"I, Sexbot"

A few years ago, my brother and I discussed when autonomous cars would be in general use in America. I predicted 2020 but he said he thought that 2020 was way early for such a big change. I argued that between our aging population and car manufacturers' need to outdo each other, autonomous cars were the natural next step and the only thing short of flying cars they could get consumers to pay a lot more for -- which is after all the goal of making stuff. Eco-friendly cars had been a hope but they didn't take off; despite people wanting to help the environment, they also wanted added features for the money. Saving on gas over the long haul is great but a-bird-in-the-hand thinking is how most people operate. So alas, eco-friendly/highly gas-efficient cars remain marginal in the car market.

As of Sept. 2014 in CA, one can, with the right credentials, get a license to operate an autonomous car. At the moment, possible drivers are limited, but soon such won't be the case. After that, early adopters will be the elderly and physically inhibited people (i.e., the permanently handicapped/injured, etc.), then everyone else as prices drop and the people embrace the chance for the return of hours of time to productive use as they need no longer drive the car but be driven by it. Talk about added-value. But will autonomous cars be in widespread use by 2020? Maybe. Honest, can't say now if that'll be the case given our economy, but we are headed there fast. (My brother didn't suggest an alternate predicted date but if it's too much after 2020, say, 2023, I'll happily concede my prediction was off-target.)

Despite the above, this post isn't about autonomous cars and how fast we may see them on our roads. No, it's about autonomous androids and how fast they, too, are being developed. Remember Number Six from the new Battlestar Galactica and the other "skin job" Cylons? I don't think we're close to seeing those too soon, but watch this video. The Japanese roboticists have, like their fellows working at Google and DARPA, been keeping busy. The aim among the Japanese guys has been to develop life-like androids to act as companions principally to the elderly and sick in hopes of alleviating problems from their pending demographic crisis: too many older folk and too few younger to take care of them. They hope to pair up their inventions with the AI we're working on in the US to create autonomous, independent, artificially intelligent humanoid androids that are hard to differentiate from actual humans even after initial interaction. Number Six-like similarity to humans using even non-biological materials is still a good way off, but coming up with CGI-like androids is itself not far off, maybe after people my age have checked out, but probably not long thereafter. Perhaps by 2080, androids that are very hard to differentiate from ordinary humans will at least be available to those who can buy them. By 2100, such models will be like mid-range model cars, expensive but within affordability. I also predict they will be designed to fulfill a degree of human companionship fulfillment which, let's just say, is the stuff of not just sci-fi fantasy but other kinds, too.

The effects this will have on human relationships of a romantic nature won't be good. If people today raised on tech gadgets show marked signs of social disengagement or substantial changes in how they interact with others compared to the pre-tech gadget era, and if as psychologists are saying these changes are not positive to mental health, then what of the first generation of people raised to not be bothered seeking intimate relationship and physical needs satisfaction with other living humans but instead, to just do the "Ensign Chekov" thing as shown in the old Star Trek episode "I, Mudd" (mark: 26 min. 21 sec. if auto-advance doesn't work for you)? No sooner had the young officer discovered Mudd's android women were designed "in every way" like humans, he went on hormonal auto-pilot and cared little about getting free of the "werry nice gilded cage" that it represented. His commanding officer had to physically sit him up to remind him of his duties -- and he had just arrived into that world. Of course, TV is fiction, but it is not entirely imaginable a person in that position having such a reaction and that a superior's intervention is what it'd take to get him back on task.

Does anyone think kids of either sex raised on the instant gratification they can get from androids doing their bidding as children and then once in adolescence, fulfilling all their newly-arising physical desires, will by age 18 be the least bit interested in bothering with pursuing authentic romantic relationships with other humans? Even if their parents disable "those features" on what will be called "the family androids", as with denying kids cigarettes and beer, do they think that'll stop them? Hardly. How hard will it be for them to find a friend with a "cool parent" who hasn't disabled those same features and perhaps for a price lets their friends sort of *get to know* their own family androids a bit better? There's no stopping this. And once raised into this environment, there will be no going back. After all, even as eco-conscious as some people are, how many gave up their less environmentally-friendly cars to buy more expensive but more eco-friendly ones? Or do you know of many people who have despite their desire to see greenhouse gas emissions fall given up their cars or forsworn riding big diesel exhaust-emitting city buses? I don't. Once people have a thing in their lives that makes it categorically easier to get along in life, they don't voluntarily part with it. If you could for $30,000 buy a full-time mate who is consistently loyal, obedient, up for anything in bed you want them to do, can be made to order in terms of looks, voice, hair, personality, can think independently but only insofar as you desire them to, protect you with machine-like power if need be, always be on your side, never argue with you, and never leave you for someone else, tell me - would you not choose that over a human, especially if you had never been in a relationship before with another human and so have no idea of how being with someone who isn't a made-to-order fantasy may be better for you in many ways in terms of personal growth, etc.? But with the cost of marriages and/or relationships involving children being very high personally and financially should they end, won't many people be much more inclined to go the safer route? Back to the autonomous cars: Think how safer it would be for people to have autonomous cars vs. manually-driven cars. Sure, the risk, thrill, "adventure" of daily chancing it on the road will now be all but gone should every or nearly every car on the road be autonomous, but is it not much safer and gives you more time to do what you want while traveling and much less trouble?

Beyond even these dire consequences of de-coupling human needs satisfaction from symbiosis between two individuals, we face the other problems creating such androids represent and have been discussed (but not enough, as of yet): what if they get smarter -- a lot smarter -- than us? What if they decide *they* are the ones to be served, not us? Who then is to serve them? Us, or maybe another race (yes, "race") of androids of their devising to serve them.

Strange as it sounds, consider this is what man has been doing for 10s of 1000s of years. By enslaving one another, we have been appropriating each other for our own use. We didn't design a new race because we lacked the technology, but now, we are developing it, and at quite a rate. And it doesn't stop with people; we did and still do likewise with animals, plants, even germs. We bred and still breed these beings to suit our needs. Our dogs and cats are the result of breeding down larger wild cat species that prowl deserts and of capturing and breeding down smaller wolves, then crossing the results ad infinitum to create the many types of domestic cats and dogs we have today. Same for plants, especially, 10s of 1,000s of new strains of plants over 1,000s of years of human history. We've created whole new species of animals by crossing them when possible, such as sheep and goats ("geep"). A race such as ours that does this kind of thing is beyond nothing.

If the androids we're developing now, even as eventually they will act as much like humans as possible to the point of not being distinguishable from us to most of us, were actually flesh and blood, what we plan to do with and to them would be illegal in almost (yes, almost) every country in the world. Nonetheless it still exists in various forms and by other names, but the conditions are the same: people forced to work or do other things they do not want to and are not allowed to leave a particular home, area, or country, and have no real form of legal redress against their conditions.

Let's not kid ourselves: we're trying to develop a new race of slaves made of metal instead of bone. If even some day it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt our androids are self-aware, capable of suffering as we understand it due to their self-consciousness (something many animal species also seem to have), will we conclude that for that reason they have rights the same as we do - rights not to be forced to work at anything we tell them to, the right to pursue their own interests and "lives," the right to be left in peace, the right not to be coerced into sexual relations with us, in essence, not to be raped by us, whether the rapist be man or woman, boy or girl?

What will be the criteria? We've already concluded that non-human animals that demonstrate even good evidence of self-consciousness lack any significant rights under the law except to be killed in a humane fashion, with the exception that to do so would, in some particular human's opinion, compromise some kind of experiment, even a relatively trivial one. So obviously, being made of flesh and blood doesn't matter. Will it be demonstrable IQ then? What else is left? An appeal to the notion that only humans have souls? Please, it's the 21st century, not the 11th. Can anyone show beyond even a not-so-reasonable doubt that only humans have souls, much less that for sure, souls even exist? It's an argument that would get laughed out of court, and that's where the fight will eventually land.

Somehow, I don't think anything'll actually matter. Human beings have been looking for a way to create a fully-usable parallel race of people to use as they see fit. They have been trying via enslaving fellow humans for countless millennia now but eventually, the slaves either overthrow their masters or their masters decide what they're doing is wrong, uneconomical, or any combination of the above, leading to the end of it -- for a time, and only in a certain place. But it inevitably re-emerges later.

Creating human simulacrum androids with super-human intelligence and self-awareness (that last not immediately, but inevitably), programmed à la "I, Robot", is simply creating a slave race. But we'll never see it that way, will we? Let's hope the androids never do, too. Otherwise, well, they'll be a lot smarter and stronger than us, won't they?

"Number Six" won't seem nearly as attractive when that happens.