The End of Cheating

Much like issues with the end of judgment and the end of insurance, will future technology bring the end of cheating?

I am, of course, referring to sex robots. They are coming. They are quite literally an inevitability. I would imagine that our first ostensibly human-like robots are less than twenty years away, and our first affordable robots that are at least functional for sexual purposes at a price that people can afford is maybe another twenty years after that.

As with so many things in the future, our ability to understand and thus manipulate the blocks of the world that represent "reality" forces questions upon us. We take so much of the world at face value, which of course makes perfect sense. We evolved in a world where we had to take things at face value. But as concepts like souls, free will, identity, and humanity fall apart under analysis, where we will go?

As regards sexbots, will we be forced to recognize the philosophical issue of not knowing what happens in another person's head? And our concept of a "person" is extrapolated from behavior of a creature that looks like "me." We already have studies showing that human-like robots can be "blamed" in the same way that we blame other people. We know that the robots are not human. We know that they are nothing more than lines of code. Yet, our emotional drives are apparently willing to ascribe human-like souls to robots if they are suitably human-like.

This drive is there even with robots that look more like Wall-e than Wally, so when robots that look very human, this drive will likely be as strong as they would for real humans. Will the inevitable sexbots change our conception of cheating?

For example, very few people would count masturbation as cheating. Likewise, complex masturbation through tools and sex dolls would also not be seen as cheating. Cheating, at least for most people, requires another person. But what happens when sex dolls look like another person?

Aside from the surface issues, we also get into thorny problems like intent. Would it be cheating if the cheater thought that the robot was another person? Could a person program an impossibly-attractive robot to specifically seduce someone for the purpose of destroying a relationship? Would we accept people being in "relationships" with robots? Many more questions present themselves, because this isn't just about sex, it's about love, friendship, emotions, and our ability to socialize.

My answer to these problems is one that Dan Savage would love: the end of relationships as we know them is less than a lifetime away. Traditional relationships with fidelity and monogamy are, by and large, social constructs. They don't even work very well when we only have human people running around, what with over 50% of marriages ending in divorce, as many as 70% of people cheating at some point in their life, and 10% of men caring for kids that they think are theirs... but aren't.

When sexbots come out, our traditional conceptions of fidelity and relationships will be ripped apart, and we will finally be free from the shackles of our ridiculous, socially-prescribed conceptions, free to live and love as we see fit.

iRobot Revisited.

I think about AI a lot. Read about. Write about. Masturbate to it (sexbots... Mmmm yeah). I still think that building AI is going to be impossible.

I look at it like a tree. Yes, we understand the basic model of a tree. We know where parts go in relation to one another, how the systems work, etc. But still, we can't build a tree from the top down. We can't engineer branches here, and leaves there. Because even though all trees are pretty similar, they are also wholly unique. Defined by the manifold variables to which they are exposed as they grow.

Instead, we start with a seed and let it grow. We know the primary, fundamental variable required to grow a tree, the seed, but we cannot construct a tree artificially. I think the various learning robots being created, where they respond to and learn from their environments, are the first steps in the creation of non-biological intelligence.

I use that term because I don't consider them artificial at that point. They've grown of their own action. Yes, we created the stuff at the beginnning, but that's like calling a GE ear of corn artificial corn. It just doesn't make sense. It's non-biological, but it has grown naturally, in the same way our own intelligence grew.

I Vacuum.

I got a pair of cleaning robots for Christmas: The iRobot Roomba 580 and the Scooba 380. They're the high-end variants of each model and after the last two months of pretty solid use, I must say, I'm pretty disappointed. I wasn't expecting the moon or anything, but the adventures I've had really don't justify the price.

The Roomba, for example, coming in at over $500, seems to have the dexterity and software complexity of robots I build back in high school with a TI-83. I'm not exaggerating. The vacuum turns on with this triumphant NES theme song, hums to life, and rockets away in search of a place to get stuck. It starts humping everything in sight, bashing into things, and wedging itself into nooks corners like some crazed hamster. It's suction power is such that any dirt that lies more than a femtometer beneath the surface of the carpet is well outside of the vacuume range. Hard floors work well, and large bits on the carpet surface are easily captured, but pet hair? HA!

You might as well try to clean up pet hair with hope. Now, assuming you have a room with almost nothing in it, and the dirt is fresh, the Roomba will get it. But if your house is the slightest bit lived-in, the vacuum will be utterly confounded by anything and everything you have. Bookbags, pets, shoes, magazines, carpets, chairs, bags, children, clothing, newspapers, wires, cords, and just about anything else you can think of will royally fuck with this robot's world.

Because of this, you cannot use the Roomba's most useful feather, namely, setting the timer to have it automatically clean at some set time. Because, if you should ever try this, you will be greeted every morning by your Roomba stuck in the ceiling fan. You would need to keep your house impeccably clean, just to make sure that the Roomba was able to clean it. And even then, it may decide that it just doesn't like your drapes and try to eat them. Or it will decide that it needs to be cleaned. Or it will just beep a lot and refuse to do anything because it has a cat stuck in its brush.

The Roomba 580, $500, does the same job as the basic Roomba 400, namely, a bad one. I expected very little from the basic Roomba which came free with the Scooba, and I got it. It does a decent job at cleaning up little messes. But for $500, I expected a lot more. I expected an LCD display to tell me things. I expected a vacuum which is able to suck more than just air. I expected a robot with enough sensors to adequately navigate an environment. I feel pretty confident that I could do a better job with a Lego Mindstorms kit, car battery, Hoover canister vac, and some RC car parts.

As it stands, I still vacuum once a day with the clunky Dyson. The Roomba, in all its technical glory, vacuums the tile floor in the kitchen. Which is then followed by the bigger disappointment, the Scooba. Also ringing in at $500, the Scooba does a fantastic job of getting everything very wet and then running out of battery. I won't deny that the water it sucks up is dirty, but the floor never looks any cleaner. It takes the dirty floor and makes the dirt shiny. And do you remember, when you were a kid, those battery powered cars (mine was a fire truck) that just drove in a straight line until it hit something, backed up, and went in another direction? They usually had that set of rotating wheels on the bottom. Well, the Scooba is one of those with a wet-vac attached. For $500. For $500 I could buy a Mexican to spray detergent everywhere and then suck it off the floor. It has no sensors, no advanced programming designed to develop a map of its environment, no interface with which to program it. Nothing. It just crashes around and gets stuck under the dish washer.

All of this seems created for people that have fake messes. You know those Swiffer mops and brooms. Yeah, for those messes. They're made for messes that people don't actually make. Like that puddle of grape juice on the otherwise glazen floor. Or those small plastic pellets that people in vacuum commercials always seem to be spilling. And they're always cleaned up by the mother who seems to be a state of bemused resignation that her children, husband, and pets are all retarded slobs. But, through the aid of these amazing products, she keeps the house so clean you could perform open heart surgery on the couch! These are not products for people who have actual messes. Mud tracked into the house? Get down on your knees and scrub. Pet hair? Get out the Hoover. An otherwise coruscating house and you want to pretend that you need stuff cleaned? IRobot has the answer!

Lego: Helping Pedophiles Get Kids For Fifty Years.

Happy 50th LEGO! The first set I remember clearly was the big-ass castle set from the 1980's. Not the very first one, but the second one. I remember that it came in a big bucket and that I lost huge chunks of it within about five minutes of getting it. We got the original King's Castle not too long after that, but we started with what I think was the Black Falcon's Castle.

I don't know about any of you, but Lego has remained an interest of mine straight into adulthood. I love playing with Legos. I usually buy one set, maybe two, every year. Just for the sake of putting them together.

We had the castle and that was pretty badass, but I really wanted more. I don't blame my parents for not buying them. I was craptacular at that age and would have immediately broken/lost/eaten half the bits. I also would have left them lying about, pointy-and-really-friggin-painful side up, in the dark, in the middle of rooms. That way I could best hurt my barefoot parents at night. And OOOOOOooooohhhhh how I wanted that space monorail! 80's children, you know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, that monorail caused almost as many wet dreams in the 80's as Farrah Fawcett draped over that Lamborghini. It was kiddy-porn for the actual kiddy. Everyone wanted it. kids at school lied about having it. The one kid who had it was a huge geek no one liked, so no one knew he had it. Truth be told, my favorite kits were the pirate kits released in the late 80's. We had about 5 million pirate bits. I adored my pirate boat, my hideout, and my small pirate island. I had a whole friggin' pirate universe scattered about my floor. It was as glorious as it sounds.

On a side note, the two guys on the 4011 "Cabin Cruiser," yeah, they're totally gay.

1991 was also the year that Legos started becoming crack. They started kicking up their box design and introducing various sub-brands aside from just line names and "Legoland." They introduced Lego System, and around that time started really beefing up their general toy design. The monorail was only the beginning. Technic came out in '92, but I was never really taken with it. Don't know why. In retrospect, it was pretty badass. Probably because it didn't have some story to go along with it. Instead, all the new pirate releases were what got added to the growing Lego minefield on my floor.

It was around that time I kind of lost interest in Legos. I moved on to a few other, more complex building sets that allowed me to do more and feel a bit more adult. Erector sets, with their cool metal parts, are what really drew me away. But ohhhh man, back in my highschool days, I got drawn back in a big way when Lego introduced the first Mindstorms kit, HOLD ME BACK! Christ Almighty, it was expensive though.

I got to play with one at school, but that was it until a year or so later, 1999, I think, my parents got me the Star Wars AT-AT walker. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that it wasn't really a robot. Weee! I can shine a flashlight at it and have it move! This is fucking AMAZING! I wanted the badass kit you could program. Blasted thing of course had to cost, like, $300. Did you have $300 just kicking around at 17/18ish? If you did, I hate you. You probably had the kit and was one of those fuckers I never saw at school because you were too busy at home doing cool shit. Like have a robot walk... around... and maybe pick something up. Ohhhh yeah. Good stuff.

My love affair continues. I got a kit in my stocking for Christmas. A little race car. It was good.

Blade Runner Was Pretty Good, Though.

I was just watching Minority Report. Well, I should say I was just watching a preview for Minority Report on Starz or something. Two things come to mind about the movie, aside from the insipid final voice-over, being the cool, future-y Lexus he drives and the drug Neuroin to which he, and apparently everyone in the world, is addicted. I've been doing a lot of study about the drug war in America, and the thoughts came bubbling up in full force with a recent, long-ass article in Rolling Stone, How American Lost the War on Drugs.

The Lexus came to mind after hearing about the fall of the Moller Skycar, which got me thinking about cars of the future. And then the recent revealing of the Lamborghini Reventon and the new Nissan Skyline GT-R got me thinking about car design, and how the Lexus was a big point in the behind-the-scenes stuff since they consulted with futurists and car designers as they tried to figure out how cars would look then by tracing car design trajectories. Now, five years into the future, the car looks almost quaint.

But before that, back to the drugs. It's supposed to be the year 2054 and drugs are a major problem. At the time, that prospect was rather depressing for me. I felt that we'd surely wise up by the year 20-friggin-54 and legalize drugs. It looks like we're on that trajectory, thankfully, and that within the next decade, drugs could very well be widely legalized. Marijuana especially. Laws against a friggin' weed are stupid almost beyond description. I really recommend that anyone who disagrees with me to read the Rolling Stone article. Then, if you still disagree with me, you should take a long walk off a short... Actually, if you still disagree, I ask that you really, really think about WHY you disagree.

And back to the cars, that poor Lexus. It looks so silly, now. At least it looks much better than the "futuristic" cars from sci-fi movies in the 80's. Still, I think it shows how futile futurism is, since the acceleration of technology itself accelerates. I also think the greatest leap of futurism in the movie, the personal transit system that goes from building to building, is a hell of a lot farther off than 48 years. I actually think the technology to "record" someone's brain a la The Sixth Day is closer.

Still, I stand in awe of the speed at which we reach the "future." Even affordable cars like the new Mazda 6 looked like CARS OF THE FUTURE not too long ago. And boy howdy have we come a long way in the world of robotics. We already have small robots cleaning our floors, one that cleans your windows is apparently not too far off, and fully articulated models that look like tiny Asimos promise a future of humanoid robots doing things like building houses at high speeds 24/7 for a fraction of the cost of current building. It keeps reminding me that the future really isn't coming, it's here, and as time goes on it just keeps getting here faster and faster.

I, Doofus.

I never brought it up in my previous post about the Discovery Channel show 2057, primarily because it wasn't mentioned all that much in the show itself, the prospect of robots. Now, considering how fantabulously cool robots are, the fact that robots were barely mentioned, I think, betrays how non-viable robots are as a real aspect to our near future.

Most of our visions of near-future robots were created decades ago, but great sci-fi writers. What's funny is that their near-future musings placed us IN the near-future. We are in the age of robots, as futurists so many moons ago so thought. Where are the butler-bots, Rosies, and Datas? They're not here, that's where. The best we have is a robotic vacuum cleaner that doesn't do a very good job.

As far as futurists go, the age of robots doing everything under the sun is always just a few years away. The pinnacle of our achievement is still Asimo, who is now seven years old, and his abilities are extremely limited and costs nigh on a million dollars to make. Would you pay a million dollars for a robot with limited abilities or three years for a maid/butler with vast, adaptive abilities?

Robots are not viable today and will not be viable for a long time coming. For the far-foreseeable future, robots will be very expensive, which means that they will be the exclusive domain of people with money, who will be much better served with human servants. Think the prices will come down and allow the working stiffs who could actually use the help to buy robots? Think again.

Crap in today's economy is cheap. It's only getting cheaper, too. Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to mechanics. Cars are getting more expensive, not less. Things like computer printers, lawn mowers, and bicycles all cost the same as they did years ago or more. It's because mechanical products cost a fixed amount to make. You can make manufacture more efficient, you can reduce labor costs, and you can find cheaper materials, but you can only go so far. Our crap is getting so hideously cheap because of a move towards inexpensive, easy-to-make, solid-state devices. This only applies to robots to a degree. What we can easily make cheap in robots has been cheap for a decade; the computer parts. The other parts, the motors, gears, servos, sensors, and the like, are expensive now, they were expensive ten years ago, and they'll be expensive ten years in the future.

Robots will not be cheap for a very, very long time. By 2057, they may only cost multiple thousands (In today's money), but for what end? Will people actually decide that they should get a loan to buy a robot to help them around the house so they can work more to afford the robot? I seriously doubt it. I can imagine a market of lazy people with few financial obligations buying a cleaning robot. Or perhaps robot janitors who can clean 24/7 for corporations who have run out of Mexicans. These are very speculative ideas about small markets. Regardless, the idea of a future full of robots doing things is bunk. It was bunk with Asimov, and it's bunk with Asimo.