EXTREME PROUST plug

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said. –MSNBC, LIVE SCIENCE, Oct. 12, 2007

PROUST [to Puritan]: You match the spirit you comprehend, but it doesn’t match reality. The reality is that human beings ultimately desire to achieve rapture. You are to be congratulated that your discipline has forced humanity to unprecedented levels of productivity. But don’t fool yourself about the situation you have created. If human beings cannot break through to the Paradise I have described, they will embrace any third-rate unmediated experience which approximates It.

And it is these third-rate approximations of Paradise which underpin your consumption economy and its concomitant coarseness. Your production-oriented capitalism has had to use mediating tools like instrumental rationality and language. Yet it also has learned that to promote consumption, it must shed mediating materials in favor of tools involving less or no mediation. In general, this means that language-based culture yields to image-based culture. However, as television gives way to computers, image-based media give way to more thorough and virtual media (where images combine with sound, and maybe taste, smell and touch). Media, in short, becomes more immediate and less mediated.

And so the people in your socioeconomic order abandon language and become more and more stupid. Clever images manipulate them to consume pallid images of Paradise, which resemble Paradise in that they are unmediated in form, but which are not equal to Paradise because they are insubstantial in content. Because the pallid images afford some concrete pleasure, your citizens will prefer them to language.

In addition to their happy abandonment of language, the people in your socioeconomic order are happily abandoning the complications involved in engaging other human beings. I know you want to accuse me of asocial, irresponsible solipsism. But as your economy (based on words) abandons words, so does your economy (based on human interaction) abandon human interaction. Look at what has been happening to the products your economy sells to its consumers! Not only do they abandon the inconvenience of words. They also abandon the inconvenience of other people. The enjoyment of music used to be an experience produced directly by one or more humans, enjoyed directly by one or more humans. Now music need involve only the manipulation of a machine. Similarly, theater used to be an experience produced directly by one or more humans, enjoyed directly by one or more humans. Movies got rid of the actual human actors. Radio and television eliminated the necessity of sitting around and dealing with other humans in consuming mechanical sounds and images. Recording devices now ensure that such consumption is utterly asocial. In the “old days” before the proliferation of cable TV channels and recording devices, societies could imitate some version of community with the simultaneous consumption of television “events” like Roots. Tivos and podcasts are only intensifying the trend towards solipsism. So now consumption of music, theater, or whatever—can occur in utter and total isolation from other live human beings.

But you need to acknowledge how much it is that humans actually WANT it this way. In books like Bowling Alone your sociologists whine about the decline of sociability in the United States. Well, it’s the result of capitalist technology responding to particular human preferences.

And thus it is that in the end, your wonderful society is coming to resemble nothing more than a row of happy pigs, each one enjoying his or her own particular and isolated trough.

…

Casell Bryan-Low and David Pringle have reported on wireless operators providing erotic content on cell phones. A Hong Kong manufacturer has created Vivienne, a “virtual girlfriend” who “won’t have real or cyber sex with her admirers,” but who will provide “exciting conversations about all sorts of things.” Keith Bradsher provides additional information and perspective:

Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one? . . .

Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses.

If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right. . .

Presumably the pornography industry is in the process of providing products that will surpass the profferings of Vivienne—if it has not already done so. EXTREME PROUST, sections 85 & 95