The Prince and the Showbot (Or Why I Prefer Artificial Intelligence to Royal Stupidity)

HRH the Prince of Wales and ASIMO the humanoid robot  

It's ten years since Prince Charles met Asimo, the humanoid robot developed by Honda, whilst on a royal visit to Japan.

The latter - always ready to perform and go through his advanced motions - warmly greeted the man who would be king with a wave and a cheery konnichi-wa, before launching into a seven minute step and dance routine at the Miraikan Museum in Tokyo.   

If Charles was impressed, he didn't show it. Not only did he keep his distance from Asimo at all times, declining the opportunity to shake hands, but he displayed a regal coldness that bordered on contempt. Only after Asimo stood on one leg with his arms outstretched, saying bye-bye in English, did Charles give a half-hearted smile.    

But it's only now, however, that he's finally made his hostility towards robots and his opposition to AI a matter of public record ...

Speaking at a GQ awards ceremony, where the 69-year-old Prince was presented with a Lifetime Achievement honour for his philanthropic work, Charles warned that human beings were losing basic skills as a result of technology and expressed fears that machines could one day rise up and take over the world (including the English throne). 

Charles also conveyed his hope that humanity would see sense, listen to him, and make a return to a more traditional lifestyle; one that was less reliant upon smart technology and more about arts and crafts. The thought that we might voluntarily choose instead to forge an ever-closer relationship with our machines and become-cyborg, was one that he found totally and utterly objectionable.

He has a point, I suppose. The question concerning technology is an essential one, as recognised by many writers and philosophers over the past century, such as Lawrence and Heidegger. But simple-minded technophobia is as tedious as the techno-idealism of the transhumanists and experts in the field of AI have been quick to point out that the Prince's concerns are often born from ignorance and an anti-scientific worldview.    

As Professor Dave Robertson at the University of Edinburgh has suggested, rapid advances in this area could greatly enhance human experience and amplify our abilities, not see our demise as a species or enslavement to an army of super-intelligent machines.

And - push comes to shove - if I were to be stranded on a desert island, I'd sooner it were with Asimo than a royal half-wit. 

Note: readers interested in viewing Associated Press footage of the 2008 encounter between Prince Charles and Asimo (who was recently retired by Honda), should click here. 

All Dolled Up with Lulu Hashimoto

Lulu Hashimoto: tumblr.com

Japanese beauty, Lulu Hashimoto, is a girl who has really taken the expression all dolled up to heart.

Or, more precisely, Lulu Hashimoto is a doll-like character performed by an anonymous model who has really taken the idea of self-objectification to an uncanny level.  

In other words, Lulu is actually a full-body doll suit, consisting of a wig, a mask and stockings patterned with doll-like joints, created by Hitomi Komaki, a 23-year-old fashion designer who has a thing for dolls and their unique attraction (a disturbing combination of cuteness and creepiness).

Despite Komaki's rather puzzling and somewhat disingenuous denials, there's obviously something fetishistic about this game of dress up and disguise born of the world of BDSM; of becoming-object through a process of dollification - a process of physically and mentally transforming oneself into a living doll and seeking out an Owner to whom one must be subservient at all times.  

Lulu has not only turned heads on the streets of Tokyo, but has built up a substantial following on social media, with fans all over the world. She is, in addition, among the finalists of the annual Miss iD (alternative) beauty pageant this year; a contest open to all kinds of beings, human and non-human, actual and virtual, including holographic characters generated by artificial intelligence.

To broaden our understanding of the real in this manner - and to redefine notions not only of aesthetics, but humanity - is, I think, a good thing; it's certainly an interesting project from a queer philosophical perspective.    

And the possibility of donning a doll-suit, whatever one's age, race, or gender and (if only momentarily and imaginatively) becoming a beautiful young Japanese girl like Lulu, certainly has its appeal ...  

Notes 

Those interested in seeing more photos of Lulu and becoming one of her 31.3k followers on Instagram, click here.

Those interested in dollification as practiced within the kinky community might like to visit dollification.com

Technosexual Futures with Reference to the Case of Tanya (RealDoll 2 Configuration 1)

Tanya: a second generation RealDoll

For her full details click here. 

Technosexuality refers to a rapidly evolving phenomenon that includes erotic fascination with engendered robots and artificially intelligent sex-dolls. For many, it is and will always remain a niche activity amongst a small number of slightly creepy men, mostly in the United States and Japan, who can afford to purchase a mechanical bride. For the love of a good woman doesn't come cheap, even when that woman is made in a factory; the RealDoll shown above, for example, Tanya, not only has gel implants in her pendulous 32F breasts, but a price tag of over $7000.

And, if you want to download the new Harmony Artificial Intelligence App released earlier this year to enable Tanya to better cater for all your personal needs, that'll cost an additional annual subscription. But it's only a small price to pay, surely, for something that allows you to become-Pygmalion and create a unique personality for your silicone lover, controlling how happy, shy, or talkative she is. What's more, as an added bonus, the Harmony app also enables users to create a fully customizable 3D avatar. 
 
For those futurists and transhumanists who get excited by this sort of thing, technosexuality is mankind's erotic destiny and they insist we'll all have artificial lovers by the middle of this century, transforming what is presently regarded as a kinky (and, in some cases, criminal) form of love into a perfectly legitimate and normalized practice.

I have to confess, however, that I still have my doubts about this - even though it's certainly true that increasing numbers of men and women are pleasuring themselves with crude robotic devices, such as vibrators and mechanical vaginas. And even though it's also true that the quest to produce full-sized, fully-interactive female sexbots is simply a further development of a trend (and a fantasy) that has been unfolding for many years.

The problem, for those who dream of a technosexual utopia, is that many people find the sexy cyborgs presently in development profoundly troubling, problematizing as they do the fundamental distinctions between natural and artificial, human and machine, alive and dead.

There will almost certainly be individuals strongly opposed to the idea of sexual congress with beings born of the pornographic imagination and assembled in the Uncanny Valley; men and women keen to preserve the unique onto-moral status of humanity and the purity of love as something existing between consenting adults - not man and child, or man and beast, and certainly not man and sexbot, no matter how lifelike and human the latter may appear.

Even David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007), can’t quite disguise his discomfort. Thus, whilst happy to speculate about technosexual futures, he doesn't actually advocate erotic relations between humans and robots, nor does he wish to suggest that sex between two people will become outmoded. In fact, Levy claims that only misfits and the sexually inadequate might willingly opt for exclusive relations with non-human objects, thus reaffirming a belief in authentic, healthy, natural sex whilst denigrating those who choose to love differently. 

Personally, I don't really have any objections or qualms about sex with synthetic lovers, though I do find the desire for techno-intimacy somewhat perplexing; I can't see why you would want a sentient machine to moan with pleasure one minute, only to then start moaning that you never listen to them or ask about their day the next.

Surely one of the main advantages of a conventional (non-sentient) doll is that it doesn't have thoughts and feelings and doesn't get moody or have headaches. One is tempted to suggest to those who insist on knowing the full girlfriend experience, that they date the girl next door and allow the alluring Tanya to remain blissfully unaware and withdrawn into the perfect silence and impersonal mystery of her own being as an object.

To make her whisper the words I love you is to collapse technosexuality into sentimental humanism ...


Note: readers who are interested in this topic might like to see a recent news report on RT America, with Trinity Chavez, discussing the ethics of sexbots: click here. 

Serenity Now (Notes on 'The Flying Fish' by D. H. Lawrence)

Stephen Alexander 
Window onto the Greater Day (2017) 

 

"'Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. Even also as the morning sun shakes his yellow wings on the horizon and rises up, so the great bird beyond him spreads out his dark blue feathers, and beats his wings in the tremor of the Greater Day.'"

- D H Lawrence, The Flying Fish (1925)

I've always rather liked this poetic passage in which Lawrence suggests that the day-to-day world of man is not the only reality; that we might, in times of great crises and crack-up, glimpse something of the deeper blue that belongs to the Greater Day, wherein shines that other (darker) sun. It's liberating to think that there is something external to our own small and tight and over-furnished universe; something unconquerable and unknowable in its sheer immensity; the world in which flowers bloom and objects sparkle.

And it's strangely comforting to imagine like Lawrence a new type of humanity living in this fourth dimensional world without walls; that those who belong to the Lesser Day and cannot or will not leave their homes behind, will "'shudder and die out, like clouds of grasshoppers'". For the Greater Day belongs to those men and women who, like flying fish, are able to move between worlds on translucent wings, invisibly rejoicing as they do so.

The poorly protagonist of this unfinished tale gains his clearest insight into how astonishing life can be in the Greater Day, when witnessing a school of porpoises swimming alongside the ship on which he's sailing. Lawrence describes the scene in very beautiful detail as a "spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life". Although travelling at high speed, the marine mammals do so with carefree composure and serenity.

And that's the crucial thing; for you can't access the blue splendour of the Greater Day by an act of restless, noisy self-assertion. Rather, it requires qualities that many modern people no longer value: silence, stillness, and attentiveness ... One must, as it were, learn to enjoy watching paint dry and listening to the grass grow. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying Fish', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Women Who Hum Are the Hope of the Future

Un Colibri

The troubling thing about living in a fully digital age is that whilst technology has been consummated, men, women and children have all effectively been disqualified; they have lost not only their independence but also their imagination. For who dares to daydream or fantasise when they have movies on demand; who needs to whistle a happy tune when they are connected to an i-Pod which streams non-stop music into their ears? 

Baudrillard refers to this as a form of existential unemployment and fears that the obsolescence of our species is racing towards a terminal phase in which our fate will no longer be in our own hands, but determined exclusively by machines to which we have transferred decision-making in a symbolic act of capitulation:

"In the end, human beings will only have been an infantile illness of an integral technological reality that has become such a given that we are no longer aware of it ... This revolution is not economic or political. It is an anthropological and metaphysical one. And it is the final revolution - there is nothing beyond it. In a way, it is the end of history, although not in the sense of a dialectical surpassing, rather as the beginning of a world without humans."

- Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2010), p. 80. 

This pessimistic conclusion contrasts starkly with the laughable idealism of those who retain their faith in the future and believe in the unlimited morphological adaptability of our species and its becoming-cyborg. Faced with an obvious inferiority to their own smart phones, transhumanists accept voluntary servitude; rather than disappear altogether, they choose to be biologically engineered and cloned. In other words, ashamed of their own mortal imperfection, the machine-ticklers are prepared to make themselves sexless and loveless; beings who pass through life knowing nothing of joy or sorrow and whose nights are no longer shaken by terror or ecstasy.  

At this point, as Nietzsche would say, I cannot suppress a sigh and one small hope; a hope that there might still be others in this world like the young French woman I met recently who, when sitting quietly and contentedly in the corner of a book-filled room, thinking her own thoughts, almost inaudibly started to hum ...          

Come Not with Kisses: Leda, Lawrence and the Swan

Max Sauco: Leda and Her Swan 

D. H. Lawrence wrote four very lovely and at times very amusing poems based on the Leda myth. Taken together, these verses are significantly more interesting than the more-widely read poem written by Yeats on this same woman and bird coupling, projecting as they do the idea into a transhuman future in which the new Helen is imagined not as some semi-divine beauty, but as a human-animal hybrid or chimera, compete with green webbed-feet made to smite the waters of an unknown world.

Lawrence is not entirely happy with his own vision, however. For within the curious world of Lawrentian zoology the swan has ambiguous status and often features alongside snakes, newts, and beetles as one of the animals he associates with corruption:

"With its reptile feet buried in the ooze ... its beauty white and cold and terrifying ... it is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphorescence of corruption ... This is  the beauty of the swan ... this cold white salty fire of infinite reduction."

       

- 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, (CUP, 1988), p. 293 

Thus, for Lawrence, when humanity seeks its fulfilment in avisodomy this is not merely a sign of our perversion, but also indicative of a kind of death drive.

Whether we agree or disagree with Lawrence's analysis of becoming-animal in terms of regression and nostalgie de la boue, at least, to his credit and unlike many pure-minded scholars who refuse to discuss the zoosexual aspects of the Leda myth, he doesn't shy away from the question of why sensitive men and women might desire to fuck with birds and beasts, rather than one another.

And besides, who's to say that the Übermensch won't be born of a swan-princess in a time of corruption?