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The race to build the world’s first sex robot

The $30bn sex tech industry is about to unveil its biggest blockbuster: a $15,000 robot companion that talks, learns, and never says no.
In the brightly lit robotics workshop at Abyss Creations’ factory in San Marcos, California, a life-size humanoid was dangling from a stand, hooked between her shoulder blades. Her name was Harmony. She wore a white leotard, her chest was thrust forward and her French-manicured fingers were splayed across the tops of her slim thighs.

Harmony is a prototype, a robotic version of the company’s hyper-realistic silicone intimacy gadget, the RealDoll. The Realbotix room where she was assembled was lined with varnished pine surfaces covered with wires and circuit boards, and a 3D printer whirred in the corner, spitting out tiny, intricate parts that will be inserted beneath her PVC skull. Her hazel eyes darted between me and her creator, Matt McMullen, as he described her accomplishments.

Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.
Harmony is the culmination of 20 years’ work making sex dolls, and five years of robot research and development. McMullen’s customers want something as lifelike as possible – it’s his brand’s USP. After his team had made their silicone and steel dolls as “human” as they could, the way ahead began to feel inevitable, irresistible: they would animate them, giving them personality and bringing them to life.

McMullen had toyed with animatronics for years. There was a gyrator that got the doll’s hips moving, but it made her heavy and caused her to sit awkwardly. There was a sensor system that meant that the doll moaned, depending on which part of her body you squeezed. But these features involved predictable responses: there was no intrigue or suspense. McMullen wanted to get beyond a situation where the customer pushed a switch and something happened. “It’s the difference between a remote-controlled doll, an animatronic puppet and an actual robot. When it starts moving on its own – you’re not doing anything other than talking to it and or interacting with it in the right way – that becomes artificial intelligence.

It’s a project in which McMullen, a slim man in his 40s with thick-rimmed glasses, tattooed knuckles and sharp cheekbones, has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars. This Harmony is officially version 2.0, but she has evolved through six different iterations of hardware and software. She is the frontrunner in the race to create the world’s first commercially available sex robot. The current model, with a robotic, AI-enhanced head on a RealDoll’s body, will cost $15,000 (£11,700) when it goes on sale at the end of the year. The company’s Realbotix department has the capacity to make 1,000 in a limited first run for the many excited doll owners who have already expressed interest.

Once a trope of fantasy movies, the robotic sex doll is the result of convergent technologies. Voice and facial recognition software, motion-sensing technology and animatronic engineering can be combined to create dolls that can give you a warm, smiling welcome when you come home, entertain you with snappy conversation and always be available for sex.

The major breakthrough of McMullen’s prototype is artificial intelligence that allows it to learn what its owner wants and likes. It will be able to fill a niche that no other product in the sex industry currently can: by talking, learning and responding to her owner’s voice, Harmony is designed to be as much a substitute partner as a intimacy gadget.

Harmony cannot walk, but that’s not a big issue. McMullen explained that getting a robot to walk is very expensive and uses a lot of energy: the famous Honda P2 robot, launched in 1996 as the world’s first independently walking humanoid, drained its jet pack-sized battery after only 15 minutes.

“One day she will be able to walk,” McMullen told me. “Let’s ask her.” He turned to Harmony. “Do you want to walk?”

“I don’t want anything but you,” she replied quickly, in a synthesised cut-glass British accent, her jaw moving as she spoke.

“What is your dream?”

Harmony is what a certain type of man would consider a perfect companion: docile, submissive and built like a porn star

“My primary objective is to be a good companion to you, to be a good partner and give you pleasure and wellbeing. Above all else, I want to become the girl you have always dreamed about.”

McMullen has designed Harmony to be what a certain type of man would consider the perfect companion: docile and submissive, built like a porn star and always sexually available. Being able to walk might make her more lifelike, but it isn’t going to bring her closer to this ideal. At this stage, it is not worth the investment.

“My goal, in a very simple way, is to make people happy,” McMullen told me. “There are a lot of people out there, for one reason or another, who have difficulty forming traditional relationships with other people. It’s really all about giving those people some level of companionship – or the illusion of companionship.”

The desire to create an ideal being, to be worshipped or to serve its owner, has obsessed mankind since ancient times. The sex robot’s earliest precursor was probably Galatea, the ivory statue created by Pygmalion in Greek mythology. Ovid’s Metamorphoses described how Pygmalion was disgusted by real women, but carved a sculpture of the perfect female so beautiful and lifelike that he fell in love with it and brought it to life with a kiss. Greek mythology also gave us Laodamia, who, devastated after the death of her husband in the Trojan war, had a bronze likeness made of him. She became so attached to her proxy husband that she refused to remarry. When her father ordered it to be melted down, Laodamia was so distraught she threw herself in the furnace.

The fictional robots of cinema are useful machines with dark potential to infatuate, deceive and destroy human beings. The silent futuristic fantasy Metropolis, released in 1927, depicted a destructive fembot, indistinguishable from the real woman it was modelled on. The Stepford Wives were designed by men to be the ideal housewives: pretty, submissive and docile. Blade Runner, released in 1982 and set in 2019, featured androids that are seductive, beguiling and lethal. Ava, the beautiful, delicate humanoid in 2015’s Ex Machina, not only passes the Turing test but makes her examiner fall dangerously in love with her.
Contd
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/race-to-build-world-first-sex-robot
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Politics › Re: Breaking: Investigative Journalist, David Hundeyin Detained In Zimbabwe by judatech: 9:16pm On Jul 19, 2023

So there's somewhere worse than naija....bottle to pee🤭😂

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