I, Robot
A robot that gave you the real relationship experience would deny you sex and threaten to dump you at least twice a week
Recently, the always-exciting topic of sex-robot-girlfriends has begun to make its rounds on the internet again. I wasn’t expecting this until after the election! What a great October bonus!
The manosphere is always fairly split on this topic.
One one hand, we have the incels and the MGTOWs ready to declare victory over woman-kind once and for all. Once we have sex robots ready and willing to give men the submissive sexual girlfriend experience, it’s the end of the road for real women. They’ll finally have to lower their insane standards, lest all men choose to be with beautiful, pleasant, submissive robots who never say no to sex.
That’s always been a weird take for me, because when the men nobody wants anyway decide to finally leave women alone and masturbate instead, I don’t think the women care that much if they’re masturbating alone, masturbating to porn, or masturbating with a sex toy that happens to be shaped like a girl. It’s a win for women either way. Finally, these loser men will not only let them be, but also stop their whining.
Except, they probably wouldn’t.
Because fake sex with a fake girl who can’t really desire you is just a very fancy way of jerking off. These men aren’t actually hoping for a happily-ever-after with a sex robot. They know robots aren’t real people. Deep down, what they’re really hoping for is for real women to change their wicked woman ways, maybe in response to the incoming dystopian sex robot thing, and start loving these guys for real.
So naturally, the second we have actual sex robots, the incels won’t get softer. They’ll get louder - much louder - as they constantly refuse to shut up about the robot thing, waving pictures and threats all over the internet, hoping to finally get real women to change their tune and have real sex with them. Because robots aren’t what they really want. Robots are just fancy porn. What they actually want is real women to want them. Futuristic robots will just be one more tool they shout about as they try to negotiate attraction from women who would rather try out one of those futuristic suicide pods than fuck them.
On the other side of the manosphere are the guys who can actually get laid, or who are at least serious about getting their lives in good enough shape to be able to do so. Their opinions about this fun sex-robot topic are pretty much already summarized in the paragraphs above: Fake sex with girl-shaped sex toys is just fancy masturbation. If AI becomes good enough to let robots give guys a fake girlfriend emotional experience as well, that’s just fancy emotional masturbation.
In fact, if a man legit develops an emotional connection with a non-human (e.g., not a homo sapiens female), that wouldn’t be heterosexual behavior any more. It would be somewhere on the Queer spectrum. We’d probably need a new category.
As fun as it is to fantasize about the sex robots of the future, or to make fun of the guys that do, if you really think about it, we’re already mostly at that dystopian state. Technology is just catching up with society, which is a strange place to be because for pretty much the entirety of human history, it’s always been society catching up to technology instead.
The internet has been a presence in the homes of the common man since about 1997. That’s the year when every home that had a computer gained the ability to exchange information with nearly every other computer, anywhere on the planet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It took society about 30 metaphorical seconds after that to begin using the internet for sex. Pornography transformed from magazines and VHS tapes you’d be embarrassed to hunt down to online videos covering every possible type of sex imaginable and many you didn’t even know existed, all of them continuously available on a handheld device in your pocket, 24 hours a day.
At it’s core, what is pornography? It is watching other people be sexual, either alone or with each other, while you masturbate and are not a part of the sexual activities. While there have been some internet pundits claiming that this is cuck-in-training behavior that teaches guys to find the act of watching others have sex arousing, most guys aren’t actually getting off on the act of watching itself. They’re imagining themselves taking part in the action. Pornography is essentially a fake sexual experience.
If you think about it, a sexual encounter with a futuristic sex robot is really just fancy porn. There’s no real woman letting the man in on the action, just an imagined sexual encounter with a masturbatory aid that looks like a woman. A robot who isn’t really a woman is just the next evolution of a video woman who isn’t really there.
Most guys eventually get bored with orgasms. Whether we’re talking about an incel masturbating to pornography or an accomplished hot social dynamo having piles of casual sex, without an actual human connection of some kind, it’s all just friction on the penis. Casual sex at least involves a little bit of human connection, but nothing too deep or substantive — by design; neither party wants that when it’s just casual, because by definition, those emotions would make it more-than-casual.
Casual sex is essentially a fake emotional experience. You’re with another human doing the thing that lovers do, enjoying each other as people very briefly, creating the illusion of an emotional connection. If you just wanted to have an orgasm, you could masturbate. So could she. The entire point of having casual sex instead of just masturbating is the involvement of another human. The emotional connection is the point of casual sex, even if it is intentionally a very slight and mostly fake connection.
That’s the part about sex-robots that gets the lesser half of the manosphere really excited. Masturbating to videos of other people having sex while pretending it’s you was fine for 2001, but when you can have sex with a girl-shaped robot you can touch, feel, and experience, who will speak to you with a girl-sounding voice that uses futuristic AI to decide realistic-ish things to day, you’re not just having fake sex. You’re having a fake emotional experience.
Robots can help men who can’t get laid get one step closer to the casual sex experience the rest of us have. It’s still nowhere near the actual act, but it’s one step closer.
Taking sex out of the equation, our society is no stranger to fake things.
We experience the sense of fake accomplishments through video games. Video games are specifically designed to give you the same dopamine hits you’d feel from actual accomplishments, but at a faster and more attainable pace. A lot goes into game design to make games hard enough to be rewarding but not so hard that people quit, and to deliver bursts of accomplishment often enough to keep people playing, but not so often that people get desensitized to the sensation.
We experience the sense of a fake life where we are known and interact with others through the cultivation of an online presence. In modern times, you can have zero friends in the real world and be darn near famous on the internet. You can even cultivate an online brand focused on a person who doesn’t exist, a life he doesn’t live — everything you wish you could be but are not.
I honestly think we’re on the path toward a dystopian Ready Player One-style world where our internet identities become as important, if not moreso, than our real world selves. If you think about it, the internet is just a giant roleplaying game where we’re all playing characters and slowly improving and advancing our online personas. But humanity is not just friction on our genitals, sound waves when we speak, and neurons firing off in response to things other humans say and do. There’s something else there. Something we can’t nail down and define, but something undeniably human. You can’t fake the human experience, no matter how good your friction, sound waves, and brainwaves are.
In summary, the whole hilarious sex robot discussion is just internet incels, who know robots aren’t people and won’t actually be a suitable sexual or emotional experience no matter what, hoping women don’t know that so they can continue to try to bully women into finally wanting them.
I agree that robots are not going to cause a mass wave of men to quit pursuing women and thus have incels realize their dreams of "women are going to be sorry that they were such bitches". But I really do think that there will be a decent enough percentage of men (5% maybe) who decide that a robot is good enough that they will stop wanting to deal with real women. We already have scads of men who have decided that online porn and video games are enough to want to forgo chasing down women. The robots will magnify this trend. On a societal basis, having 5% of young men opt out of the dating market is a massive massive disruption. The robots will have consequences
As a social robotics engineer, I can say ur starting to reach close into stuff we know in the industry. One step closer is a good way to put it. I will add that the main reason it will never be the same is that the realization of lack of agency and free will would never leave the man's mind.
Imagine the tech peaks and let's say a man pays for a sex robot with the highest human likeness and human like scenario:
- man sets dating app to robots
- robot appears as a profile on man's tinder
- man swipes right, conversation starts.
- man asks out robot, robot agrees, man gets charged for 1 night with robot, man recieves email from credit card company with purchase details.
- man goes with robot to a bar
- man brings robot home and has sex with it.
- robot does all the human stuff, even play breathing noises, move chest gently, go for a pee break, release cum like liquids that stain ur bed etc.
- robot goes back home next morning.
I would argue that is thearotically this is closer to a real date and hookup scenarios than prostitution is, because the prostitute might ask you for the money up front but this one is more covert, by sneakily charging ur card (which prostitutes can replicate with the right kind of ap)
However it is still more fake than prostitution. Because even the prostitute had to make the choice to accept the man's money as a client. The robot had no choice, it does not even have the concept of a choice. It does not have agency and free will
What I know is that this is a turd in the punch bowl that sours the experiences. That though of "this is not a real person capable of making the choicr to have sex with me" will pop into the man's mind and haunt him, especially in the post nut clarity moment. Post nut clarity with a prostitute is pretty bad for most men, post nut clarity with a girl who gives the "I have no choice" "get it over with it quickly" feels is very bad for most men. I assume the same will replicate with more intensity for sex robots
What I don't know yet is the level of self-delusion required to suppress that thought enough to make the purchase worth it. If enough men can self delude it, the industry will boom.
Will it cause the great correction the incels want? Fuck no, by the time those robots become human like enough to be viable, we would have already had robots do everything and the superfluous nature of men will be much more than etched in stone.