Dinkaltranen

I wanted to be an inventor growing up. It was a very noble idea, but one that I hear these days and wince. An inventor? And what shall we invent, or discover? What is left? Scarcely little, and what is left is being worked on by millions of people with better equipment and training, and probably for the military. But even that is simply a variation, a minor improvement on current standards. I remember thinking of technology as a sort of freefall, where it would accelerate and at some point it would reach terminal velocity, but that isn’t the case at all. It’s bleeding edge at best. For example, these new remote controlled robots. There is no real market for these. Think for a few seconds about the demo videos, and the advertising material. The product is extremely slow and clumsy, to the point that the only thing that is slower and clumsier than it is an old person. The current best in robotics, with all its advances, is still only just barely able to be slightly more effective than your grandparents. Sex bots will never happen for similar reasons. For sex bots to be a thing, there needs to be 2 or 3 things.

1. Massive advances in material technology to make non-horrifying and human feeling robots.
2. Astronomical advances in robotics to allow for gratifying human movements or ‘cooperation’ of movement.
3. There needs to be a market.

Items 1 and 2 require immense, immense amounts of money. A black hole of money. Robotics is very quickly improving, but nowhere near enough at the rate that it will be affordable for target market: which is probably 30-40 year old men.

If one came out today, there would be little to no point, because the price would be so exorbitantly expensive that the only people who could afford them in their market demo probably have enough money to have a wife or a girlfriend already. Despite what people say, the data says having money (or rather, resources, of which money is a good representative of) is one of the greatest predictors for having a relationship if you are a man.

“Oh yes, oh yes.” the robots says, increasing its volume to try to drown the sound of its own whirring servos. You lean over it, and when it speaks again you can hear every motor hum in its jaw.

The idea is absurd. There might be a particularly depraved group of the male population that really only want sex from women or a woman-like object, but even in committed relationships men still masturbate. Sex is a lot of work for both men and women, and its understandable that in a lot of cases people just want to do the deed themselves and be done. It is convenient, easy to clean up, and very much within your control. A sex bot is almost none of those things. I highly doubt it would ever replace women, or that the men who used it as such added anything to society to begin with.

It sounds pretty bad, but sex with a sexbot seems like all the inconveniences of sex with a woman (but most likely worse) and without any of the benefits. There is no market. The market is hypothetically lonely men who are getting baited into robotics marketing because they’re worried about having a wife and child and that somehow we’ll go through the million leaps and bounds of development for artificial wombs and believable human AI and indistinguishable robots before they become sterile at 75.

And that’s why they’re offering $200 pre-order/funding investment. Such an amount isn’t enough to buy one, but it is a demonstration of a demand for a market whilst raising some capital. They’re going to go back to their bosses and say “Hey, we should develop this, 500,000 men think we’re going to put a pussy in the robot we’re making for geriatrics.”

“Are we?”

I’ll let you decide.

This is unfortunately true of many developments in science. They’re a lot of headlines and marketing, god, so much marketing. But the actual development is minor at most. People are waking up to it to some extent, partially driven by the world being on the brink of a global financial crisis for the last 5 years, partly awareness. Most advances of technology in our life time will be minor, and largely to do with the material science or manufacturing, like with batteries. This leads to the technology becoming more widely available, and usually cheaper, but mostly this is kind of… nothing. There is no penicillin left to find, and even if we did find it, we probably wouldn’t use it: we’ve had the ability to eliminate disease carrying mosquitos for more than a decade, and we still do nothing. We’ve had a vaccine for tooth decay for 50 years. Nuclear energy is obviously the best long term energy solution, and yet reactors are being knocked down instead of being built. We have the scientific knowledge and practical means to improve the future and we quite literally choose not to use it.

Writing, autofiction or blogging; that’s where everyone seems to think the future is. Ideas, philosophy. Go into a bookshop and it’s half books for women about fucking faeries and half self-help books. We haven’t yet caught on to the idea that there is little we have yet to know, there is mostly only interpretations and deliveries of it. The population are desperate for self-help not only because of the temporary artificial confidence it gives them, or using the effort of reading as a surrogate for self-improvement, but because it convinces the reader that there is something it knows that they don’t. It has a secret. But it doesn’t. That’s why the author wrote a self-help book, instead of being the happiest person in the world, or an inventor. This along with the rest of philosophy is largely dead; it has been reduced to the reorganisation, reanalysis and regurgitation of ideas that never go any further.

The reality is that every meaningful secret relevant to the next 3 generations has been discovered. That’s one of the reasons blogging or autofiction is popular. The only thing we don’t know is the inner, private lives of other people. That’s very powerful if you’re lonely, or don’t have friends, or connections, or are generally very isolated. Reading someone else’s journal is intimate even it is published on the internet for anyone to see. What was seen as the act of lonely men and women in the 2000s has become an intimate confessional of solidarity for an incredibly isolated society who experiences more of other people through screens each week than they do through any physical interaction with one another. A gaze, a touch, a hello, all of these things convey far more than the thousands of bite sized pieces of text or images or video made by someone you don’t know about someone else a million miles away. Yet we’ve been captured by our desire for easy feelings to the point that it has become the prime focus of free time.

This is why there is a distinct lack of good new stories. We are so alienated from the richness of experiencing our fellows and the world that even mediocre stories seem impressive to us by comparison. It isn’t that we’re less intelligent or less creative than we were in the past, not at all. It is that we have as a whole lived far less of the human spectrum of experience than our predecessors, and because of this cannot derive any of the lessons or insights from them. This most likely stems to invention too. It is hard to discover anything new when there are entrenched paths to success. Without new experiences, or at least experiences ranging more than the ones of old, we are unlikely to have another meaningful discovery or story. Human experience has become rigid and impoverished to itself. Which is why when readers of autofiction experience the colour of others’ inner lives they find it fascinating, even if it is unrefined and ugly.

I am uncertain of where the future leads. The pendulum could swing back, but it is equally likely that we enter an age of borderline stagnation. An era rich with technology but completely impoverished of humanity. Historical parallels are mounting, and it’s worth remembering that most nations that didn’t fall to war instead faced a slow crumbling decay.