The most hilarious quote from The Hollywood Reporter’s post on the Westworld Episode 5 orgy in the frontier town of Pariah has to be when Co-Executive Producer Richard Lewis says, “I think all of us have a modicum of taste that keeps us from take it too far into the pornographic world.” Dude, get over yourself. You’re offering up boobies in gold paint to the horny nerds of America just as surely as anything on r/BodyPaint. Titillation is titillation, my man. There is no sharp line dividing sex in our prestige television from sex in our pornography. We’re a big planet of horny apes and you can stop fretting over how much smarter your boner is than everyone else’s. Everyone can see right through you, HBO.
Anyway, who are all these people paying $40,000 a day to dress up like a cowboy to fuck or get fucked? Westworld? More like HyperSpecificFetishWorld. Ehh! Oh! Haaa! Ha. Oh.
There’s a link at the top if you really want to hear a guy compare his TV show with the robot cowboys to Stanley Kubrick and Pier Paolo Pasolini films. I can’t reaggregate that level of self-aggrandizement without getting sick. “The biggest, best and most mind-blowing stuff… the best sex orgy you can imagine… we really curate the scene to the T… you can’t categorize it, because it’s so uniquely strange and beautiful.” *Hurk*
Did Donald Trump co-executive produce Westworld?
But let’s say you really do want to have sex with some robots. Would they even be any good at it?
According to BroBible (lol), you’ll soon be able to buy $15,000 “sexbots.” I think we can all agree this isn’t exactly the sexy future we’re all eagerly awaiting. But it’s safe to expect that variety of hype in the immediate future, as people attempt to portray products as more futuristic than they are. Hoverboards, anyone? We live future-obsessed, our minds already projecting themselves into the post-apocalyptic or utopian scenarios we dread (a world better than us is frightening too).
Well, be afraid, because robots are going to be awesome at sex… eventually. Very eventually. In a paper titled Robots, men and sex tourism (you could, theoretically, use Sci-Hub to break through the academic research paywall), Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars (neither are roboticists) argue that Amsterdam’s red light district will be entirely android by 2050. This prediction is based on…. virtually nothing, of course. There are all sorts of prognosticators fretting about the death of intimacy, sacrificed upon the genitals of our sexy robotic overlords.
But a number of massive robotic breakthroughs will have to occur before sex with robots adds up to anything more than an expensive sex toy. We still can’t produce artificial hamburger right, let alone warm, living human skin. And artificial human kinematics are still years away from anything approaching sensuality. Unless this really does it for you:
Yeah, if we don’t destroy ourselves it seems certain that the advancement of technology will eventually produce a sex robot actually good at sex. But tech companies are currently invested in a massive PR blitz to convince you AI is further along than it actually is. Google isn’t actually “dreaming,” that’s just marketing. And sexbots are sure to follow the same hype-y arc. It will first take decades of hype and false promises, as companies draw up massive marketing budgets to convince you that some awkward, quaking, oozing thing is just as good as biology.
But this will be you:
