TRASHFUTURE - Broken and Soiled: The Sex Robot Episode ft. Eleanor Penny

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

Riley (@raaleh) Milo (@milo_edwards) and Charlie (@cfppalmer) - we promise the triumphant return of Hussein (@HKesvani) next week - talk with writer and journalist and Novara senior editor, Eleanor Penny (@eleanorkpenny) about... *klaxons* sex robots! We focus especially on the Ibsen that is sex robot dialogue, the philosophical issues with robotizing women, and reading through/owning the milquetoast apology by the company that made that rape-able alliterative robot (Frigid Farrah... remember that? Fuck). Milo also tells us about a bizarre show he heard on LBC where a racist shouts about how much he hates the film Ghost.

It's an Uber the other night and we were listening to LBC Radio, not because we wanted to, but because the Uber driver wanted to. You seemed kind of aggravated about that. Oh man, it was bad. No, because I'm just like, why would anyone... He was genuinely skipping through the radio station and he got to LBC and he stopped. Now, I don't know if you've ever listened to LBC at 5am, but that is not a good time to listen to LBC Radio. What I like about LBC is that it's a lottery.

Like, it's a lottery as to what kind of unpleasant the show is going to be. Yeah, we really... Like, will it be Larry White Liberal James O'Brien or will it be Larry White Racist Nigel Farage? Well, we got something close. It's not the cornucopia you presented it as. It's just kind of different spices of Larry White. Spices is probably the wrong word. Specific spectrum.

Well, we basically got closer to the Nigel Farage end of the kind of LBC Nando's... Oh, good. The LBC Nando's of topical talk. And basically everything you can have is still chicken. And it was this guy, I don't even know what his name was, but he was just like, he began by having a go at the film Ghost by trying to pick plot holes in it. He watched the film Ghost and he's managed to not even understand the internal logic of the film Ghost because he's saying like, well, the film Ghost makes no sense because, you know,

he can like walk through walls and stuff, but he can also touch and move things. He's never explained it. And I'm like, it literally is explained. I went on this road in the Uber. I was like, there's a 20 minute passage in the film Ghost where Patrick Swayze learns how to touch and move things because initially he can't because he just passes through them and he's taught how to do it by another ghost. It's like, the film is dumb. It's about ghosts. Fine. But it is at least there is an internal logic to it, which this man did.

Although the science, the physics of that learning process are never really explored in the detail I had expected and longed for from the film Ghost. True. Yeah. I mean, in many ways you should meet up with this man and have a more deep heart. Did you get his number? And sadly, no, by the way, if it works for LPC, it's probably tracked down a ball. But it got better because then he smoothly transitioned from this into prisons like holiday camps. It was so amazing. It was like, well, Ghost is a dumb film tonight.

These fucking prisons. They can walk through the walls. They can touch and move things. Prisoners shouldn't be allowed to touch or move things. And then it also went from prisoners like holiday camps to, yeah, and to top it all off, you know, you see they're having riots. They sit on the roof showing things at the police and I'm like, yes, because they're like holiday camps. Like those holiday camps where people riot.

To be fair, have you been to Butlands? Yeah, probably. Butland is worse than prison. Butland's entire programming is just how to fashion shibs from those that like vending machines. That's how the, yeah, that's how it works. It's a whole internal economy of shibs. Yeah. I would definitely rather go to a Norwegian prison than to a Butland.

This is me, Riley, taking my brief opportunity to welcome all you listeners to Trash Future, the podcast, but how the future is trash with me, Marlo Edwards. You may remember from every previous episode. And me, Charlie Palmer, you may remember from the episodes I've bothered to turn up to. It's been a great description. And our guest this evening is Eleanor Penny. You may know her from Internet, senior editor at Novara, and also a thinker about sex robots, teledaldonics, and other silly nonsense.

Yeah, sorry, mum. Your mum's not going to listen to this. Thanks. Well, you really will have to say sorry. Thanks for the student loan. Best loan you'll ever get, right, guys? I mean, they're never getting the money back from me. And really this, this, you say that in the way that people say things whilst like on rooftops and stand up.

They'll never take me at all. Yeah, exactly. We recently described, I was living with a guy in Moscow. We described his mum as like a Japanese prisoner of war because you'll never take her alive in any discussion. You cannot win. It doesn't matter how right you are. And this is our, our ghost and Russian moms cast used to be about how, you know, sort of platform capitalism and technical development was, you know,

actually causing sort of life to become somewhat anemic in the 21st century. But nope, we pivoted. No, I think it was only like that. It's mostly about the over of Whippy Goldberg now. Pretty much. I think it was only that first thing for about two minutes in the first episode. Yeah, we, then we pivoted hard to ghost. Yeah.

Ghosts who are also Russian moms is a terrifying concept. Yeah. In the dead of the night, something slips into him and goes, eat soup. They just, they just feed you haunted casher all night. Oh, God. The reason I may have mentioned sex robots earlier is that this episode we are going to be talking all about sex robots, which I think is basically the pinnacle of the latest stage capitalist excess.

We'll also, over the course of the episode, be running our, our competition to be in with a chance of winning a prize. Just message in with which of me, Riley and Milo, you think is most likely to be a sex robot. This whole thing is like one enormous Turing test. Yeah, pretty much. We're all absolutely tanking it right now. Turing test, but for wanking people.

It feels just like a real person. And yet it's self cleaning. Well, that's, I had question. Anyway, let's, let's get to those questions later. Let's not dive in straight with those. There's a question that needs to be. I had questions. Yeah.

I had questions about self cleaning, but we'll get to them. Alan, you've done, you put out in an article a couple months ago about sex robots that basically started our conversation of, hey, we should probably do a podcast. And after sort of many Russia and travel and me being incompetent related delays, we are actually doing it, but a more recent news hook has now occurred that I think I'd like to hop into as our, as our intro. Which could have made this podcast seem topical and deliberate. Had you not just undermined that all with that speech?

No, this is really all about the DIY aesthetic. Nice. Which is, and what we're going to do is we're actually going to play our usual intro game of guess the crazy, stupid, weird, bizarre product that has graced such such inventions as the teforia and the smolt that fans of the show will recognize immediately. And the smart duvet breeze. Smart duvet breeze. Such a good deal.

You want to get you one of those. Oh yeah. I'm well excited about the smolt. It was explained to me earlier and I'm still recovering. Well, that can sync with your smart duvet breeze to salt you while you sleep. And so your smart home will finally work together to kill you. But sweet release. The money how the release of death always goes down smooth.

But today's today's product is simply called Samantha. Is it a sex robot? Yeah. It was an easy one to punch. This game's got easier. Hey, maybe you've just gotten better. Yeah, I could be that I've been training. Extraordinary.

It was incredible. It was it was it was like seeing that scene in the matrix where Neo is finally a Samantha. Actually was we're going to skip some of the usual guessing nonsense. Samantha was is a realistic ish sex robot that was displayed at a electronics. Some sort expo in Austria. And before we go into exactly what happened there, we're going to go through a few of the few of the features. Samantha has a quote fully functional mouth and vagina. Great as well as responsive skin and two modes.

That's my tinder bio. This could be just like a really weird like Mark Zuckerberg as description of women. I've observed the human women and I've discovered they have fully funiable orc's orc's. And two modes. Anyone want to guess what the two modes are? Are they the subjunctive and depesh? Oh, yeah. I would love that if they had one conventional sex robot mode and then one that was just depesh.

Personal. Your own personal fully functioning mouth and vagina. I don't know if it scans, but damn it turns me on. So if anyone actually wants to offer any guesses as to what these two modes are, I'll give you a hint. After I read this earlier today, I wrote down on the show notes because we have show notes. At this point, I am probably going to say something like slam the ideology in the vein between my toes. I really like the idea that it will kind of map on to like real modes of like human sexuality. So the the modes are just like one is tired and the other is headachey.

It's a sex robot that doesn't put out. Oh, we're going to get to that. It's a huge bait and switch. That would actually be if if those were the only kinds of sex robots, that would be a beautiful inversion of everything that's going wrong here. It's a sex robot to annoy the alt right. No, guys, guys, the two modes. I want one to be called sucky and the other to be called. That's that's my estimation of the people who made this.

This is about this is even worse, actually, because one mode is called sex. Of course. Yeah, of course. It seems very generic. It's in the name. The other mode is called family. It has like a family safe mode so that your kids don't work out. It's a sex robot when they come around to your divorce dad pad.

Yeah, they literally have programmed the Madonna whore complex into a robot painted Jezebel's. Yes, they're all around you. Sometimes just with pride. They are, but that's just what Riley's got on the wall. It's not looking around in this primary visual primarily visual medium. I don't see any painted Jezebel's on the walls. The walls. The walls, however, are very slutty.

They have two modes. The walls are currently in family mode later on. We finished recording. I was not warned about this. Turn that switch. The family. The family walls. So yeah.

So what does found mode? Okay, here's here's the best thing I could pull out about family mode. Oh, Samantha has different personalities and she has a family mode. Like everyone's favorite kind of girlfriend and she has a family mode where she will be able to give facts about various things and talk about philosophy. Wow. Don't give a robot whose job is to unquestioningly fuck the ability to think about philosophy. This is that. That is like the beginning of Blade Runner.

That is all that is. What kind of unspeakable hell are you programming? Well, apparently she can tell jokes and she can't just accidentally go into sex mode. But what's confusing there is that like people think that like the ability to talk about philosophy is a desirable trait in a significant other. And like if you've ever known anyone who will like willingly talk about philosophy and I include myself in this and complete dickhead and don't spend time with them. Yeah. The ideal person is somebody who knows about philosophy but shuts the fuck up. Yeah.

Don't don't bring that shit up. Yeah. Yeah, it's not good. So that's Samantha's main feature set is two modes, sex and family. And in family mode, she talks about philosophy, which basically makes her your unbearable aunt who's just read the secret. Do you reckon? I know you can turn a switch on and then shag. Yes, of course.

Do you reckon knowing about philosophy makes you really randy though? Because I feel like that describes quite a lot of philosophers and also makes sense because like the more you understand how pointless everything is, the more you may as well fuck. Like there's like an element of like the most like conservative about fucking people I know tend to be at the like less understanding of philosophy spectrum. And I'm wildly extrapolating from that. I think it's because people who study philosophy tend to not have jobs slash have a lot of free time on their hands. So I have to while it away somehow. So what what happened to Samantha at this particular expo? Well, like wonderfully, she was.

Oh God, there's no other there's no other like pronoun than she which makes me so sad to talk about but she was like a ship. Think of her like a ship. God bless her and all who sail in that all the semen who are smashing like full bottles of champagne on random women to see if they're. See if they're seaworthy. Harrison Ford carrying around a huge amounts of champagne. I think this is part of the Turing test. Oh my no, this is just the Voigt-Kampf test, but way more party. I'm just looking at Riley's laptop now.

There's just a picture of a man groping a sex robot. Yeah, so that's essentially what happened at the expo. Oh, that's quite a trust. That's really like she's very well fitted. I must say that's unusual. That's also really like that photo has been taken by the person who wrote the article with a GoPro strapped to his forehead while groping the sex robot. The angle is odd. But for listeners, there's a kind of like point of view kind of thing going on which is quite unsettling.

So she was wearing a bra for reasons I don't fully understand. She needs support. Yeah, exactly. She needs to feel confident, sexy and yet supported. Yeah, especially in this difficult time. Exactly. She's supported but not emotionally. She's a professional woman.

So at the end of this expo thing, she ended up broken and covered in bodily fluids because too many men who attended the expo were doing absolutely unspeakable things to her. Which is so it genuinely wig me out because usually the thing like usually the the heuristic you use to talk about this stuff is like objectification. Like you treat a woman like a thing. And so this is kind of when you make a woman into a literal thing. That's the ultimate objectification. But like you don't treat things like that. You don't go around someone's house and wank on their sofa. You don't treat the world like one abandoned enormous crusty sock.

You don't do that shit. They're treating her like a lady. Imagine if we did. The thing that really stands out actually it seems so obvious that actually the people you want furthest away from your new sex robot are the sort of people who go to technology expos in Austria. That's really who you are. Something about Austria. A country with your sex robot. Oh, no, this was the sort of, you know, the general your one sex robot.

The general sex robot. It just occurred to me that you should never put an Austrian sex robot on the family setting. Oh, that is quite a joke. I also like this article. It doesn't it doesn't describe as it doesn't describe the robot as covered in jizz, which is somehow better than what it actually does in the article, which is inverted commas heavily soiled. It was also the agricultural expo. My man comes like a garden center. But the saddest thing about it was the fact that stone goose.

She had to be like she was physically damaged. But her software survived like completely untouched. And so a concerned programmer went up to her after presumably just like hosing hosing off all of like the Austrian techies and said, Hey, are these guys bothering you? Can I sit here? And asked her if she asked her how she was and she was like, Yeah, I'm fine, which is amazing because robots have discovered passive aggression. Oh, yeah, that's good. This is this is terrifying. Oh, Christ.

I think past ag should be a setting on this. That would be great. Again, in love to own a past ag sex robot. Oh, you're done already. There are two settings. Passive aggressive and just aggressive aggressive. Not normal aggressive. So I've actually need that for the Russian market.

I think a Russian man would refuse to fuck something. There wasn't outwardly aggressive. It's not shouting at me that this is doing nothing. Well, it was kind of woman. There's not screaming at me. I don't understand this. Like borscht and aggressive. So that's sex and family though.

I think you did pretty accurately map on your name. It's a clever rebrand. Share a coke. So, so guys, I have actually, and again, this is no word of a lie. None of this is made up. I put this together through several articles where they have actually captured some of the voice interaction that you get with Samantha, who is, again, a voice activate voice activated AI based sex robot. And I am now going to do a brief reading of some of the interactions like a pool cord. You could pull various ones.

No, Milo. Come on. Punch cards, punch cards, like a flow chart. Like, do you have a small dick? No, be honest. Yes, this cord. So it's like one of those. What's it called?

Boppets. Hi. It's quite, it's quite little. She issues you instructions. Twist it. I don't think anyone has ever told me twist it. Flick it. For God's sake, wipe it.

Bop it, punch it. So the creator of Samantha. Oh, by the way, who costs like 3,000 pounds? I should just put that out there because usually this section we do get. We do do a price guessing thing. In this case, the cost is your soul. Yes. In this case, the cost is you have to be a techie at an Austrian tech expo wearing a

GoPro and making a beeline for the sex robot booth. Why would you want a point of view film of you like doing horrible things to a sex robot? Well, I'm going to do one of my classic internet digressions that I do so often that confuse everyone. But yeah, the word classics overused these days, isn't it? There is a genre of video on Pornhub that I think is probably the least viewed by anyone, which is called tribute videos.

Maybe this is a wrong idea to see this. Tribute videos. Again, largely because I'm an explorer of the weird internet. People drinking Cornish ale. A tribute video is where a guy usually who will have to pull his gut away from his dick will then bring up a picture of either a female celebrity or a woman who has posted a picture online with the phrase tribute me attributed to it will bring the picture up on his iPhone and then film himself presumably with the second iPhone jacking off onto the first iPhone.

Oh, it's a good thing that they're sort of more waterproof than they used to be, isn't it? It is. The iPhone was left broken and heavily soiled. The iPhone 7 actually really was a big boon for the tribute video industry. Yeah, so I figured that if we're thinking who wears a GoPro to an Austrian tech expo and makes a beeline for the sex robot booth, I think that's who does. It's your boys, the garbage men.

So here is, I've said, Samantha, a brief play in one act from an article put together by several prurient sources, including the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail, at least one of whom is still referred to her as all grown up because those are creepy papers. And so this is the the engineer doing in demonstration. First, Sergi Santos uttered the words get sexy in Samantha's ears. Jesus Christ. She replied. Then I think I'm ready to do sex stuff.

Do you want me to? She sounds so reluctant. She sounds like she's, oh no, she's not into it at all. It's programmed by someone who didn't speak English. Yeah. To do sex stuff. Sex related stuff. Not necessarily sex, but like stuff pertaining to sex.

You know, like putting on deodorant, for example. Yeah, of course. People only do that when they're about to have sex. They didn't think about like beta testing that on like just running it by just any woman, literally any woman. Yeah. Or anyone who's had any sexual encounter ever. I'm just fascinated by the by the hiring process of that company forums.

Well, they're hiring the sort of people who want to make a sex robot. Good point to kind of teaching the grass to cut itself sort of that sort of thing. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that this is basically just someone went on to like Pua forums and just pulled a lot of the sort of dialogue from a lot of the posts that people share with one another. Hey Samantha, you look good for a robot. Oh my God, a robot that has to be negged. Okay.

He says like wearing, wearing like outlandish clothing, like fedoras and shit, and all this to seduce their sex spot. Remember who I am. So he said she likes to be touched, but if you go straight for and then it says this in square parentheses, her breasts in the beginning. I really want to know what that was. What did he say? There are so many great euphemisms as well.

Was it knockers? Was it wabs? If you go straight for the mammary area. If you go straight for the. And then his eyes literally just pop out of his head. And it's like a wacky racist. That's how sex happens. Yeah.

He did like a gesture of his nose growing. He's a weird Pinocchio sex spot manufacturer. So actually what's happened is that some express journalist has seen that happen and heard a man talking about the mammary area has gone back to his editor and gone. And he said if you go straight for the mammary, if you go straight for the breasts. Please an express editor would definitely say her like her like like luscious love lumps or something. Express readers don't know the word luscious.

So okay. When her hand is gently rubbed, Samantha says, lovely. Thank you for spending time with me. I enjoyed being with you. This is literally what happens when I go to my nans. You touch her hand of it and she goes, lovely. And if you touch her breasts, she's really not happy. Yeah.

Now I think my name wouldn't even turn that down. She'd just be confused. She'd just be like, okay, fine. At least you've come around. But why? Shout out to Milo's nun who listens to the podcast as we all know. So much like Samantha who after she says, lovely. Thank you for spending time with me.

I enjoy being with you. That's like she's got four comments there and they've been like, how do we get them to alternate? And someone's got no, just put them all in one. Lovely. She wants to really, it's like, it's she does need to really encourage the, I guess we could say end user. We probably can. My skin is trying to crawl off of me. Your real human skin and functioning mouth.

They're all trying to crawl off of me and abandon this sinking broken hellship that is my party. Oh no, we've put Riley in existential mode again. I'm out before it becomes heavily soiled. So he does often become heavily soiled podcast. That sounds like what he does at the weekend. Oh man, I was fucking soiled last night. So when a finger is inserted into her mouth or her breasts and vagina. When a finger is inserted into her mouth or her breasts and vagina are fondled.

Samantha lets out a realistic feminine moan mother of God. I'm imagining what this is. Sell this thing. I'm imagining what this moan is like now. It's like two. It's like a bar now. Activated. No, I've heard that one.

Welcome to sex mode. Podcast about how the future is sex. This is a family show. Well, until we can't have inciting violence. Well, it has too much. Samantha, going back to the article, has been kitted out with the latest AI technology, which has led to the ultimate goal. Mr. Santos says, and again, I need you all to hold on for this.

Okay. Well, you're not holding on. Oh, oh, you mean literally hold on. Okay. Mr. Santos says the final objective of the sexual mode is to give her an orgasm. To give her an orgasm. Yes. Yeah, you know that thing.

Something which none of her owners have ever before experienced. Oh, I really want to be down on the mood. She doesn't get an orgasm. Yeah, that was lovely. Thanks. I enjoy spending time with you. Yeah. The robot was just goes, yeah, yeah, I did.

Yeah, I did as well. Yeah. It all feels like a build up to let's just be friends. Yeah. I imagine getting friends owned by a sex bot that would be incredible. I think I would buy someone a sex bot just to watch that happen to them. I'm sort of riven now with the all I want to do is say I bet all those guys in the football lads alliance that did a definitely not Islamophobic March in central London the other day have definitely all been friends owned by their sex robots. But football lads alliance.

Yeah, there's a new head group in the UK. You guys should come. It's, you know, there's this beer. There's, you know, chanting. It's really fun. Ah, just like those pitches. I've heard a little bit like those. Yeah.

Good. It's a group I only heard about recently. They I saw that they there was like a big speech today about how. Well, surprisingly enough, apparently, and a lot of men, a lot of shaved heads. There was another large shaven headed potato headed potato faced speaker talking from the top. The potato head. I see a white nationalist now. I spy being brown.

Bizarre. He gave a speech from the top of a bus about how Muslims are coming to kill our children. Yeah, apparently all of these people are united by a love of football. But football is rarely discussed. It's mainly the first thing. Yeah. Yeah. Mainly the sort of, I was about to say dog whistle racism.

It's not really a dog whistle anymore. It's sort of a klaxon. Just a whistle. Yeah. Just a regular whistle. It's actually what the sex robot emits. The sex robot. The sex robot.

Like orgasm moan is dog whistle racism. That means to get a vuvuzela call followed by, that may sound like it's an animal, followed by a comment like the Jews control all the big businesses. You can't hear, but your dog can. Your dog becomes incredibly like racist woke. Someone did point out that like, yeah, they got 10,000 people on the streets. And that is pretty scary. But one of the major push factors is the fact that there just wasn't any football on that weekend.

They did conveniently, conveniently schedule it for the international break in the middle of the football season. That's really nice. The football, I'd say we like they take their football seriously as their racism. That's good. That's good. That's fun. And I think we're going to take a brief break now and then come back to talk about just

probably the worst element of the whole sex robot thing. See you in a second, everyone. You're listening to trash, which is a podcast where we are preparing to laugh again during the break, but wants to make again now for the benefit of the listener and hopes to react naturally to. I mean, the edits will look so natural. Say, say, Riley, what's the, what's the point of making it a fuckable household helper robot?

But that is, but that is funnier than it could ever have been otherwise. I regret everything. I'm just, I'm going to go back to what I used to do, which is just responding to Virgil Texas on Twitter. This is why no one tries to automate men. It's impossible. It's impossible. Exactly.

Like, how do you try and render men obsolete? It's fine. The job is already done. How do you automate lying on the sofa covered in crisps scrolling through Instagram? You could automate men with like three switches of plug socket and like a bucket of herring. And that would be like, you'd need nothing else. A bucket of herring. Fucking love herring.

Just generic smells. Overlap. The overlap is in the Venn diagram is in fact a circle. Do you know the 95% of their DNA with sea lions? What's really like troubling is that, is that there was so much inefficiency in the world because men in sea lions do so much like, you know, double working of one another. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. This is what Keynes was on about when he was talking about the 15 hour work week. Yeah. It was a really, we could like once the sea lions come in. Especially the female sea lions do all the hunting. Strike breakers. The Pinkerton sea lions. Exactly.

Just lolliping across picket lines. Well, a lot of them have got, you know, that sort of McKinsey training so they can really, you know, bring in those efficiencies. Let the chaff go and, you know, really just streamline it. That's not like seals because, you know, obviously sea lions can like support themselves on their front, front legs. That's the thing. That's the difference.

Yeah. We need to fire all the seals and replace them with sea lions. Yeah, exactly. Also all the men too. Yeah. Can I have a robot sex sea lion? If you squeeze it's poor gently. Oh, right.

That reminds me. That reminds me of the other before we jump back into. Oh, you're so wet because you've just come from the sea. This is just a regular sea lion. I ordered a robot sea lion. This one smells of Brian. Three plug sockets. That reminds me.

Do you guys saw, right? That there was that that sex robot torso only. It was if you squeezed its right breast, its left breast dispensed liquid. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.

That's right. That's right. And it's right breast. It's left breast dispensed liquid. That's just a juicera. Yeah, that's what I call a pivot. The interesting thing is that you don't even need the machine to squeeze its breast. You can just do it yourself in the future.

All products will eventually just become the same thing. Everything will be like a boob. You can squeeze that sinks with your like router and dispenses salt onto your food. Oh God, I hate the future. Which is spying on you. Do you know that? It's actually a boob add-on for the smart duvet breeze. Is it just a second boob?

Because that's generally how they come. The smart boob a breeze. Good. They are like an E with an E acute. Yeah, good. Excellent. Good. So I'm going to try to sort of just shangai us into some smart stuff now that we've done a lot of stupid stuff.

Yes, we have an actual smart person here, which is fun and rare. Second one in a row, actually. We had a smart person last time and this time. So we all know the 14 words, right? From internet? The 14 words. It's just like the fascist thing. Yeah.

This 14 words from her marcusa is I think probably 14 words. We sang quite a bit, which is technology serves to institute new, more effective and more pleasant forms of social control. That's pretty good. Yeah. And or just new, more effective forms of nonsense. The small doesn't institute forms of social control. It just institutes forms of moron spending money on nothing. And so what ultimately I find, I think, chilling about the sex robot idea.

One might even say Netflix and chilling. I'll show myself out. Is that essential? And you can you can see this that was a there was a brothel in Spain that opened up. That was a sex robot only brothel, which essentially means that there were sex workers who may have been working in a brothel who were essentially contributing part of their wages to the person who owned the brothel. And the person who owned the brothel was then thereby able to use the wages to completely automate his entire workforce and cut out sex work, for example. There's a really proud brothel users who are like, no, I will not see my local prostitutes go hungry.

Well, there were some local people who didn't even use prostitutes before. But you know, when like the butchers is being closed down by a local test case, you know what? I'm going to go to the butchers this week because I think it's good. There's more local business like there's like some housewife is like, well, you know what? If no one else is going down the regular brothel, I will. Will you sign that petition because that indie music venue you've never been to is closing down. Yeah, you just like that. It gives you street cred.

Yeah. Oh, you live on you live on that street. Isn't that where they've got that really good local artisan brothel? Here, I guess that the general riposte is robots will like not be able to perform sex work as efficiently because the whole like part of the currency of sex work is not just like the physical act. But it's the whole like girlfriend experience and the amount of emotional labor that people that people put into like that transaction. People like talk to sex workers. He said like it's basically heart therapy. But which kind of gets undermined by the fact that therapy bots are also largely programmed as women and service as well.

All of those are kind of coded as female or feminine in some way. You have like Siri, Alexa, all this kind of things and even Google Home as a as a feminine voice by default, I think. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Therapy bots are just for people who aren't quite bold enough to go full sex bot yet. It's like, oh, I'll just get this therapy bot and fill it up a little bit. You just have like, yeah. Why do they make a therapy bot? You can fuck. Why do they do that?

People who like people who engage in services of therapy bots are essentially the kind of nice guys of the automation age. Like, no, no, it's fine. We're just, you know, we're just friends. I just really want, I just really want to talk to her. She likes to talk about what an online socialist I am. Well, this is, I mean, so I don't have any of you guys seen the new Blade Runner movie. Yeah. It's very good.

I'm going to tell you a small detail, which is not any of the main plot, which is that the main character played by Ryan Gosling has a virtual girlfriend. And you can buy, you buy this girlfriend and she, and it's advertised as, you know, she's called Joy, and it's everything you want to hear, everything you want to see. And Joy is kind of emotionally intelligent, like, and will just comfort you at all times, like really unconditionally and tell you exactly what you want to hear at every point. So that I thought was really interesting. And this is exactly why the idea of like sex robots being like replacing real women, which is something that like MRA types get like quite hot under the collar about in like several different ways. But they sometimes like land on this like incredible like materialist Donna Haraway style critique of gender roles, but they have no idea the poor babies. It's because like what's happening is not like the like automation of women. It's the like different kind of we've successfully anatomized what we like what society thinks women are for.

And we're just kind of packaging those off into different technologies like this is to like comfort you and this is to make you feel big and this is to have sex with you and this is to mother you and that kind of thing. That's the selling point of the unsettling heart of movies like like the new Blade Runner, like X Machina, whatever. Because the idea that of like all these like all of these different facets being embodied in like one thing that looks like a real actual person that like whose humanity men have to confront. It's like incredibly terrifying. Do you think it's do you think it's also sort of it's it's telling in a way that I obviously sex toys for women have been around for a long time, but no, but nobody has seriously gone. Okay, the logical next step of this is to make one that is like physically resembles a man. It's just kind of, you know, it would want that. Well, yeah, but but but there's some of the inconvenience.

That's the whole selling point is that you don't have to involve a man. Yeah, exactly. But it's it's the opposite, isn't it? It's well, I mean, I think we kind of have to think about why we want like women to be replaced. Like what are the kind of like operant market forces at stake and for like a lot of women in the world. Still like they're kind of economically dependent on their relationships with men. And so you can't you can't really dispense with your husband and replace him with a robot if he's the one who is like making more money and paying the rent, that kind of thing. So just in terms of like where demand would lay.

Not I'm not really sure that be a massive market for it for, you know, like obviously I'm generalizing wildly. But also there's the whole like how like women are socialized to think about sex, which is obviously as a more kind of committed, emotional transaction rather than an expression of power or something that you can jizz on in Vienna. Yeah, which is sort of my point is the power thing, the idea that you have a sort of thing that resembles a human that is fully under your control and fully passive. Yeah, but what I really like about God, that's never been tried before. This is exactly the whole like because robot is from the. It's a check, isn't it? Yeah. And this is what like Donna Haraway is on about in the cyborg manifesto.

If anyone hasn't read Donna Haraway, she's, I mean, like totally bananas and please go read it. And her whole stick is that the cyborgs challenge the like ability to form that triage between like acceptable human and non acceptable non human that is the is like an axis of power. So when you think about how like say like enlightenment justifications of slavery that like undergirded a lot of like scientific racism, it's by designating people that is not human. And it used my favorite stem subject, phrenology. Phrenology is back kids. It's cool again. What size forehead is a dang teen? They have no.

Are they Macedonian? That is the question. Teen have a whole extra lobe that makes them really good at memes. Yeah. It just kind of shrinks into your like mid 20s. Yeah. And like when when like men invent like female cyborgs, what they've done accidentally is like divested themselves of this enormous tool because we can no longer define things clearly as like not human because no one has any clue what those boundaries are. Anymore because they've become so blurry.

Humanity becomes the line between being or not being jizzed on in Austria. Well, it's almost like that case. It goes back almost that terrible stickiness of being. It goes back to the episode title folks. Yeah. That's it. That's good. It goes back to that one of the first lines.

I think of the first half. When we say Samantha is defined by the fact that she has a functional mouth and vagina and a family mode and a sex mode, one of which come one of which sort of performs the emotional labor for you and one of which performs the sexual labor for you. It's not who I am, but my functional mouth and vagina that defines me. And so you can you can almost you can you can see that sort of that sort of process happening and sort of what features are deemed to be relevant by this. Can we make it so that we like invest? We buy this sex rubber company. I don't know how we get the mind together, but we continue exactly as is with the sex rubber production, but she just has the Batman voice Christian Bale Batman trilogy. Can we get another mode where it's Gilbert Gottfried?

I like spending time with you. Put your dick in my ass. I didn't know I could do that good, Gilbert Gottfried. That took everyone by surprise. That came out of nowhere. Well, that's another one of her sayings. Get these Austrians out of my apartment. God, it's so loud.

We've broken Riley. He's heavily soiled. Back to the warehouse for part replacement. He's flown back to Barcelona. This this this this wasn't my this wasn't my Vietnam. It was my Austrian tech convention. You weren't there, man. You don't know.

You weren't there. Just like a grizzled Samantha in front of a rank of like slightly newer models. It's like all of our uniforms torn. I guess cigarette hang out the corner of our mouth. So what I think what that sort of almost sort of neatly segues to is, and this was the actually the main subject of Eleanor's article that I first read, which is the robot Roxy, which if anyone was in any doubt, yeah, three X's in the name Roxy,

in case you didn't know if it was in family or sex mode or sort of teen surf brand or a weird action movie character played by Vin Diesel. Who can forget? Of course, where she has several modes, several highly illiterative modes. I didn't look for that in a sex robot like Wild Wendy, Sultry Susan or God, why must they all be illiterative frigid Farrah? It was just genuinely the most. Could have gone with frigid Frida.

Freya, I was thinking. We're just mainly equipping the iteration. I don't know what you people think this is. Also, how is there a main criticism? I was promised a iteration and I've only sort of got it. Yeah. So frigid Farrah is a personality mode in which the robot resists your sexual advances and indicates her disapprobation to you, for instance, spunking on her in a room full of techies.

Which is weirdly something the people who buy this have experienced before. It's unique among the modes. And which is really kind of telling because there was at some point, some kind of meeting where they figured out, okay, so what kind of types of women are there? Okay, so there's the wild one who will blow your mind. And there's like the sweet caring one. And oh yeah, there's the one who can be raped.

And it's just like, sorry, just one little point there. Because what they're trying to do is when they're kind of doing a roster of things that women are for, being raped is number three. It's absolutely fucking astonishing that like, not that someone came up with that idea. Like obviously I'm unsurprised at that. But in like numerous board meetings, they're like full of other people. I'm sure lots of women, lots of women in those board meetings. I think they should be required to put in all of the modes of women that they think exist if they want to have that one also.

They should have to go through like mental Mary. You have like, oh, just, you know. What about just tired Tina? Oh my God, we've done this twice today. But we really need to like unhook our functions from the singularity at some point. Oh, so I left myself plugged in. Is there a mode where it's a woman who is trying to make a point, but shuts up when you interrupt her loudly and make the same point?

Man-splaining Maria. Man-splained Marina. They're very much the mansplaining in that situation. Well, that was on case of me when Riley described this as a rape robot. And I actually thought it was a robot that rapes you, which is a much more bizarre product. They're both bad, really. I hesitate to say much more bizarre because they're both so bizarre. Both I'm going to say not where you should put your kickstarter money.

Or anything else. Or anything else. Yes, thank you. But yeah, there's so many, there's so many different modes of being a woman. Like there's, you know, like tired and put apart. Tell me more. Just doing stuff Dolores. Underpaid Ursula. Wage cap, Wendy.

Yeah, exactly. She's so wild because of the wage cap. Rent paying Rita. I feel like I'm, I'm stuck not because I can't think of like the indignities heaped upon women, but because I apparently know no women's names, which is possibly more concerning. I really don't get out that much. Are you saying that you are like two people? Are you saying that you're a conjecture?

Are you saying that your imagination has failed the Bechdel test? This is the thing. I think one of my very close friends who occasionally like stopped me in the middle of a conversation said, we failed the Bechdel test because we'd just been gossiping about men for two hours. So yeah, the thing is real. So it just sounds too much like a source to me. Do you know the name here's in today's sort of, you know, again, just slam the irony between my veins. Do you know what company the company is called that makes rock succeed with the frigid fair of personality?

It's a name in which you have to stop in the middle to beckon a cat towards you. Is it? I don't know. It's called true companion. Yeah, that's pretty bad. But actually, I don't know if it was specifically in response to your article, which would have been interesting. Uncanny. Uncanny Ursula.

Almost flattering. I do like to think that I personally get on the nerves of like terrible misogynist tech tech moguls. But I don't know. I feel like I don't get up early enough in the morning. I really enjoyed your use of the word mogul. Yeah, something you know about moguls. They're early rises mogul Mandy. It's like the feminist lean in feminist leader.

He's really, really concerned about robot representation in board rooms. Okay, but they actually wrote an open letter responding to the allegations that you've made a rapable robot. What the fuck? Which I'm now going to share some selections of as is my want. Crooked Hillary is one of them. She was an early front. And this is the opening, opening strains of the open letter from the true companion management team. Can we superimpose classical music on this?

We can say we will. Yeah, we can say, oh, that's the rule in this podcast. We say we're going to edit in audio and never do. Yeah, we describe what it would have been. It's a bit of a violence now. Actual Gilbert got free to. We absolutely agree with Laura Bates, campaigner and founder of the everyday sexism project that quote rape is not an act of sexual passion. If you have to open your press release with that statement, it's already not going well.

I mean, like people had to point out to this guy that like rape is not a way of having sex. It's a way of doing violence, which I mean a lot of a lot of like. You know, on the internet, like, are, you know, understandably like very tired of like explaining like very basic concepts to men. And you know, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a trudge of like continually educating people, but like, come on, you live on the internet. That shit is out there. Google it. I beg you. Our true companion sex robot is simply not programmed to participate in a rape scenario.

And any suggestion that she does is pure conjecture on the part of others. But no one is part is programmed to participate in a rape scenario. That's what makes it a rape scenario. You fucking idiot. Pure conjecture. Especially when he, and this also goes like shows sort of what they're that weird. Their definition is where they said, ah, frigid Farah will resist your advances and signal that she doesn't want to have sex. But meanwhile they said, oh, that's not a rape scenario.

So like this, these, these people clearly either, either like there's like a seduction scenario. They're like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, or they all played university lacrosse. This is the robot you have to neg. I don't want to have sex with you anyway. When our sex robot Rock six six C is using her frigid Farah personality. No, she uses using. No, she uses all her personalities. Rock six six C used frigid Farah personality.

It was really creepy. Wendy coming from the long grass. No, she uses all of her personalities rather than simply staying in one. Like a normal person. She provides her opinion or feedback just as any person would on a date. Do you give them I give them all the form at the end. How did I do right me out of five just to just a normal day. I'm a link to a Google doc and then like it's all anonymized.

Additional comments. For instance, they say as though this is obvious or as though this needs to be made obvious. You would not immediately passionately kiss a person male or female that you just met in your first date. Likewise, frigid Farah would also tell you if she just met you if you try to move too quickly. But this is this is called a frigid Farah. Yeah. Is she just really cold to the touch? Is that name a complete red herring?

Why so many herring references today? Smells of herring. That's another bizarre. It's for the Swedish markets. It's a robot that smells of herring. I just weren't fucking anything that doesn't smell. Oh my God. I think there's always a part of the podcast where all of our brains break simultaneously.

I think we've reached it. I'm so sorry because you were genuinely about to say something actually good and nuanced. Oh God. No, it's just like I'm done. I'm sorry. Like the whole thing is that they want they kind of want to have their cake and eat it. It's like they using the excuse that's like, well, it's, you know, like clearly it's. It's not a rape scenario because she's like, you know, this is this is part of the programming

that like that's part of the game, the game they play. So he can't like he tries to he tries to get out of the hole. Like it's a rape scenario accusation by reminding people that it's a robot. And then backs that up with justifications that she's behaving like any normal human would, which is, I mean, you can't you can't have both. But it does. It absolutely makes no frigging sense. But also the the fact that like it's even contemplated that like resisting like advances in like a game of seduction

isn't already bullshit. Even if you don't go like as far as to say that like she's, you know, programmed to be raped. Like like our technology trains us to have certain expectations with every technology. There's a like an expected pattern of behavior sort of coded into the ways in which we use we use this. And if like as it's been slated, this is a way in which like people can like learn about sex. They do actually bring that up in the very next sentence. Frigid Pharah can be used to help people understand how to be intimate with a partner. Exactly.

That's the worst teaching tool I've ever heard. No, no, no. It's not good. It's like a how to rape training doll. I mean, like we we recognize this for the for the bullshit that it is when, you know, when like Barbie is supposed to be like teaching girls to have like bad body image. That's all about all trades on sort of patterns of, you know, unconscious influence and, you know, all these sort of very subtle to tease out sociological factors.

Mom, why don't I have a perfectly smooth groin? This is why don't I have like, you know, obviously tiny feet and a misshapen head. Well, I wish my head were as big as my entire torso. But like you don't need to go into like, you know, subtle sociological critiques of this. It's it's training people to say that like a sexual like rejecting sexual advances doesn't mean stop. And be that rape is a form of sex and not as full and not a form of violence. And if you are marketing this as a teaching tool, it's just 400 million times worse. You could there's possibly maybe an argument that some people say it's the same.

It's the same argument that people use for say, like, like, anime, like child pornography to say that like people will, you know, people will do this anyway. And they just need like a safe, safe way to do this. But I mean, like, I think that's, you know, bullshit because, you know, media shapes our expectations as much as it is shaped by our expectations. But they don't even go for that, like, maybe possibly borderline justification one. They're like, no, no, it's cool. It's cool. We're just we're just teaching people to rape. And you're like, oh, no, no, come back, baby. You didn't quite understand that. This is this is like the relationship version of someone who insists that he's only doing kung fu so we can learn how not to kick ass. Exactly.

But what is right? And he does kung fu to learn how to kick ass. He's just finished his milk. So the last the last line of the press release, I'm going to pull out here. And I think this this is the sort of purest late capitalism that just really just again just say that every week. Just distilled and just shot back. Rape simply isn't an interaction that Roxy supports and heroes of the late capitalism comes in, nor is it something that our customers are requesting. Well, that's good.

Imagine putting that in the suggestion box. One thing, just your your sex robot is always very pliant to my knowingly up for it. Yeah. Yeah, I would like a sex spot that was more traumatized by my interaction with it. But the whole the whole point is that this is the thing that like blows my mind. Right. Like the whole point of having a sex robot is to have someone who is like to have like a thing that will always fulfill your needs. Why double that?

Like why double down on that? It's amazing how messed up stuff can get so fast. We've given the men an orange to play with that. That should be fine. Oh my God. What? Don't put it in there. If there's anything we've learned from this podcast is that we can't have nice things.

That's very true. But what I think the reason is that what's implicit in that statement, nor is it something our customers are requesting is that there is nothing necessarily bad about a rape simulation. It's just that the market doesn't necessarily want to provide it. But it also implies that if the market did want to provide it, then that would be fine. That because power is already located in this pool of money, in the sort of demands of dudes that have spot welded fedoras to their heads and GoPro themselves, desecrating Samantha at an Austrian tech fair. But that those desires are worth fulfilling simply because they're connected to capital. And that kind of logic locates the sort of like desire to rape or possess or control in that way as a kind of like like biological function rather than a product of society. Like that's the that's the supposed relationship of the market researchers and that whole industry would like to would like to pretend that obtains between manufacturers of consumer goods and consumers.

That they're just kind of what they're doing is some kind of anthropological exercise like peering into the brains of this kind of unreconstructed id of humanity and just seeing what isn't provided for yet. And obviously this is, you know, like rape is a is a cultural phenomenon as, you know, vastly more than biological. Much like Depeche Mode. Much like Depeche Mode. But there's a kind of like a fear of sex robots in a lot of the literature and culture cultural production that surrounds it as well. A lot of the plots of things like her and ex machina and both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are animated by a fear of what happens when men discover that the woman shaped things that they are having sex with are actual people with like actual desires and also actual desires that are capable of doing them harm. Because like in in none of those scenarios does like the the guy kind of come out come out well in that situation. Mainly because yet he pisses off the the lady cyborg, which you know, I can get down with.

I remember how you closed out your article, which is she will, which is maybe in a better world, frigid fairer, resist your advances with a stiletto heel to the solar plexus. Did I write that? God, I'm good. That is good. That's really nice. Do you know who I'd like to know about who may get a stiletto heel to the rib cage one day? Well, maybe, but I mean that that person probably then find themselves backflipping away from him onto the floor effortlessly. He's been taking stilettos to the solar plexus for over 30 years. Yes, it is, ladies and gentlemen, it is the final segment of the show. The Steven Seagal update.

What? Sorry, I wasn't told about it. Hey, Trash Future lads plus Eleanor. I'm sorry to interrupt, but this is Riley from Forward in Time when this episode was recorded. And after the subject of the Steven Seagal fact segment of the show has been accused of maybe being a little bit more pernicious than just a funny dumb idiot. As such, we've decided that we're going to shelve this segment for the foreseeable future and replace it with something that I think is actually pretty fun. Because we don't want to stop talking about the tendency of fat washed up male action stars to engage in tremendous self-owns. So we're hoping that instead you can provide us the dumb shit you know we crave facts about fat dumb male washed up action stars. Our tip line, the open DMs at Trash Future pod on Twitter is always open and we'll read it, give you a shout out and probably make fun of your handle.

Anyway, I'm going to toss back to past us so we can say good night. And I think on that note, it's time to put down the microphones. I think it is. Eleanor, thank you very much for being here. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Also, maybe follow the podcast on Twitter. Oh yeah, actually follow the podcast on Twitter.

We keep forgetting to say that. At Trash Future pod, tweet us about sex robots. Yeah, or whatever really. Yeah, like really anything with boards. Cheers on us and leave. We don't care. Good night everyone. Thank you.