Sex with robots

There once was a young man named Gene
who invented a screwing machine.
Concave and convex,
it served either sex,
and it played with itself in between.

Ho-hum.  This guy is worried about a “code of ethics” for robots:

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” he said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

People have been having sex with machines for decades.  I’ve commented on this before:

Ethics for robots?  That’s a nice thought but futile.  If a market exists it will be met.  If whether it’s to wage war, perform assassinations, or brothels filled with mechanical sex machines there will be some to supply the programming to accomplish the task if there is enough money on the table for the task.  Asimov’s three laws will be simply commented out in the code.

Busy times at home, James goes to work

The last few weeks have been very busy for me.  Barb came
to Seattle to visit, then I helped James move over and get an
apartment, then Barb and Xenia came over.  Xenia has a few pictures up (check out the new car James bought).  I’ll have some more pictures up before too long.

James starts work (orientation actually) tomorrow morning.  His
first job just out of college.  Barb, who handles all the medical
questions in the family, said James asked her about his appetite. 
He said he had a funny feeling in his stomach and didn’t feel like
eating.  Yeah, there’s a name for that condition.  It’s
called “butterflies”.

Interesting about the new car.  It’s a Toyota, which is the same
manufacturer as the first car Barb and I bought and he got it at the
same dealer we did.  We bought ours new (only one other car we
have bought was new when we got it) and James bought his new.  We
bought ours in 1976, James got his 30 years (minus a couple months)
later.  His cost about nine times as much and his starting salary
is 5.25 times as much as mine was the next fall.

Quote of the day–Greg Hamilton

You know what they teach you in the military about what you use a handgun for?  You use it to fight your way to a rifle.

Greg Hamilton
Self Defense Instructor
Nov. 19, 1995
[Greg may have picked this meme up from Clint Smith, but I first heard it from Greg.-Joe]