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The Mechanics of Mechanophilia: Why Men Find Siri Sexy

posted by janrinok on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:57AM   
from the it-takes-all-sorts dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Last month, in an interview with The Times, Illy Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, creators of a virtual assistant and satnav known as 'Robin', said that 5% of interactions in their database are classified as "clearly sexually explicit".

Trawling the Internet for evidence of the above I discovered a Reddit forum titled: 'I masturbate to Siri and I feel disgusting'. The poster says he's a 20 year old male, who started talking to Siri sexually as a joke before realising that "it really turned me on."

The phenomenon clearly has farther reaches than one sole forum post. VA creators and chatbot companies predict such interactions and put algorithmic safeguards in place to deter feelings of emotional and sexual attachment from costumers.

Earlier this year one of the key writers for Microsoft's Cortana, Deborah Harrison, revealed at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" regarded Cortana's 'sex life' adding, "That's not the kind of interaction we want to encourage."

+1 Funny and Sad?

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Original Submission

• Re:it separates them from the “bad” women (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @10:07AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @10:07AM (#428769)

  White dominance actually requires a pretty delicate balance. If white people want to maintain the control over black people they’ve enjoyed since the time of slavery, they can’t just use brute force. They need black people to actually like them and not resent their dominance.

  And so a compromise emerged — or at least a “protection racket,” like when the Mafioso tells the businessman he’d hate to see his nice shop burn down, so why don’t they make a deal.

  The basic agreement is that as long as black people cater to white people’s needs, white people will protect and cherish black people in return. If black people have few good options for independent success, this is a pretty good deal — which explains why in more overtly racist societies where black people have fewer opportunities, cross-national studies show that black people endorse benevolent racism at even higher rates than white people do.

  When black people are under threat, their benevolent racism scores go up. Specifically, showing black people survey data about white people’s hostile racism makes black people more likely to endorse benevolent racism out of psychological self-defense. It may be ironic to turn to white people for protection from white hostility, but it’s how the cycle works.

  This also helps explain why so many black people hold racist biases against black people. If black people themselves enforce racial norms and punish deviants, it reinforces the social order that guarantees them protection. And it separates them from the “bad” black people who are deemed unworthy of that protection.

  Parent