Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
“Gigolo Joe” character in the recent Spielberg film
AI
. Contempo-
rary approaches to artificial sexual companions such as the RealDoll
are severely lacking in realism and limited in capability. Sara hopes
to make the fantasy of sex robots a reality; inspired by animal and
human behavior, her goal is to build capable robotic sex creatures
with a living presence and to gain a better understanding of how
humans will engage in coitus with this new kind of technology. [2]
Those of you with good enough college grades and a burning inter-
est in erotic computation can also find, on the same web site, details
of two graduate courses offered at the Media Lab: MAS 888: Fun-
damentals of Erotic Computation, and MAS 972: Special Topics in
Erotic Computation, which is described as “a project course with enroll-
ment limited to keep a design studio atmosphere. Students will design
and develop experimental sexual interfaces, applications, and underlying
technologies.”
There are two things that I find rather amusing about the MIT Erotic
Computation Group web site. The first is that the site is a hoax, as an
article in the
New York Times
revealed.
“There's a fair amount of fluffy stuff at the lab without much hard
technology behind it,” explained Dan Maynes-Aminzade, the first-
year Media Lab graduate student behind the hoax. “Sometimes we
hear masturbatory rhetoric about how we're changing the world.
This seemed to fit.”
If the Media Lab has a reputation in some circles for focusing on
pie-in-the-sky, even whimsical, research, the faculty can also appre-
ciate a good prank. “They did a good job of mimicking a lot of the
research that goes on around here,” said Walter Bender, executive
director of the program. Mr. Maynes-Aminzade said that Mr. Ben-
der had e-mailed him saying that the site was so popular the traffic
was slowing the network and that a Media Lab corporate sponsor
had asked if the site was real. [3]
The second aspect of this site that I find amusing is that it is, despite
being a hoax at the time it was posted, almost certainly foretelling the
future. There are many aspects of the work at MIT's Media Lab that
many people would find esoteric, off-beat, unlikely or just plain point-
less. But, given that sexual robots already exist on the drawing board at
least,
1
and that tangible sexual interfaces appear to be no more difficult
1
See the section “The Mechanics of Sex with Robots” later in this chapter.
