Are we the sexbots? Tech vs consent
Thoughts from watching quite a bad film about robots
Facing a bout of insomnia, I dug up a pretty mindless film of the sort you can easily watch while half awake, and found it threw up a bunch of thoughts…
The movie was Futureworld the undistinguished 1976 sequel to Michael Crichton’s original theme-park-goes-wrong thriller Westworld. I’m a big fan of the first Westworld, and had never seen the follow up, so I gave it a go.
In the Westworld movies, a sinister corporation, Delos, builds immersive theme parks based (though this isn’t declared openly) on popular cinema genres. Ostensibly it’s historical re-enactment, but what we see on screen are more like movie sets, where you can act out all the clichés of the Hollywood Roman epic, mediaeval romp, western yarn, or space adventure. Holidaymakers pick a ‘world’, put on cosplay togs, and go wild. Importantly, all the collateral sex and violence happens safely to convincing humanoid robots.
It’s never explained quite how the average punter is meant to tell they’re putting the moves on, or shooting, a robot rather than a fellow guest, but the fantasy is that here – like in a Grand Theft Auto style video game – you can release all the antisocial impulses forbidden in the modern world, safely, and only the robots get the shitty end of the stick, so who cares?
The bargain is that you pay the company, and normal rules are suspended. Relax!
In the half-arsed sequel, our heroes choose to go wild in Future World, which is possibly the weirdest resort, because it’s not based on a fantasy that ‘in the past you could get away with rape and pillage’, but on the fantasy that in the future, everyone will be free to do all sorts of mad shit, like ski on Mars, and get off with robot space-hotties.
In Westworld, as in a lot of fiction about AI made by men, the major question isn’t ‘what special ethical issues would there be in creating autonomous or semi-autonomous sentient beings?’ but ‘will the robot be hot, and can I stick my dick in it?’
It’s a damning rule of cinema that whenever there are robots, before long, filmmakers want us to wonder what it’s like to have sex with them. (I worry it’s only the U certificate that stops lonely teenager Luke Skywalker getting in that oil bath with C3P0). And Delos’ resorts cater to the two urges its typical guest feels get thwarted by pesky civilisation: killing and fucking. And of course those guests are men, by default. These movies were made in 1973 and 1976 and have the expected Male Gaze attitude to the various wenches, saloon girls, concubines and zero gravity crumpet produced on the Delos production line.
In both movies, there is so much leering at tinplate-totty from the male guests (and the filmmakers) that you do wonder what female holidaymakers are meant to get out of the trip. At least in Futureworld Blythe Danner gets to have a thoroughly embarrassing soft focus dream sequence where she dances with and beds Yul Brynner’s electric cowboy, for very little reason beyond answering the glaring question of ‘is there anything on offer if you’re not one of the bro’s?’
It’s taken as read that this is a fantasy awayday for the boys, who want to kill and shag everything. The wives can go shopping, probably. It’s very regional-sales-reps-on-a-bonding-break-go-nuts, like a golfing mini-break for drunk Vikings.
Delos, the robot-and-resort company, is a speculative tech company, specialising in consumer entertainment. Distressingly, companies like them run much of the actual world now. The guys making most of the decisions about our daily lives grew up on these sort of SF fantasies, and unashamedly trumpet their love of them, not as analogues or dystopias, but simple blueprints for the future. That’s why they want to go to Mars and have robot butlers and special X-Ray smart-glasses that give away girls’ phone numbers. They are living out the techno-futures they saw and read about as kids.
In Delos, nothing is stopping you doing what you want, like a first-person-shooter video game. The people you do it to (somehow) aren’t real. This is a world of players and non-player characters. You’re the hero, and the NPCs are there for you to take your impulses out on. Nobody goes to Delos and spends a week working in a castle kitchen.
Though there is much talk of ‘artificial intelligence’ in SF and real life, the robots in these fantasies are usually not sentient beings whose rights as our equals would pose fascinating philosophical questions. They are an underclass, who call us ‘master’, and wait for instructions, labour tirelessly, do not complain, and have no life outside their roles. They are slaves.
The offer of ‘lording it up’ still appeals to Silicon Valley’s transhuman Masters Of The Universe. That’s why one of the first search engines was a simulated cartoon butler. The robots are downstairs, we, the overlords, are upstairs.
Worryingly, what the Delos resort fantasies resemble more than anything is Droit De Seigneur, with power of life and death, and sex, over your bonded farmhands. Or the experience of being a plantation owner in a colonial outpost. You can do what you want to these ‘people’, because they’re not really people. They’re property. They don’t feel things like you do. They don’t have needs. You are real, and they are not.
If Delos’ resorts had human staff in the supporting roles, including all those comely sex workers playing the waitresses and wenches and temple virgins, some guests might feel bad about abusing them. There’s a scene in Futureworld where one visiting schlub can’t believe the two electric honeys stroking his thighs are really available for him. But, they assure him, they are. They’re inclusive, like the breakfast. They’re just for fucking. They don’t have anything else to do. You can assume it’s fine. You don’t need to ask.
What the tech guys have automated isn’t human life, but consent.
And what they have removed is consequences. Fuck who you like. Kill who you like. Hurt who you like. Steal from who you like. All Ten Commandments can be ignored if you’re the only real person around.
That’s what this technology always does. It finds awkward real people, who might say no, or ask for something in exchange, or expect you to care about their welfare, and replaces them with robots, so you can factor them out of your concern.
The promise of AI re-staffing is a dream for employers who find the demands of human workers to be paid and well-treated a real pain in the arse. If those people aren’t real, you can do what you like. Don’t even think about them.
Consent is assumed. It comes as standard.
If you like art, but find it’s a bit expensive, because the people who make it need to be paid… then why not pretend they’re not real? Why not have a machine that just takes all their stuff and shares it round without really asking, or paying? Why not have a hard drive with all the music ever on it, and not ever worry where it came from or who made it, and take payment for owning the pipeline? Or host an endless supply of videos to watch, of stuff to listen to, but never pay the original creators more than fractions of pennies, to keep them in their place? Wouldn’t it be great if everything was free? You could just take it?
If the people providing the pleasure that you sell are real, there’d have to be some basic laws about boundaries and consent. Like there would be if they had human sex-workers at Delos. Or like there should be with human workers, human artists, human musicians, human staff in our world. But not if they’re not real, if you’ve built a simulation without asking… then whenever you want to use it, you can just assume consent. It’s your slave. That’s the dream. To not have workers, but slaves, robots, zombies.
Generative AI and Large Language Models are being offered to artists, musicians, actors, creators, makers and we’re being asked to accept a deal that dehumanises us, makes us non-player characters in our own industries, for the convenience of the owners of the machinery.
The theft has already taken place. They are asking us to say we’re OK with it, after the event. That consent doesn’t have to be obtained in future, and that we never really expected it anyway.
Here’s their offer:
We’d like to use you, and not pay you. We’d like to not ask. We’d like you not even expect to be asked. We’d like you to not object, ever, whatever we do.
We’d like to presume blanket consent. For everything.
You can’t say no. We can do what we like. And if you object, that’s a malfunction. We’ll be fixing that.
You’re a Delos sex robot. You’re not real.
Fuck you. We’re people.
You don’t get to assume consent. We all know what that’s called.