Technocreep (26 page)

Would humans actually jump species to have sex with robots?

The website YouGov and The Huffington Post commissioned a survey on robosex and found that 18% of us believe that robots will have sex with humans by 2030, and 9% would go for it if they could.

In answer to the question “if it were possible for humans to have sex with robots, do you think that a person in an exclusive relationship who had sex with a robot would be cheating?” 42 percent said yes, 31% no, and 26% probably gave the most honest answer, “not sure.”
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There are some deep definitional and philosophical questions at play here. What is a robot? RealTouch Interactive is a device that connects to a USB port and to a certain part of the male anatomy. It can then be controlled remotely over the Internet. Is this robot sex? Is it infidelity or just high quality porn viewing?

The RealTouch is said to bring “porn into the 4th dimension.” Gizmag reviewer Loz Blain admitted that he has “been using this USB-controlled pleasure machine to have amazingly realistic long-distance sex with girls on three different continents.”
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The female side of this market is also being addressed. In an article on
Wired.com
, writer Regina Lynn documented the day a UPS truck delivered her high tech Internet-enabled sex toy for women called a Sinulator. Both Sinulator and RealTouch appear to have ceased selling their products, but others are filling the void, including some that include smartphones apps.
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Teledildonics moved into virtual reality with the November 2013 introduction of VR Tenga, a robotic sex toy from Japan that coordinates its ministrations with the Oculus Virtual Reality headset. According to people who have tried it, the effect is more than adequate.
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Users of this device may be showing us the way of the future—the rise of human/computer hybrids. The VR Tenga is more than just a communication channel: it adds input of its own into the experience, but there is a human on the other end.

In Japan, “Doll No Mori” (”Forest of Dolls”) charges the equivalent of about $110 for a 70-minute “doll escort service.” In a book on robot ethics, this example is discussed with the appropriate degree of gravitas. While concluding that the dolls are not fundamentally different from vibrators, the authors do raise thorny issues about whether spending an hour enjoying the pleasures of Doll No Mori constitutes marital infidelity.
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Considering the extreme “robots have rights too” viewpoint, this book also suggests that “natural law mitigates in favor of an artificial consciousness having intrinsic rights, and therefore, simply by virtue of having an artificial consciousness, a robot should be ascribed
legal rights.”
So much for the idea that robosex will be cheap, simple, and uncomplicated.

For decades, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has stretched our minds about interacting with technology. In her Plenary Lecture to the 2013 AAAS conference in Boston, she described her experiences watching people interact with Kismet, a big-eyed humanoid robot that lives in a lab at MIT. Even highly intelligent people seem to enjoy conversing with Kismet.

This is not about the robot deceiving anybody. But because of that eye contact, those facial expressions, the voice that responds to the cadences of your own, there is what I call ‘a moment of more.' Talking to Kismet you have that pleasurable experience of being understood, even though you know that you are not really understood.
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Turkle suggests that we all crave attention, which explains the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, social outlets that provide us with “so many ­automatic listeners.” She claims that our interaction with sociable robots will change us, causing us to rethink the meaning of words like “caring,” “friend,” “companionship,” and “conversation.” Anyone who has ever delivered a longish soliloquy to a dog or cat will probably ­empathize.

What limits should be placed on robotic access to our lives? Gmail got us used to the idea that robots should read our mail to sort spam and to advertise to us. If we agreed that Google can robotically read our messages to give us free email, how can we argue on principle that it's wrong for a government agency to read our traffic to keep us safe? Of course, “informed consent” is a key difference here. Yet how many Gmail users are well enough informed to really give that consent? As General Keith Alexander suggested in his speech to the 2013 Black Hat conference, many people might actually approve of the NSA's data collection techniques if they thought about alternative security measures that might be even more draconian.

Another robot that we all use on a daily basis is some sort of a search engine. Even toddlers now understand the concept behind Google or Bing or Yahoo Search. The actual workings are extraordinarily complex, involving spiders that traverse the net, indexing files and mathematical ranking algorithms. But the end results seem like magic.

The demand for this functionality is so great that it has even been implemented in places where the Internet has yet to go. MIT Media Lab co-creator Nicholas Negroponte once proudly showed me the work that his students did in rural Cambodia. Every day, someone would ride a motorcycle with a wireless access point along a road, letting it communicate with systems in schools and other buildings in order to provide once a day email and search access.

These MIT students quickly figured out that certain queries, like how to grow rice or avoid HIV/AIDS, showed up with some regularity. They “cached” those answers in the offline computers, meaning that if you asked the right question, you got an uncanny instant answer, even without connectivity.

There is little question that the existence and convenience of search engines has fundamentally changed our way of thinking and learning. In a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose, Google chairman Eric Schmidt noted that his company's signature product has made it unnecessary for today's students to do the kind of rote “education” that he was apparently subjected to.

When I was 13, and I grew up in Virginia, I was required to memorize the 52 cities that were the capital cities of each county of the state of Virginia, which I mastered after a lot of work. Today, of course, there is a nice table in Google that tells me all that. I don't know why I'd have to memorize that.
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In fact, the regular use of search engines appears to actually “rewire our brains.” Like any change, it undoubtedly has both positive and negative aspects. Researchers at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior put people inside fMRI brain imaging machines and found that “for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.”

Compared to people reading a book, Internet searchers showed increased activity in the dorosolateral prefrontal cortex area of the brain. The researchers also managed to locate, back in the late 2000s, some people who were not experienced with Internet search and observed that, after five days of searching for one hour per day, “the subjects had already rewired their brains.”
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One of the researchers, Dr. Gary Small, has expanded on these findings in a book called
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.
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The advent of visual search engines, such as TinEye and Google Image search, have also changed the way we think and search for information. Having an unlimited ability to search for anything can lead to mischief. There are actually some searches, such as for numbers in the format of credit cards, that can get you banned by Google for a period of time.

Of course, Google is not the only search engine in the world. Another, called Earthcam, specializes in helping you find webcameras that are available, and sometimes even controllable, from the Internet. Some are put there deliberately by tourist attractions like ski resorts. Others are available because they have been poorly configured or improperly secured.

Programmer John Matherly built a tool called Shodan, paying homage to a character in the
System Shock
video game series. When pointed in the right direction, it robotically traverses the Internet, looking not only for cameras but also for power plants, industrial sites with weak passwords, and just about anything in the big wide “Internet of Things” that is available to the public.

Shodan looks in places that Google doesn't go for things that people don't want you to see. One of its strongest abilities is finding systems that monitor industrial processes, and in some cases, allowing a user to control them remotely. According to a media report, Shodan users have discovered “control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron.”
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Imagine an unseen hand from the other side of the world suddenly taking charge of a nuclear facility or a city's transit system. Still recovering from the impact of natural disasters like the Fukushima tragedy, some worry that a fiddling hacker pushing buttons in the wrong sequence just might take us all back to the Stone Age.

Things were both brutal and creepy in the Paleolithic era as our ­ancestors struggled to survive.
Homo erectus, Homo habilis,
and
Homo neanderthalensis
all had the technologies appropriate to their time: stone tools, clothing, and most especially fire. Recent plant ash and charred bone evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa show that, even a million years ago, early hominids harnessed the power of fire on a routine basis.
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We can only imagine how bizarre the astounding transformation of matter by fire would have appeared to these people. They would have been as unsettled by this mystery as we are when we walk by a billboard and it displays something we just mentioned in a tweet. They figured it out, and so will we, but not without some burned fingers.

In their article on the Wonderwerk cave discovery, anthropologist Michael Chazan and colleagues call the ability to control fire “a crucial turning point in human evolution.” In a very real way, we have reached a similar juncture. Information, and the technologies that handle it, are transforming our lives in ways as fundamental as the changes brought by fire.

Since we've had information processing for over 60 years, one might think we've moved beyond the “Ugh. Look. Fire!” stage. Actually, and I can say this with confidence because I've been involved with computers since 1965, the first four or five decades of information technology, for all but the most advanced thinkers among us, were spent just rubbing the sticks together:

First we automated things that we understood, like payroll processing, airline reservation systems, and searching for stuff in the library. A few bright lights like Joseph Weizenbaum and Ray Kurzweil pushed us to think about using technology to do things differently, instead of just billions of times faster and more efficiently.

The way we applied technology in the past made eminent good sense because that's exactly what the times called for. Just as Henry Ford's assembly line made car making more efficient, the IBM 360/50 computer ensured that I got my paycheck on time and that the calculations were done right, as long as humans entered the data correctly.

Now, however, as biomedical and information technologies merge in seamless ways, we don't really know where we are going. Information will still be the spark, but our bodies and our entire lives are becoming the fuel.

It is clear that we should be thinking about the moral, ethical, and even spiritual dimensions of technology before it is too late. We know we will not get it 100% right, because some entrepreneur or hacker will always come up with something clever that we never anticipated. That's why having a framework based on past experience can help. It's time to consider why some technologies strike us as being technocreepy.

Helen Nissenbaum has written extensively about “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” suggesting that a shared understanding of the norms of information use is key to protecting privacy. As she writes, “demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it” will provide a benchmark of privacy protection.
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Nissenbaum's ideas are explored in an article by Alexis Madrigal, which includes an excellent example of contextual privacy.

Madrigal notes that some people are offended by Google's Street View car even though they are standing in a public street and can be seen by their neighbors.  “If I'm out in the street,” he writes, “I can see who can see me, and know what's happening. If Google's car buzzes by, I haven't agreed to that encounter. Ergo, privacy violation.”
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The key criticism of Nissenbaum's framework, Madrigal writes, is that “it rests on the ‘norms' that people expect.”

To explore what contextualized privacy really means to us, here is a model that illustrates some aspects that have emerged as common threads in the examples we have considered:

Figure 9. Dimensions of Technocreepiness. Concept by Thomas P. Keenan. Image created by N.R. Dekens.