the preemptive attempts at banning the technology. But the irony is that sex bots will only be eliminating the males they never wanted to begin with. The homely and awkward will finally have respite and women will never have to be bothered by these "creeps" again, whereas the alpha male types will stick to real women, and continue to be the kind of men that all the women are already competing for.
'You know, I've been searching for someone
Who can share that special love with me
And your eyes have that glow'
Computer Love...Zapp & Roger
Don't be so certain about "alpha males".
There is a certain novelty factor that goes with sexbots, especially when they are capable of sensations no women could ever hope of performing. Same with females- imagine a perfect fit contoured exactly to your anatomy. Dildos outsell fleshlights by a large factor.
Anyway, social acceptability will be the stumbling block, but I could easily see prominent men keeping female acquaintances socially, but otherwise indulging in sexbots in private.
Women have a different set of social expectations of men that will be harder to satisfy with what is essentially a high tech dildo.
How many older men, who have had relationships with women, even relatively successful ones, will just decide it ain't worth the work anymore and go for a sexbot?
Count me in.
Posting anonymously because... well obviously.
What? Bitch and moan about everything? Act like hurricanes (come wild and wet and leave with your house and car)?
No need, comparing real people and sex bots is comparing apples and oranges.
Real relationships are about more than just sex. Even when engaged in sex, it's about more than the mechanical aspect. When you touch your partner and they shiver with pleasure it's a very different feeling to when you touch them and they pretend to shiver with pleasure because they think that's what you want, or because the robot was programmed to. In other words, it's about forming a connection with another sentient being that feels the same way you do.
So while sex bots can cater to certain needs, sure, but not all of them. It won't be until robots become good enough to accompany us in everyday life and hold a natural conversation that we see people really replacing human partners with them out of choice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ha ha it's funny because women, eh? Amirite fellas? Fellas?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you wish to make an Scarlett Johansson robot from scratch, you must first invent the universe. And i don't think he did.
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
Yes, but that's not the problem. Women need sex too, which is satisfied by a nearly equal quantity of men looking for sex. Sex will be more difficult to obtain if men choose sexbots instead. In the 1820s and again in the 1920s, warfare had depleted the quantity of men so women became more promiscuous. Will demand for sexbots plateau as more men get sex, or will women resort to sexbots too? If men resort to sexbots but women don't; what happens then?
One can't really call it Darwinian because the actual Darwinian selection process has already NOT chosen that all people will want to have children. It's simply counter to the cycle of feast/famine that everyone should have kids. Honestly, the whole developed country == negative population growth stems precisely from this because while there's now plenty of money (feast) the economic structure discourages use of that money for children because they're entirely an economic drain.
Unlikely because women (not all all, but lots) seek out jerks (btw, men do the same with women). I'd assume it's a combination of low self-esteem coupled with a desire to please another person. Well, jerks are hard to satisfy in that regard, so it's sort of a challenge to do it. So, perhaps subconsciously it's about trying to better oneself.
See now and porn. See the past and not porn (be it prostitutes, masturbation to imagery in ones head, or merely masturbation alone). Clearly it's not like there hasn't been a long history of quasi-substitutes for men/boys. The fact is that sexbots are unlikely to ever be considered socially acceptable and it's obviously a lot harder to hide a sexbot, so even if they could be built cheap, I don't see sexbots ever being a big thing that people own. Now, if you want to discuss sexbots replacing prostitution....
See above and divorce. Or having a mistress (old or younger). Or visiting a prostitute. I don't see this shifting things much.
Plenty, but again see above. Hell, plenty of women don't have dildos because they're hard to explain, but a penis substitute? Those are like everywhere. :)
Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?
If you get a kick out of being a jerk then a sexbot won't do it for you.
Considering the huge market for vibrators, I'd say a lot want them right now and already have them.
I'm sure it sounds like the sky is falling, Chicken Little, but before we start worrying about sexbots, shouldn't we also worry about homosexuals and people on the downlow before we worry about sexbots, for all of the reasons that you listed?
Until some point in the 20th century, prostitution was widely tolerated. Brothels operated more or less openly, and even if they were illegal, widespread corruption allowed them to operate anyway. I don't think there was much in terms of unintended consequences for the nature of human relationships.
Sex bots I don't think would change all that much, although it would be interesting to see how the forces of moral purity would challenge their commercial implementation. Would they try to ban sex bot brothels?
I'd wager that the women gaining political rights and economic abilities equal (or nearly equal for nitpickers) is largely what eliminated the accepted levels of prostitution that used to exist. Women with economic and political rights gained the upper hand in terms of sexual power and forced men to negotiate more and give women more sexual control.
Women largely operate as a sexual cartel and seek to eliminate competitors who don't adhere to the cartel's pricing requirements. Sex for pay weakens the bargaining position of women generally by requiring a higher level of compliance with women's interests. When men can obtain sex for money relatively easily, women lose some of their bargaining power.
Weak! Lame!
The hardest part to model was her vagina. You can't imagine how much effort it took for her not to notice he was making a cast of her shape, like they do for Real Doll(tm)
So which of the 50 or so domains trying to run scripts on this page actually need to be whitelisted to just play the video?
Will there be a Darwininan selection process where only people who really want children will have them, so eventually everybody wants to have children and is a competent family man/woman?
Between a welfare system so you don't need to have children support you, contraception, morning-after pill and legalized abortion doesn't the vast majority already choose to have children? It's not like you need sex bots to have sex without reproduction, it might cut down on one night stands and prostitution but those rarely lead to children anyway. It doesn't make them good parents, in fact our medical and social system is likely to make sure all of them survive to adulthood almost no matter what. What most parents want are someone to love and be loved by, whether they're capable and competent is often not much of a factor at all. And what they think and reality over the next 18 years will be different.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Holy god that sent shivers down my spine. Here is the creepiest dude on the planet, besides the one building an underage sex robot
Maybe it's just a matter of degree, how convincing can you make them?
They have to be realistic enough to get out of the unclammy valley. Forget the Turing Test, can they pass the Dr. Ruth Test?
I hate to say it, but having suffered a lot of rejection when I was in my twenties, having a good amount of sex in my thirties (quantity not quality), two unsuccessful marriages with bitter divorces, and now being "in demand" among middle-aged golddiggers, I get more satisfaction these days from telling women "no" than from saying "yes."
> How many women will want sexbots?
That's much easier than this project.
Just stick a dildo and a Brad Pitt mask on an ATM.
No, it's funny because it's fucking true. You blind fuck.
I really recommend you go to google images and type in the following 3 words.
ancilla tilia scarlett
You will not be disappointed.
AmiMojo, we all know you have a robot penis in your bedside table, so get off your high horse.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
God how I can relate to this....
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
If S.J. lawyers-up, this guy's toast...
I prefer the left hand Suzuki method.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, if we get to the point were half of the men are either gay, or prefer a sexbot for a companion, bigamy is going to become the norm. If society has a 2:1 ratio of women to men wanting to be with actual women, that's just what's going to happen. In that instance a man knows that he'd better remain worthy of a wife (or two), or his woman will just walk off and get hooked up with another man; because in some sense no good man will ever be unavailable. Thereby getting him stuck with just sexbots for the rest of his life.
Once bigamy becomes common enough, and everyone will have been born into a bigamous relationship, it'll be even more acceptable to just leave an abusive man and find a good one. Women who have a good man will realize that they shouldn't prevent others of the sisterhood to enjoy the happiness they're enjoying, just because they got to the nice man first.
Women have had sexbots for the history of humanity; they're the other half of the species.
Women largely operate as a sexual cartel and seek to eliminate competitors who don't adhere to the cartel's pricing requirements. Sex for pay weakens the bargaining position of women generally by requiring a higher level of compliance with women's interests. When men can obtain sex for money relatively easily, women lose some of their bargaining power.
not this again.
I agree with all of it except the word "largely." Nerds are obsessed with the market aspects of dating. It is in all the PUA stuff, too, "demonstration of higher value" and using 0 - 10 ratings to choose among the strategy cookbook for approaching the Target. I think that it makes a seductive kind of conscious sense while you are single to think this way, but once you aren't, it doesn't make sense at all, so it was never really correct. Also, if you search your feelings honestly, or look around at what's actually working well between men and women, I think you'll find it's very untrue, and not aspirational: the more these capitalist metaphors leak into the early phases of dating, the worse off all us men and women are.
wait until a hacker load the bitch virus into your female robot friend
it could be worse, she (it?) could catch the beartrap ramsonware worm and demand that it wont release your bits until you pay the ramson
You know what seems creepy to me? The preoccupation many people have with worrying about what other people find personally appealing.
Guy likes his robot. So what?
My personal concerns are what I like and what any partner of mine likes.
Here are the metrics for my concerns with others in this area: Informed consent. That's it. That's all of it. Do issues of informed consent come up with a non-conscious robot? No. Not at all. Ergo, it's only a matter of interest in the sense of here's something in the personal behavior spectrum someone else is interested in... and then considering whether I would be interested in such a thing, or not.
There may be (probably is) a legal issue with Johansson's likeness; I wouldn't consider such an issue valid in terms of "should there be a law", but I would not be the least bit surprised if this was something he ended up having to deal with, because legal systems such as ours and the UK's, quite unlike other people's personal and consensual activities, is inherently creepy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A "sex bot brothel" that did not also offer human or conscious robotic services would be a matter of the customers making personal choices for themselves.
Would people interfere with such personal choices? Consider the current circumstances:
o Laws against various types of consensual sexual acts are widespread ("sodomy laws")
o Texas has laws specifically against sex toys
o Laws against gambling are widespread
o Laws against drug use are widespread
o Laws based on pathological definitions of "informed" are widespread
So I think it is clear that laws against "brothels" that utilize non-conscious robotics as sexual tools are extremely likely.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Please propose an alternate theory that better fits the facts. "Searching your feelings" is not good science.
I think most of it isn't aspirational or conscious at all, I think it's mostly evolutionary biology behaviors that border on instinctual. I don't think women get together and strategize on the best way to obtain the benefits of male relationships with minimal sexual compliance, nor do I think men (effectively, anyway) strategize on how to obtain sex from women with the smallest amount of effort.
I think evolutionary biology, though, has ingrained sexual behaviors into cultures and maybe even as instinct into people to match desired outcomes with sexuality. For women this means stable mates who will contribute materially to raising offspring, and for men this means women who are sexually compliant and monogamous to produce offspring that are their genetic progeny.
I think the economic model of a cartel is an interesting way to look at the social organization of sexual activity. Women act in surprisingly uniform ways as a group towards various aspects of sexuality that suggest a cartel. Women tend to be very critical of other women who are promiscuous, for example, much like a cartel does when one of its members violates the pricing rules. Prostitution is just a form of promiscuity that is profitable for both parties. Older women frown on older men with younger women, as it threatens the artificial valuations the cartel wants to impose -- the older woman is an inferior product (appearance, ability to successfully bear healthy children, etc) whose pricing normal market mechanisms would discount, however the cartel always wants to impose its own pricing mechanisms, seeking uniform pricing levels regardless of the product quality.
It's also interesting how economic externalities, like job equality and legal equality, influence the cartel pricing arrangements. The cartel itself is somewhat under attack, as its own members now question their pricing model. They still have a product on offer, but they don't know how to value the exchange they receive for it. Some value it low -- women with good job prospects may engage in sex more freely, as they no longer value the material stability of a marriage partner. Some eschew the value completely, disengaging from male sexual relationships. This chaos in the market is somewhat evident from reading publications oriented towards women, and the hand-wringing over sexuality, men, even lesbianism as an alternative lifestyle.
On the latter topic, I'm kind of amazed at the number of stories I've heard lately of acquaintances who have been married and even had children who end up divorced because their wife "discovered" they were lesbians in their late 30s or 40s. This kind of "discovery" would have been unheard of a century ago, and I think more closely reflects the kind of disruption in gender and sexual identity as women leave their childbearing years and no longer have the maternal instinct for childbearing. While some of these women may actually have been social prisoners of a culturally imposed sexual identity, I think its difficult to believe that ALL of them were. I think a more compelling explanation is that these women more likely had no compelling economic interest in their husbands and when combined with a naturally declining libido as they entered the sunset of their childbearing years and are actually making a much more conscious lifestyle choice that simply abandons men as a desirable partner.
How many couples will want to stay together but have his and her sexbots on the side?
How many couples will want one sexbot on the side for threesomes?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
There is a serious lack of dongle jokes in this area.
You'd probably get a real hoot out of the article linked from this story (which I'm assuming may be NSFW)
Indeed. Now lets all sit back and watch some commercials about how men are stupid and inept instead, because apparently that's perfect fine, right-o?
In many countries (Germany, for example) registered brothels are still legal. Those who work there pay taxes and undergo regular health examinations.
"Will women be relieved that all the jerks have gone off with their sexbots and aren't bothering them anymore?"
This brings to mind the saying "Everything is about sex, except sex, that's about power." I've probably got that wrong but it's how I remember it going.
I think in many cases men who are jerks to women, seemingly only in it to get laid, are behaving that way to feel power over someone else. If it were only about getting their rocks off they'd utilize other more expedient methods to save money, time, and drama. So while anatomically functional robots might reduce this problem I don't think it'd be a large change.
With the hot_grits upgrade.
I heard about this guy and his robot on the radio today, but their version was slightly different. The radio version said the guy was just trying to make a "female robot" and that it "just happens" to resemble Scarlett Johansson.