Impacts of Robotic Sex (1997)

After reading Gizmodo's interview with a technosexual I thought it was as good a time as any to look at an article from the July-August, 1997 Futurist about sex with robots.

Joel C. Snell wrote a piece called, "Impacts of Robotic Sex," which describes many of the same reasons for wanting a robotic sex partner as Zoltan does in the Gizmodo article. Alimony, disease, and a sense of shifting cultural norms all lend themselves to a tone of inevitability in both pieces. The more tomorrow changes, the more it stays the same. The Futurist magazine article appears below in its entirety.

(The robot to the right is a painting my girlfriend, Malorie Shallcross, did for Valentine's Day.)

Robots that provide sexual companionship are likely to become common in the future. Prototype models have already been reported from Japan.

The future "sexbots" will have humanlike features and will be soft and pliant, like the latest dolls for children. Sexbots will contain vibrators to provided love talk.

Sexbots will be disease free; they won't judge one's sexual performance, and they won't say no. They will never have a headache or demand alimony.



They could certainly alter human relations. Here are a few potential impacts of sexbots:

Marriages may be destroyed by sexbots. A husband chooses sex with the sexbot, alienating his wife; the jealous wife destroys her sexbot rival and sues the manufacturer.

Individuals may change gender orientation. Heterosexual people may use a same-sex sexbot to experiment with homosexual relations. Or gay people might use other-sex sexbots to experiment with heterosexuality.

Robotic sex may become addictive. Sexbots would always be available and never say no, so addictions would be easy to feed. People may become obsessed by their ever faithful, ever pleasing sexbot lovers and rearrange their lives to accommodate their addictions. Eventually, support groups will likely form.

Technovirgins will emerge. An entire class of humans may emerge who not only will never have sex with other humans, but won't even desire it.

Robotic sex may become "better" than human sex. Like many other technologies that have replaced human endeavors, robots may surpass human technique; because they would be programmable, sexbots would meet each individual user's needs.

Would electronic and robotic sex reduce teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, pedophilia, and prostitution? The jury is still out on these implications. However, boundaries, barriers, and beliefs will be challenged.

See also:
Civilized Adultery (1970)
Headlines of the Near Future (1972)

The Future of Religion (1980)

For the October, 1980 issue of The Futurist Ted Peters, associate professor of systematic theology at the Pacific Lutheran Seminary (Berkeley, CA), wrote a piece titled, "The Future of Religion in a Post-Industrial Society." An excerpt appears below.

Western society is so pre-occupied with the consumption of goods and services that even religion may become just another commodity, like the packaged tour to an exotic island. If so, the world may lose a possible solution to its great crises.

What is to become of religion as our society moves further and further into the post-industrial period? Certain trends are fairly easy to identify. For example, an extension of Islamic influence due primarily to the sudden expansion of wealth in Muslim hands. But I would like to bypass trends of this type and focus on something else, namely, the potential interaction between religion and the current understanding of the human self which has developed during the now passing industrial period.

My thesis is that as our civilization becomes increasingly post-industrial, our preoccupation with consuming goods and services will most likely commoditize religion. There is now a strong trend - which I believe will continue - toward treating the moral and spiritual dimensions of life as commodities to be acquired and disposed of according to tastes and whims of shoppers in the religious marketplace.

Excessive consumption, however, whether it be consumption of material goods or spiritual values, is the root of the crisis we call the "world problematique." In addition, as long as the consumer mentality prevails, we will be condemned to a prostitution of the essential religious vision, a vision of the transcendent unity of all things which requires a sacrifice of the human ego. It is just such a vision, however, that holds the greatest promise for resolving the world problematique.

See also:
Headlines of the Near Future (1972)
Future Shock (1972)

The Future of Personal Robots (1986)

The May-June 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine ran an article titled, "The Future of Personal Robots." An excerpt appears below.

Robots can already be used to entertain young children. Their entertainment value for older children and adults, however, is for the most part limited to the intellectual challenge of programming them. But future robots will be complete home-entertainment centers, able to sing and dance and tell jokes, as well as control all your electronic entertainment equipment - TV, radio, stereo, computer games and telephone.

Like many paleo-futuristic images of robots, the article imagines the robot as a mechanical person, one of the least useful forms a robot can take for those living in 2007. Taken literally, it is difficult to image the robot that will, "sing and dance and tell jokes," being mass-produced anytime soon.

Also, do the people above live in a house with kitchen counters just two feet tall or is Omnibot one hell of a jumper?

See also:
Closer Than We Think! Robot Housemaid (1959)
Robot Farms (1982)
The Robot Rebellion (1982)
Japanese Retail Robots (1986)
Robots: The World of the Future (1979)
Living Room of the Future (1979)

The Electronic Newspaper (1978)

The April, 1978 issue of The Futurist magazine ran an incredibly forward-thinking piece about the future of newspapers.

If we think of a newspaper as being a printed object delivered to our homes, we may be talking about replacing newspaper with an electronic signal. But if we think (as I do) of newspapers as organizations which disseminate news and information by the most efficient methods available - then we are thinking in terms of applying a new technology to an existing institution.

The author, Kenneth Edwards, was writing about the emerging technology of Teletext in the UK. If the newspaper industry has had 30 years to think about this concept and decided that litigation is better than a new business model, it's tough to feel bad about their declining revenue.

See also:
Tablet Newspaper (1994)
Future Newspapers Written by Advertisers (1912)
Online Shopping (1967)

Fuzzy-Duzzy, The Computer You Cuddle (1976)

The August, 1976 issue of The Futurist magazine ran this blurb about the need for humanized machines, which would make technology less intimidating for the average user. The piece appears to have originally appeared in Hal Hellman's 1976 book Technophobia: Getting Out of the Technology Trap.

We need "humanized machines." Wes Thomas, editor of the future-oriented newsletter Synergy Access and a computer expert, once told me of a "dream" he has. "What I'd like to do," he said, "is develop computer systems that are more 'human,' that people are not afraid of, in fact that they would get along with and even enjoy." He would like, therefore, to develop the "Fuzzy-Duzzy."

Today, he explains, computer terminals are made out of metal and plastic. They are cold and uninviting; therefore most people are immediately turned off by them. And they look menacing, like something a mad scientist would create.

With Fuzzy-Duzzy, he says, "you would put your hands into this warm, inviting Teddy-Bear thing, and you would be able to look inside through a porthole. Inside there would be these big knobs you could get hold of and turn, instead of the usual miniature keys everybody keeps making mistakes on. By moving things around, you'd be able to communicate with the machine.

"And the pictures that come on the screen would not be the usual angular shapes, but nice, round organic forms.

"So I'm interested in developing a sort of organic computer terminal that people will feel at home with immediately."

When I mentioned this to an acquaintance, he became furious. He called it underhanded, meretricious, and worse. A machine has no right being "friendly."

Thomas's "dream" is a bit extreme, I will admit. Yet humanized machines combined with people who are not afraid of them (and who understand where and how to use them) may be the way we will eventually do many of the things that remain to be done in basic education and job training, in health care and perhaps in many other applications as well. Just as the supermarket put the customer to work, so too may it be necessary for patients and prospective patients to do some of the pre-entry work themselves, aided by computers - humanized ones, of course.

Machines will also help us provide sight for the blind and hearing for the deaf, mobility for the lame and dexterity for the handicapped. Will humanization of such machines be necessary too?

Start 'em Young (1991)

I have three questions about this picture:

1. Why did we believe paper faxes were the future?

2. Does that toddler have Wi-Fi?

3. Why does the teddy bear have a phone?


This illustration by Tom Chalkley ran in the November-December, 1991 issue of The Futurist magazine.

See also:
Apple's Grey Flannel Navigator (1988)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
Starfire (Part 3, 1994)
Online Shopping (1967)

Electronic Shopping (1983)

Terry R. Hiller wrote an article titled "Going Shopping in the 1990s" for the December, 1983 issue of The Futurist magazine. Mr. Hiller was understandably skeptical of the prospect of electronic shopping. However, many of the things he asserted would not come to pass did indeed happen.

An excerpt appears below, along with graphics from the piece.


Nor is electronic retailing equipped to deal with the logistics of delivery. Product information, selection, and billing can all be transmitted electronically, but physical merchandise must be physically moved. Today's mail-order houses depend on federal or private package delivery, services that are simply not structured for the huge traffic increases that large-scale teleshopping would generate. It would require not only the total restructuring of existing routes and systems, but an investment of billions of dollars in equipment and personnel - resources we are simply unable to spare either now or in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, since teleshoppers can only view products piecemeal, electronic marketing has severe drawbacks as a retailing device. In nine square feet of drugstore shelf space, you might easily encounter as many as 80 or more different brands and sizes of cold remedies. But in electronic marketing, shelf space is defined as time- the number of second an item appears on the screen. Allowing even 10 seconds per item, it would take more than 13 minutes to show that same 80 items. Add to this the cost of production, handling, and shipping, and we begin to suspect that the "convenience" of electronic marketing will be very expensive. Unless we are prepared to sacrifice variety - and therefore competition - some products will never be purchased "in absentia."


See also:
Online Shopping (1967)
Mobile Malls (1981)

Mobile Malls (1981)

The February, 1981 issue of The Futurist featured this illustration of a "mobile mall" of the future. Below are excerpts from the accompanying article.

"It will be the age-old concept of the traveling merchant; but instead of camels or sailing vessels, the retailer of the future will transport his material via superhighway and erect his store on site," says the originator of the retailing on wheels concept, Elinor Selame of Selame Design in Massachusetts.

The advantage of mobile malls lies in their simplicity, economy, and mobility. Retailing on wheels, Selame argues, may be a popular marketing response in an era of shrinking energy supplies and hard-bargaining consumers.

See also:
Online Shopping (1967)

Hubert H. Humphrey's Year 2000 (1967)

Yesterday we looked at Hubert H. Humphrey's vision of 1967-1987. Today we have the second part to the Vice President's piece in the February, 1967 issue of The Futurist.

Far-Out Developments by A.D. 2000
For the year 2000, however, we can foresee some really far-out developments:
The virtual elimination of bacterial and viral diseases.
The correction of hereditary defects through the modification of genetic chemistry.
The stepping-up of our food supply through large-scale ocean-farming and fabrication of synthetic proteins.
Control of the weather, at least on a regional scale.
In space, the landing of men on Mars and the establishment of a permanent unmanned research station on that planet.
The creation, in the laboratory, of primitive forms of artificial life.
This can indeed be an age of miracles. It will be your age.

The ocean and space continue to pop up as the paleo-future's greatest unexplored frontiers.

See also:
Hubert H. Humphrey's Future (1967)

Hubert H. Humphrey's Future (1967)

For the February, 1967 issue of The Futurist magazine, Hubert H. Humphrey, wrote a piece articulating his vision of the future. The Vice President broke up his thoughts into two categories; Developments of the Next 20 Years, and Far-Out Developments by A.D. 2000.

Here are some of the developments we can look forward to within the next 20 years:

In agriculture, the large-scale use of de-salinated sea water.
In medicine, the transplantation of natural organs and the use of artificial ones.
In psychiatry, the widespread application of drugs that control or modify the personality.
In education, the use of more sophisticated teaching machines.
In wordwide communication, the everyday employment of translating machines.
In industry, the extensive use of automation, up to and including some kinds of decision-making at the management level.
In space, the establishment of a permanent base upon the moon.
Some of you might say that there is nothing very surprising here. And you would be right.
Experience shows that it takes 10 to 30 years for a new idea to make its way from its inception in a scientist's mind to its general application in everyday life. Therefore, the world of 20 years from now already exists, in embryo, in today's advanced research establishments.

A theme in 1960's America that seems to pop up repeatedly is faith in a permanent moon base. Tomorrow we'll look at Hubert H. Humphrey's predicitions for the year 2000.