I like Joseph Polchinski… See here for more
Improvisation….below:
My 60 seconds video “An Invisible Barrier” (below) is about the so supposed mutual understanding between two conversing persons. But an invisible barrier of errors and misinterpreting falsifies the conversation. There is only one remedy to this state of affairs: love.
The musical track is taken from “Venetian Games” by the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski whose music I find admirable.
Here are 3 stills from the video,
Artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently completed (Oct 12, 2007) his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships.
His work reminds me of “The Caves of Steel“, from Asimov, where Elijah Baley, the human detective, and R. Daneel Olivaw his number 2 robot detective, preludes in 1954 the story of an human-robot relationship bearing a great likelihood to what Levy to day proposes … (I quote) “In his thesis, “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners,” [he] conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them…”It may sound a little weird, but it isn’t,” Levy said. “Love and sex with robots are inevitable.”
To day, (I quote), “There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, “and it’s just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration,” he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. “That’s fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there.”..
An article from Reuters, “Japan’s lonely hearts turn to dolls for sex, company” provide further insight. (I quote).”Real love is hard to find for one Japanese man, who has transferred his affection and desires to dozens of plastic sex dolls.
When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it’s not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa.
Each has a name. Ta-Bo often watches television with his toys before bathing them, powdering them so that their skin feels more human, dressing them in lingerie and then taking them to bed.
“A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those thing. They belong to me 100 percent,” says the engineer who has spent more than 2 million yen ($16,000) over the past decade on the dolls
“Sometimes it takes too much time before I can have sex with the person I meet. But with these dolls, it’s just a matter of a click of the mouse. With one click, they are delivered to you.”, see more here.
Now Levy…” argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”…
This may be the remedy for lonely man and women by letting them ‘buy a women’ embodied in “dolls”, programed to their special affinities and in the future with new legislation to married them and live in a new family form.
(I quote)…”My forecast [says Levy] is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots,” …” “Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage,” Levy said. “There’s also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT.”,
And finally, possible pro and con of getting married to a robot are perhaps,
(I quote)…”In a marriage or other relationship, one partner could be jealous or consider it infidelity if the other used a robot,” Levy said. “But who knows, maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, ‘Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,’ you could get ‘Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?’ “, see here.
The last three pictures are sculptures and come from here.
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I watched an television show “Sin City” where all the rage in Japan are “Comfort houses” in Japan that cater to bashful Japanese gentlemen whose fantasies are to have sex with dolls similar to these, though not as robotic, but just as acrobatic. These dolls, prices ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 dollars US are dressed in various outfits ranging from French Maid to Schoolgirl uniforms and the price for an hour with your Latex beauty? About $200.00 an hour and up depending on your taste and fetish. For that price it was stated to one customer sitting on the bed beside his latex horizontal schoolgirl that you could hire a real live prostitute next door, to which the sheepish twenty something customer responded in some unintelligable gibberish as he caressed his prostrate willing “Love Doll”, indicating to the Sin City interviewer that perhaps this interview was over. Apparently sanitization is not an issue as removable clothing, wigs, mouth pieces and various orfices are are removed/replaced or just flushed out and sterilized, leading many paying and willing Clients to believe ‘Sloppy Seconds” are a thing of the past.
I tried to find the Sin City Show on Google without success. What I did find below is a MacLeans link for Japanese Love Dolls and the growing trend to Sex without Mutual Intimacy. What a warped world we live in today, and there are actually Live people willing to pay for all this! see here.
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The Movie ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, presenting a funny and affectionate story… I quote…”Lars and the Real Girl is another really different film, especially different for up-and-comer Ryan Gosling… . Gosling plays the extremely troubled Lars, who is so lonely that he resorts to buying a sex doll online. After he introduces ‘Bianca’ to the family, he keeps adding on little details here and there about her life and everything, and the whole town just plays along. The premise and script are especially good, along with the fun little cast and a really funny ending. This is just such a cute and easy movie to like, and at times you even feel like the doll is alive. Lars and the Real Girl never disappoints—it’s one of the best and strangest films I’ve seen all year.”….see more here.
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My ‘DailyComics Dream’, brings every day a new episode. The ‘Dreams’ where dreamed and reinvented on the storyboard. The written part tells the story. The black and white drawings obey no conventional comics rules, and live in a world from Francis Bacon to Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’.