SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Country's first 'robot sex brothel' set to open in Texas prompts backlash: report
The first so-called 'robot sex brothel' in the U.S. slated to open in the Houston area this month has prompted a massive backlash from residents and activists who say it will ruin the neighborhood. The company opened its first location last year near Toronto, where $60 buys a half-hour alone with a robot sex doll, according to the Washington Examiner. The dolls start at $2,500 to buy.
Update: Houston officials halt plans to open first US 'robot brothel'
Houston city officials have ordered at least a temporary halt to a Canadian company's plan to open a so-called "robot brothel" in the city. The Houston Chronicle reported that building inspectors ordered the halt after determining that the company, Kinky S Dolls, lacked the permits required for demolition and construction at a former 2,500 sq ft hair salon in the Galleria area of the city.
takyon: Change.org petition aiming to "Keep Robot Brothels Out of Houston".
Also at ABC7.
See also: 'Robot sex brothel' slated to open is not wanted, Houston's mayor says
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:21PM (2 children)
In the general sense of AI problems you're probably correct, in the sense of building a machine to simulate "one night stands" I don't think the customers are selecting a product based on highest IQ or best SAT/ACT test results.
Kind of like telling someone 500 years ago about a TV, aren't you worried the little people in the box will have thoughts and feelings? Well, in practice we don't do data compression to that level, its just lots of rapidly changed images with little sentience inside a VCR or DVD player.
What is likely to be a huge issue, much like Harley Davidson could or did trademark and copyright their motorcycle exhaust sound, making robot sorta-clones of possibly cooperative or not cooperative pr0n stars is going to be a legal minefield. So picking a name out of the headlines, someone is going to try and sell the "Stormy Daniels" experience and its gonna be a legal minefield to stumble thru. For example there will be shitty cheap gray market imports from China on ebay and amazon of the "Thunderstorm Danielle Experience" that happens to be almost identical but they're factory seconds so a boob might fall off during vigorous activity or whatever. Or "Rainy Dani" that's an identical clone of high quality but they didn't pay the license fee.
And we'll probably continue to get 100 spam emails a day, now including robot chicks.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:48PM (1 child)
Well the brain is the biggest and best sexual organ of all, especially for nerds like me (although that's one of the reasons I wouldn't visit a brothel). You make a good point though that a bot could just physically replay a sort of motion captured sex scene previously performed by a human actress. It would greatly limit the interactivity but I'm sure a lot of people would find it very, very hot and theoretically that wouldn't be much more sentient than the images on the TV. There'd just need to be an algorithm to scale the sizes of each motion to fit the customer's body shape, size and movements. Probably there'd be a few pre-recorded responses to customer actions, a bit like a call center flowchart!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 02 2018, @01:05PM
Yes consider table tennis aka ping pong game. You can get a machine thats something like a baseball pitcher machine but for ping pong balls although its not terribly interactive if you're just trying to strengthen up your swatting muscles its adequate. However there's some robot video on youtube demonstrating machine vision robot arm ping pong player who has a set of 5, 10, 50 theme'd movements and picks the correct move based on visual stimuli.
Likewise the pr0n actress theme'd robot will likely have a very impressive soundboard that reacts appropriately to behavior, possibly we're approaching an era where pr0n stars are going to trademark and copyright certain "moves" that are their way of doing whatever. Not only is her voice copyrighted but the exact way precise way she wiggles her hips.
I would imagine automotive research into active suspensions would apply directly to programming a robot to the exact physique of a specific human at a specific time. A mathematically provable engineering reproducible wiggle matching one specific human.