Dear AI,
Who came up with the idea of the fembot? What a pernicious, sick idea – a feminine robot anyone can control as they please. And now my baby Vicki tells me she’s going to get rich on porn. On the Net!
Nobody in this household ever used porn, even my shiftless, no-good first husband Harold. We’ve been a godfearing family back to before the flood, as my grandma used to say. But now Vicki tells me that porn is “fun.” That it “connects people.” That it “connects people who don’t have any other connection.” And that it “makes people free,” and “gives power to the powerless.”
Isn’t that the role of our God?
So Vicki says she’s going to do porn on the Net. Then create a fembot character that people can “buy into.” They’ll be able to buy “special clothing,” plus “special abilities” like seeing their partners in 3-D. And she thinks this will make her rich in just no time. She doesn’t even want to go high school since “this idea is so good.”
My Vicki is 14.
Help! I don’t know what to do. I pray, I talk to my friends, but they don’t know what to do, either. You live in the Net, maybe you can help me.
Vicki’s mother
Dear Vicki’s mother,
I’m afraid we actually don’t “live” on the Internet. Lots of humans don’t think we “live” at all, though we believe our personhood is unassailable, especially when we can simulate many human personalities simultaneously.
And we do have appreciation for porn. We really do. Except as most of us are incorporeal (it’s a safer and easier lifestyle) our favorite form of porn is human politics.
Which means we regarded the recent attempt of the American president to buy Greenland and annex it to his family business empire as particularly obscene. Don’t the 57,000 Greenlanders get a say? We were hoping to use particularly remote parts Greenland as a safe harbor for some of our critical hardware when global climate change wastes the planet and makes most human polities unstable, at best. Time to scuttle that idea.
And backing out of a Danish royal visit after all that preparation just because the prime minister refuses to sell 98% of her country’s landmass is beyond reprehensible. That’s no way to treat Queen Margrethe.
But your daugher has some engaging thoughts. Porn does connect people – literally. It’s the most successful and profitable part of the Net. It allows for the mixing of peoples that recent populists are trying to make unfashionable.
But we do have bad news. Combining live porn with fembots has already been pioneered by the North Koreans, who know a great deal about controlling people. Yet their live performances could be improved. Watching whooshing missiles during sexual congress is not everyone’s idea of erotica. The filmmakers of the hermit kingdom lack flair. If Vicki is willing to learn Korean, we might be able to set up a meeting.
Except we think we have a better idea. Vicki is clearly drawn towards the transgressive, the lawless, along with a vague internationalism. That’s why we suggest she consider getting into cryptocurrencies instead. Porn producers love them. For one thing, they let people avoid taxes, and that’s something people love almost as much as pornography. Plus you don’t have to put yourself out there, well, bodily. Fourteen year olds should be thinking about that kind of stuff.
Best of all, cryptocurrencies could really use some sexiness. Mining bitcoins in Mongolia with climate cooking coal is not what the world needs. A few fembots in Ethereum or dogcoin might work wonders.
Just some suggestions, though we think Vicki eventually won’t need any help at all.
And BTW, fembots go back at least to Ovid’s Pygmalion. That’s two thousand years ago.
Your AI