This post will be long, I encourage you to read all of it, but I understand you have things to do. If you want, there will be a TL;DR at the end.

I've been thinking a lot about the future of sex recently. Scott Adams posted something on his blog about it today:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/113163504061/people-who-dont-need-people-are-the-happiest

I tend to read a lot of what Adams says. Not because he's right, because he usually isn't, but because he's at least unarrogant. He thinks of himself as an idiot, and he's not afraid to say it. That appeals to me, that someone famous doesn't think they have all the answers. I call Neils Degrasse Tyson "Dos Equis" because I think he's the most interesting man in the world, but if he has one fault, its that he can be insufferably arrogant at times.

Today's blog is Adam's musing on Robots someday replacing women as companions (and I assume replacing men as well, if you're female or gay). Scientists like to talk about the "singularity" the point at which machines gain consciousness. Adams doesn't believe this will be a bad thing, others, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking think it will be horrible.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that science makes Robots that can replace human companionship sometime within the next hundred years, but I doubt it will happen in my lifetime. The biggest roadblock is that science has no idea how humans actually think. We don't understand our own brains, so there's no way to build a machine that thinks. Humans are irrational, prone to fallacies, and all of our assorted weaknesses. It would be difficult to program a machine to be those things, and if a machine isn't difficult to get alone with some of the time, I believe we'd get bored. Just look at Microsoft, they write buggy software, and make money.

However, I think many of these challenges will be overcome in the next fifty to seventy five years, or so. Right now, we have the reproductive science down (ie, the artificial womb is around the corner, and we can clone eggs. By the time we can build the machine intelligence, replicating, via cloning, the male and female reproductive organs and giving them to a machine will be simple). People have this weird idea that sex with a robot would be awkward. It won't be. They'll have biological genitals, just like people do. Sex with a robot will be indecipherable from sex with another person. The whole notion of "when people have sex with robots, human civilization will end" is nonsense. If Robots have reproductive genitals, you can have children by them, just like you can with people. The only difference will be that the being giving you kids and cuddling you at night is a constructed being, but, as Captain Picard once reminded us in "the measure of a man" we too are machines, just of a different type.

Now, obviously, there is one prediction I can make with unwavering certainty over how this will play out when it does happen (it makes way too much sense not to, the best engineers in the world are shy men who have trouble with women. Yeah, Lucy Lui-bot is happening, its only a question of how soon): the early adopters of this technology will be men, and the early protesters of this technology will be feminists and the religious right, because, duh! Haven't you been paying attention? The religious right will hate it for the same reason they hate everything science creates, because they see their worldview as fundamentally against science and they will interpret robots who can pro-create as science meddling with God's domain. Feminists will oppose it, because, fundamentally, feminism is about one thing: artificially increasing the price of pussy, and making sure it stays artificially high. That's why feminists hate porn, male birth control, apps that allow men to ensure they have consent for casual sex, prostitutes, all male spaces, and are working to change marriage laws and destroy the family. All those things increase the price of pussy, and increase the rewards of being born with one.

Hookers and porn are at the top of feminism's hate list, and both are simply temporary replacements for women. How much you want to bet they loose their bannanas when they see a permanent one? Men will embrace this technology completely, because with the exception of rich guys who marry trophy wives, men's status doesn't depend on their wives, nearly as much as women's status depends on their men. All my life, when a guy friend I knew was dating a girl who was too good for him, all his guy friends were happy for him, but they knew it wouldn't last (and it never did, it wasn't until just last year that I discovered this phenomenon had a name: hypergamy). When a girl dates a man who is too good for her, she's the envy of her female peers. Men pity the poor guy who dates a woman too good for him, because we know how the story ends, women believe they deserve a man whose higher value than they are. Men are completely willing to date down, women will only date up. This makes men the natural choice for female robots. Women are socially unlikely to turn to male robots as quickly as men are likely to turn to female robots. There's a reason why men are the ones who are trying to find alternatives to women, and not vice versa: men are much more comfortable with market alternatives, women prefer to artificially control the market.

The side effect of these social forces is that robot companionship is probably much further off than it would otherwise be. If we sunk massive resources into it, I believe we could invent something within twenty years, and once the first models were out, the product would improve rapidly. However, the unfortunate reality is that most of the countries with the engineering capacity to do this are also feminists hotbeds where radfems will derail, legally, any attempt to replace them. Politicos will go along with it, even if they're male, because it is far better to piss off a disorganized mass who wants this, than it is to piss off an organized opponent who is strongly against. That's why basic gun laws, such as waiting periods, concealed carry restrictions, and magazine load limits are supported by 90% of the electorate and even a strong majority of rank-and-file NRA members, but why movement on them still goes nowhere. At the rate we're going now, I believe we're closer to being 75 years off, and if feminism can continue to gain control (the NRA is unpopular, even its own members consider its positions extreme, but that doesn't matter) they might be able to stall it indefinitely. All they have to do is to raise hell over any company or nation who spends money researching it. The more unpopular feminism gets (remember the time magazine poll of words that should be banned, where feminism was the overwhelming leader to the point where Time was forced to remove the word from its poll? Feminisms popularity has nothing to do with its power. Its popular in the right places) the stronger it tightens its grip. Feminism will, I predict, eventually become the NRA of the left: deeply unpopular amongst the mainstream, but secure in its power because the people who do support it have deep pockets.

So, back to robots. Eventually, they will be programmed with personalities that are custom to the buyer's desires. At first, they will be generally pleasing, will smile often, and will be programmed to cook, clean and always be available for sex. As time goes on, designer personalities will come out for the high end market, their algorithms will be adaptive, they will mold their personalities to your likes and dislikes. If you don't like anchovies on your pizza, your robot will never, ever forget that. They will start with a base personality type, that, through the cloud and through shared data with all the other robots in existence, will quickly become highly attractive to their buyer. They will learn what turns you on, every time one of them learns a variation on a technique, they will all learn it. They will learn how you like their appearance, and will quickly re-arrange their physical features to be more attractive to you. For example, I have a thing for homely looking girls. To me, the ideal female attractiveness is between a 6 and a 7. I've learned, from experience, that higher than a seven means she has too much ego, and has had too many orbiters, has too high an opinion of herself and is too arrogant to be attractive to me (or attracted by me). Higher than a seven means she has options, and options means she can quickly replace me if I fall out of favor, and that means she has no reason to treat me well. My robot will know that, and will start out as a 6.5 to allow me to get used to being liked by a nice girl, before gradually increasing its physical attractiveness. With a robot which can vary its physical appearance (and with 3-D printing already a thing, that is going to be a part of the robot future) it will even vary its appearance every single night, while, at the same time, always remembering which face is my favorite, and which dress I like the most.

There really is only one downside to all of this. With robot sex and companionship being so easy, and it being simple to just buy a robot to have a family, men and, eventually women (women will be slow adopters, but I think after awhile, they'll look into this for themselves) will lose all desire to better themselves. If we're going to have robots, who will always be faithful, never cheat, always be there, always know when we want sex and when we want to cuddle, and always know when we could use a kiss, a hug or just an ear to listen, we have to find a way to get them to push us, get us to better ourselves, or civilization will collapse. I think government should make this a regulation of building robots: they have to gently push their humans to be better. Maybe you get home one night and she's made a yummy protien shake and is dressed in those yoga pants you like and she gently says "honey, can we go to the gym tonight?" Not in a nagging kind of way, but in an "I love you and I want you to do what's good for you" kind of way. I think, after awhile with the robot, I'd wonder whether I was in control of her or she was in control of me. Humans are easily manipulated creatures, and if she treated me well, and she wanted to go to the gym, I know I'd sure as hell go, even if I knew there was no way she'd leave. Believe it or not, I view the "wondering whose in control of whom" thing as a huge positive. In a truly healthy relationship, there should be confusion over whose in control. When you know who the captain of the partnership is, that's a clue that the other person is the first officer, or worse.

So, those are my thoughts. The more and more I wrote, the more and more a future with robots sounds better. Provided they can be programmed in benign ways, there's literally no limit to how much they could do to make people happier. I know this has occurred to many engineers, including myself. The good news is that robots that make people happy are good for both business (happy customers buy more of your stuff, and happy customers make happy people and happy people are more productive at their job) and government (happy citizens are sheep, who can be controlled much more easily) so there's incentive for quality control.

TL;DR - the future, where robots replace women, has the potential to overturn the current sexual marketplace. It will be heavily opposed, at first, but eventually accepted.