Quote:Yes, sex robots are emerging as the new, next-gen high-tech form of erotic indulgence.  Put aside the traditional dildo or innovative vibrator, forget about online porn or even immersive 3D VR porn — they’re so yesterday.  And good-bye to the living, sexual human other.  Who needs all that erotic stuff if you can play with a full-size (female) sex robot who fulfills all one’s (a guy’s) commands?

In July, the Netherland’s-based Foundation for Responsible Robotics (FRR) released a revealing study, Our Sexual Future With Robots, that explores what the authors identify as the “significant issues that we may have to deal with in the foreseeable future over the next 5 to 10 years.”

Quote:Sex robots are emerging as a new product line of the sexual marketplace, the latest expression of future-sex.  A half-century ago, Herbert Marcuse identified future-sex as a form of “repressive de-sublimation.”  The more sex is integrated into the market economy, the less it functions as a revolutionary force of personal and social change.

In his 1964 reflection, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse worried, “In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations.” He goes on to identify an as-yet unacknowledged tendency of capitalism, “It thus obliterates the opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs.  Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion.”