It’s the fireworks holiday. And following with what must be a centuries’ old tradition here in SF, a huge fireworks celebration is planned for 9:30 tonight, while The City is surrounded by an ominous wall of fog. A juggernaut of fog, a behemoth of fog on all sides, ready to roll in and smother the sky in time for the event. It happens every year. And then everyone complains, and forgets again until next year.
I just got my July issue of Wired magazine, late as usual. Last month they had an article about the guy at Pixar that had me longing to work somewhere like Pixar, where you suggest an ambitious project, and instead of people saying "too much work" and "too expensive," everyone is like, "bring it on!" It made me depressed.
This month there’s a huge article about the present and future of humanized robotics. And it is, in my opinion, gravely disappointing. No, they have lots of cool stuff in it, but they missed what I feel is at the core of our humanoid robotic obsession, the role of sex and gender in robotics. I’m not surprised they left this out; in a mini conversation I had about it with Xeni, I got the squeaky-clean gist of the feature before it hit the stands.
Sure there was a brief mention about pleasure bots, but they didn’t even mention the queen of pleasure bots, Pris from Blade Runner. Who can forget the irresistible alien beauty, built for pleasure, so desperate to cling to life and the human ability to feel that when threatened with extinction, she shrieked and fought and kicked to stay alive while in the fatal throes of her last robotic impulses of life. She was the essence of our attraction to humanoid robots; sex, death, feminine evil, the dangers of desire, a mastery of engineering, a finite technological siren. A pure idol of perversity, utterly fabricated and still unpredictable, the combination of medical precision and the raw viscera of humanness: sex. The *entire* body will merge with technology, to deny it is foolish. Philip K. Dick got it, why can’t Wired?
Being as that I like to cook, I have come up with a recipe. I call it, ‘Making Pris’:
Body: Abyss Creations (RealDoll) has reintroduced their latex doll, an IKEA-style doll you assemble yourself. Body doctors
Living muscle powering robots fueled by glucose nutrients.
Robotic hand and arm does all movements of a human — also
Android head projects — this site is a gold mine for this discussion.
Skin — also
Conversation — also — also
Sex programming: Vivid has been making "virtual sex" DVD’s with various pornstars for years; their formulas could become template programs for a pleasure bot, including ‘tease,’ ‘foreplay,’ and ‘sex’ with numerous positions. Their execution of the programs have received low reviews, but you get the idea.
And to make Pris complete, you have to give her a fake personal history; or at least tell her who her father is.
I could continue but now I’m really hungry.
