In my family, the presence of Siri has fundamentally, and forever, changed us.

Illustration: Sophia Foster-Dimino

By Andrea Grimes

They say that smartphones are tearing us apart. That technology is building walls, not tearing them down. That the internet makes us dumber.

Not in my family. In my family, the presence of a goofy ole gal named Siri has fundamentally, and forever, changed us. For the better.

Every family has its special holiday traditions and quirks. Some folks all wear matching pajamas for Christmas morning, others all share a beloved pancake or latke recipe, or escape to their favorite skiing locale.

My family argues about facts. Dates of birth, dates of death, celebrity marriages, the lengths of various wars both foreign and domestic. The ingredients in all manner of pies and desserts. The temperature at which meat is safe to eat. Which QVC host rang in New Year’s Eve 1998 while shilling for Craftsman tools? (Or was it the Kirks Folly jewelry spectacular that year?) If it’s a question that definitely has an answer, my family is definitely not just going to find out what that answer is and do literally anything else with the precious and limited gift of life.

I have tried to warn my friends and boyfriends about this habit ahead of time. They never believe me. Until it’s too late. My mom and dad once spent the entirety of a half-hour car ride to dinner arguing in front of my new friend Susan about the nature of real estate purchases on cruise ships. What if, my dad suggested, you could buy a condo on a cruise ship? You could live on a cruise ship!

My mother was not having it.

< twang > “But Tommy, who would want to live on a cruise ship? You’d just visit the same places over and over and over again.” < / twang>

My dad countered: < twang > “No you wouldn’t! The ship would go all over the world!” < / twang >

Hey, quick question: Do you guys know if you can buy a house on a cruise ship? Do you know whether, if you did, that ship would go to like, the same five destinations, or if it would go all over the world? I DON’T KNOW EITHER. NEITHER DID MY MOM. OR MY DAD. OR SUSAN, WHO NEARLY CHOKED HERSELF TO DEATH TRYING NOT TO AUDIBLY LAUGH HER WAY OUT OF THE CAR. This didn’t happen in 1995. This happened in 2010, 12 years after the invention of Google and three years after God gave us the iPhone.

But did my parents ask Siri, “Can you buy a room on a cruise ship” or “if I lived on a cruise ship where would it go”? They did not. It was pure fucking speculation all the way to the Olive Garden.

But the Grimes family comeuppance was on its way. And it came in the form of a meek, three-word rebuttal, uttered by my dearest and sweetest aunt, sugar personified, sweetness incarnate: Cindy. Cindy is the youngest of my mom’s three sisters, and while she failed to cultivate the brash smartassedness characteristic of her sisters, her capacity for generosity and quiet affection is unparalleled. Cindy does not start shit.

Until the year she started some shit.

It was Christmas, the year of the great Cruise Ship Debate. I’d brought my boyfriend, now my husband, home to meet my family for the first time. Things were going well. We had not had a protracted fall-out over whether Richard Nixon had died in the spring or the fall, so I was hopeful, but nervous, especially since big ordeal holidays were not really Patrick’s family’s thing. Patrick’s family just sort of of gets together whenever it’s convenient, because his parents are divorced, like normal people willing to end their factual forever-wars in a draw.

But Christmas lunch went great. We ate at 2 p.m. and were on track to continue grazing, as we do, until one of my aunts remembers that her cats haven’t eaten in 14 hours and the party breaks up.

My aunt Cindy does not start shit. Until the year she started some shit.

Cats are important here. My family is a cat family. Growing up, we had anywhere from six to 20 cats at any given time. My mom, who is an actual genius, went back to school at age 50 and got a veterinary degree so she could take care of more cats. I have heard my family argue about the temperature at which sand becomes glass, but I have never heard them argue about cats. There’s nothing to discuss. Because we don’t just know about cats — the things we know about cats? ARE FUCKING FACTS.

So this is like, nine hours into grazing on turkey and dressing and cream taters and this jello-coolwhip-pineapple thing that we call “pink stuff,” and me and Patrick and my mom and her three sisters, and my dad, are all staring at our phones because we love each other a lot, and my aunt Terri pipes up to read this news story she found on Facebook about this puma they spotted in the woods in East Texas.

Now, my family doesn’t argue about cats but they will argue about East Texas, where they are all from. Are there pumas in East Texas? Well — I mean, this news story seemed to indicate that there are! That was not good enough for my aunt Carla. Carla is the un-Cindy.

< twang throughout > “There ain’t pumas in East Texas. They mean mountain lions.” Carla is the oldest sister. She is 68 years old and she has never been wrong.

Bad Advice On Family-Destroying Cat Worship

But Cindy wondered, ever so gently: “I think pumas and mountain lions are the same thing?” But here’s what: You don’t just suggest, to Carla Fay Baker’s face, that Carla Fay Baker doesn’t have a real solid grasp on the taxonomy of the big cats of her ancestral homeland.

My aunt Terri is just trying to read the story: “Well, anyway, it says there was a puma — ”

Carla: “THERE AIN’T PUMAS IN EAST TEXAS.”

My mom: “Well now, but they could mean jaguars.”

Questions that were explored by my mom and her sisters over the next ten minutes include: What is a jaguar? What is a puma? Is it “jag-yar” when it’s a car, and “jag-u-war” when it’s a cat? Does a jaguar have spots? Is a jaguar a kind of leopard, or is it more like a solid-colored cheetah? How big does a big cat have to be?

Are all wild cats “big cats,” or are some, such as the North African sand cat, which is a small cat, simply wild, but not big? Housecats: More closely related to jaguars, or pumas, if in fact jaguars are not pumas? Do mountain lions have to live in the mountains?

Did I mention that my family does not drink? Or consume mind-altering substances of any kind? This is just straight up, four salty-ass Texas women with giant Texas hair telling each other things they’ve heard about big cats as if Christ himself crawled out of the manger and issued to Carla, Becky, Terri and Cindy each a different, but equally accurate, individual gospel in feral feline biology.

Finally, Carla shut that shit down.

“A PUMA IS NOT A MOUNTAIN LION. A PUMA IS A JAGUAR. AND THERE AIN’T NEVER BEEN NO JAGUARS IN EAST TEXAS.”

Well, it was settled. Because Carla said it was settled. After a few moments of quiet reflection on her decree, my dad cranked up the volume on the Longhorns game. I sipped the last of my coffee and started thinking about a final serving of pink stuff. My mom, cowed into silence once again by the only woman on earth who can out-cat her, resigned herself to flipping through Southern Living’s annual best recipes book.

Are all wild cats ‘big cats,’ or are some, such as the North African sand cat, which is a small cat, simply wild, but not big?

And then my aunt Cindy looked up from her phone. My sweet, demure, dear- hearted aunt — who come to think of it, had been unusually quiet. Turns out she’d mostly spent the last few minutes consulting the tiny experts locked in her bejeweled phone case, straightens up a little in her chair.

“Carla?” she squeaks, holding the screen of her phone up over her cup of super-creamed coffee. “This says not.”

No one on earth could have put together three more shocking words. “I eat dicks.” “Chili has beans.” “Jesus was gay.” Nothing, and I mean nothing, would have done it quite like “This says not.”

Carla was stunned. Cindy proceeded to read the wikipedia article about mountain lions — also known as “pumas.” I quote: “They are a large felid of the subfamily Felinae native to the Americas. Their habitats range from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes of South America. Also known as a cougar, the mountain lion is the most widespread of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere.”

Not only are pumas and mountain lions the same thing, but they are more likely than other big cats to be found ANYWHERE, including East Texas.

Seven years later, there is no putting the fact-cat back in the bag. Everyone has learned to use their iPhones. Whenever a debate gets rolling, the phones come out and appeals to Wikipedia are made. “We don’t have to wonder!” I find myself shouting over the din of discord as somebody fails to remember who was quarterbacking for the Texas Longhorns in 1985. (It was Bret Stafford.)

The Vietnam war started in 1955 and ended in 1975. A macaron is a meringue-based sandwich cookie, while a macaroon has coconut and is dipped in chocolate. Sand turns to glass at 3,090 degrees fahrenheit. Richard Nixon died in April. Beef, pork, veal and lamb cuts should be heated to 145 degrees, and ground meats to at least 160. Poultry of all types should be cooked to 165 degrees. It was the Craftsman tools special on QVC in 1998.

And a puma is a mountain lion.

Now we have nothing left to talk about. Just like a real family.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-complicated-ethics-of-our-sex-robots-future-cdd526b423f9/ Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:01:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2555 Read more]]> ‘Sex robots combine the propensity people have to panic about technology with their propensity to panic about sex.’

This essay is associated with Tina Horn’s sex, kink, gender, and love podcast ‘Why Are People Into That?’

Sex robots might murder us! Sex robots promote rape! Sex robots promote the rape of children! Sex robots will perpetuate unrealistic expectations of the female body and sexual availability! Sex robots will contribute to the objectification of women!

These and many other concern-trolling sentiments have been popping up in headlines lately, so much that you might think the commercial availability of Avas and Gigolo Joes could be just around the corner. In reality, artificially intelligent robots capable of intimacy could be as far as a hundred years away.

So why are we grappling with all of these thorny ethics of consent and sentience right now?

As my recent podcast guest Rose Eveleth puts it, “Sex robots combine the propensity people have to panic about technology with their propensity to panic about sex.”

LISTEN UP TO THE LATEST EPISODE:

52: YaPi Robots w Rose Eveleth | Why Are People Into That?! on acast

I’ve never done a speculative (why would people be into that?!) episode of my show before, but it was only a matter of time before I allowed my intense love of science fiction to overthrow everything. I’m fascinated by the allegory of sex robots, in part because most of the aforementioned concerns about them are suspiciously close to the flawed arguments that conservatives and second wave feminists make about sex work.

I knew Rose would be the right person to combine scientific integrity with sex positive politics and geeky creativity.

Rose is a science journalist who has written some exceptional pieces about the future of sex tech. She is also the creator, host, and producer of Flash Forward, which she aptly describes as “Black Mirror meets Radiolab.” Every episode combines imaginative science fiction sound design with rigorous inquiry into the “What If?” it poses. The Flash Forward episode “Love At First Bot” skips a lot of the usual moral handwringing to ask some practical questions about robot mobility, rental rates, and storage.

I spend so much time in the realm of the abstract that it’s refreshing to have someone like Rose bring me down to Earth, even when talking about something that literally doesn’t exist. In our interview she frequently brought up studies to back up her arguments, and in some cases hesitated to even speculate on a subject if she didn’t have the data to cite. She also has a biting feminist wit, observing that, “There’s a tendency for men in tech to trust machines more than they trust women.”

When imagining what sex robots would be like, I think we miss the point when we put their projected humanity first in our minds. After all, we have a whole lot of adjusting to do as a species before machines pass through the uncanny valley (where their “realness” is more disturbing than familiarizing) and begin to pass the Turing Test (aka persuade us of their indisguisablibity from humans).

It’s pretty obvious that we should be foregrounding the machine part of our sex machines. A sex robot will be a sex toy, not unlike a vibrator, butt plug, sleeve, or dildo in terms of practical application to our bodies and fantasies. Having sex with a robot means, in effect, you’re having sex with yourself. Just as a vibrator can give you an orgasm that is often more personal and pragmatic than the pleasure you experience with a partner, intimacy with a more sophisticated machine might provide the function of exploration and satisfaction.

Rose points out that for women, a properly functioning, obedient machine could provide the possibility of no-strings-attached sex without the threat of assault.

Imagine a toy with the hydraulic power to pick you up and give you that real passionate sweaty fuck-fest feeling. Or a toy that you can mount and hump until you’re exhausted, perhaps with a self-lubricating orifice and entertaining moans of pleasure. Your toy could have any body type or any gender, any personality or pheromone smell; it might even look otherworldly. Meanwhile, we will still seek connection with non-artificially intelligent, flawed flesh and blood, just as your favorite Fleshlight isn’t a substitute for sentient love.

Having sex with a robot means, in effect, you’re having sex with yourself.
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Some people will consider robot sex to be cheating, just like some people consider porn watching or a strip club lap dance to be cheating. Others will likely find the inhumanity of the robot to be the ideal place to blow off steam without the threat of mutual attachment. Oh, and with the proper cleaning, robot sex will be safer sex!

Think about the ways a robot could be incorporated into your partner or group sex life. One of the benefits of a threesome is the mechanical possibilities of extra bodies. A robot third could prop your body into supported positions to be available to your partner, even acting as a new form of bondage. Or they could simply provide extra sensations — plowing you from behind while you go down on someone, or acting as a full-sized butt plug for one partner during intercourse — for over-stimulated bliss.

A robot could stimulate the clit or other erogenous zones while a partner focuses on holes, or vice versa. A robot could provide pleasure while a human partner provides pain, or vice versa. Or a robot could just be an impassive voyeur to your otherwise private sex life. It could provide analysis, encouragement, dirty talk, or expert instruction.

Then there’s the possibilities of everyone becoming sex cyborgs: part organic, part machine. If you could surgically enhance your body to fuck in a way you never had before, would you? What if a synthetic strap-on or canal could be connected to your nervous system for play, and then removed? What if the same possibilities existed for gender and identity affirmation?

Humans will still seek connection with non-artificially intelligent, flawed flesh and blood.
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I’m delighted imagining a little BB8-style droid whirling around an orgy with fresh supplies of lube, condoms, water bottles, or little finger sandwiches for the busy grinding players. A robot could gracefully disinfect your toys right after use so you could stay luxuriating in your human afterglow. The only ethical issue with this is that service submissives the world over would have to come up with new ways to make themselves useful!

Inevitably, robots will become their own kink. An android companion could be a tech status symbol like a smartphone, marketed as a way to “fully experience the future.” But for some, the inhumanity of the robot will be a source of erotic shame. I’m certain we’ll see cuckolding scenarios where hapless men watch their wives get off fucking a hired “synth,” screaming in ecstasy that he could never please her with that puny human cock!

Then again, there is humiliation potential in “not being able to get a real girl” as we see in the current cultural attitudes about sex dolls. And I do think we will fetishize the Turing test, molding situations around robot deception and “passing.”

When Robots Are An Instrument Of Male Desire

I think the most important angle to use when thinking about sex robots is to realize they’ll be the sex labor force of the future. Rose even suggested thinking of them more in terms of caregiving skills, as we are also contemplating robots to provide support to the elderly, sick, and disabled.

I love imagining a future where sex workers are able to seize the means of production, programming, designing, operating, and marketing sex tech. Who knows better than sex workers how consumers will relate to this new frontier of desire and consumption?

We Came, We Saw, We Femmebot-ed: The Establishment’s Gender|Technology Event!

Last night at the StoreFrontLab in San Francisco, 75 beautiful humans all gathered together to talk about the intersection of art, technology, and gender.

We talked about the future; we talked about how one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. We talked about the Siri being the proverbial, pliant secretary-slave; we talked about alien sex; Ursula K. Le Guin; we talked about aol, the sneaky genius of Twitter bots, and how we can all take better care of one another.

Kamala Puligandla, Mallory Ortberg, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall regaled us with three incredible readings about futuristic phones, preposterous sci-fi plots, and AI. We belly-laughed loud and I know it echoed into the streets.

In short? It was kind of a perfect evening and I wish every one of you was there.

Take a gander at the magic. We’ll be making more soon.

Pre-party mingling in StoreFrontLab’s courtyard.

Establishment co-founders Kelley Calkins and Nikki Gloudeman take in the alfresco Est. vibes.

Mad mingling, cheese noshing, vintage video watching, and covfefe quaffing.

THE FEMMEBOT PANEL . . .

KQED Visual Arts Editor Sarah Hotchkiss (in the polka dots) moderated the panel, wondering about how the panelists’ vision of the future aligns with their current reality.

Annalee Newitz (in glasses) said she had dreamed (at age 14) of triple-genital sex with aliens when she was a grown up. But alas.

Charlie Jane Anders (with the pink coiffure) talked about the incredible community of female geeks at io9 and her new novel set on an exoplanet…

I (Katie Tandy) gestured wildly and emceed like a champ.

Virtual designer Chelley Sherman (with that Wednesday Adams glare) spoke about building virtual 3D donuts—in the hopes of getting free confections from donut shops—and the humbling importance of inclusivity and safety for WOC at Grey Area Foundation for the Arts.

AND THEN . . . THE AMAZING READINGS

with Mallory Ortberg, Kamala Puligandla, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Kamala Puligandla kicked things off with a hilariously scathing tale of female friendship, modern courtship, and the new FemmeVibe phone.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall told a delightfully depressing story about a woman who falls in love with Beau, her office scanner/copier.

Mallory delighted us with alternative Black Mirror episodes and How To Tell If You’re In A Soft Science Fiction Story. “Your new mission is to figure out the real mission before you start laying eggs.”

We laughed. We hugged. We fan-girled on each other like woah. We filled up our brilliant love-cups and promised to do it again.

Really soon.

PHOTOS BY LAUREN ROSENFIELD!

Long before the word “selfie” was invented, people have been figuring out fun, time-wasting ways to fuck around with our outward appearance. Internet-age boredom may have fueled millennials to take this to new heights via platforms like Snapchat, but there are also our innate human insecurities to consider. Feeling adequate is a rarity; living in a capitalist culture that profits from making us feel flawed, it’s no wonder we feel the need to edit how the world sees us, whether that’s altering the words and feelings we post or the images of ourselves we share.

Arguably, few demographics are more concerned with outward appearances than transgender people. We’re often compelled to demonstrate how well we perform gender — whether because cisgender society demands we “pass,” or because we need to quiet the dysphoria that tells us we’re hideous. Taking selfies, as I’ve written before, can also be a form of self-love; when we’re feeling gender euphoria instead, we can preserve that moment forever, celebrate it, and even use it as an anchor.

So when FaceApp became the latest photo-editing fad a couple months back, I was greatly intrigued. FaceApp is a smartphone application that allows users to put pictures of themselves through filters with various semi-realistic effects: plug in a pic, and the app can make you look younger or older, enlarge your smile in various ways…and swap your gender. It’s not the first program to offer functionality in this vein — virtual makeup and hair apps have long been used to approximate these effects by closeted trans people — but FaceApp certainly seemed like one of the most advanced apps of its kind, and still does.

The Painful Privilege Of Passing
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There were a number of problems with its neural network, of course. For one thing, FaceApp’s “hot” filter (which was quickly removed) drew criticism for lightening users’ skin and making their features noticeably more European. In order to touch up each photo, the app’s artificial intelligence draws on largely stereotypical traits that can be interpreted as reinforcing harmful preconceived notions; the “male” filter invariably adds a beard and the “female” filter overlays long hair, reifying binary ideas about gender.

Still, my curiosity was stoked. Problematic stereotypes aside, the fundamental conceit behind FaceApp was one that appealed to the science-fiction nerd in me. I like to think of my own transition as biohacking, where I take nature’s chaos into my own hands and remake myself as I feel I need and desire to be. But whereas I’m doing all this blind, technology could change all that. What if smarter AI programs could accurately predict the effects of aging, transitioning, and so on, without relying on templates? What if they could help us be smarter about how we go about our biohacking, which is totally going to become a Silicon Valley trend? (Sidebar: the first tech company to monetize transgender biohacking better be helmed by a Black trans woman. I’d do a lot for my ideal transition, but I’ll be damned if I’m paying some white tech bro a hundred grand for the privilege.)

So — dysphoria be damned — I decided to take FaceApp for a spin and see what all the fuss was about. The first thing I tried upon booting up the app was putting a current picture of myself through the “male” filter. I was fascinated with the possibilities. Would FaceApp be able to replicate my features as they once had been? As I quickly learned, the answer was a resounding “no” — I ended up looking like Edward Snowden, and the less said about that, the better.

Instead, I decided to reverse course. Downloading a selection of pre-transition photos of myself from Facebook, I began filtering each of them through the “old” filter, examining how I might have aged without hormonal intervention.

Some might say that there are worse fates than looking like Sir Ian McKellen. That may be true, but this shook me up; it was too close to what I’d imagined for myself before starting HRT, too reminiscent of the images in my brain that made me realize I couldn’t survive becoming an old man. Shaken, I reversed course and ran the same picture ran the same picture through the “female” filters instead, which turned out to be quite the emotional roller coaster:

Suddenly, staring back at me from my phone was the image of a girl who, but for testosterone, might have been me — a young woman from an alternate universe (with slightly amorphous-looking eyes). Part of me wanted to delete the app immediately, stricken by a glimpse at what I’d “lost.” But that sense of losing something I’d never really had — at peering into “my” own divergent history — made me certain I’d hit on something meaningful. Grabbing the last pre-HRT picture of me in existence, I fired it through the “old” and both “female” filters, and was rewarded with everything I’d ever wanted and feared in one collage:

Of course, the rational part of my brain knew that a substantial bit of trickery went into the creation of these photos. Apart from cleaning up my eyebrows and adjusting my jawline, the “female” filters also enlarged my eyes, making me appear — according to science — more typically desirable. And every “old” picture of me seemed to look a little different, so it’s not like any of them were stable predictors; each seemed to use a different senior citizen as a template.

But looking at all those photos together, one thought drowned out all the others: If I had seen this five years ago, I never would have waited to transition.

Testosterone Helped Me Feel Like Myself — Here’s Why I Stopped Taking It
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Although lots of trans people have had a firm knowledge of their gender since they were toddlers (children begin to form and understand individual gender identities around age 2–3), many others take decades to figure our shit out. It wasn’t easy for me to put a finger on what I was feeling or why — I just knew that there was something peculiar going on. Just before my 25th birthday, having accumulated enough life experience and vocabulary, I recognized some of the signs of dysphoria: I couldn’t stand my body hair, I was depressed at my lack of breasts, and I had practically no self-esteem where my face was concerned. As I began my transition and started adjusting my hormones and presentation, the severity of those symptoms eventually began to lessen. But it was a long and sometimes extremely painful process — one that’s still ongoing — and although I know those struggles helped make me who I am today, I’ve often wished that I’d had something to grease the wheels.

This collage could have been that grease. I look at it and see such a clear and obvious path forward that any other decision seems ludicrous; of course I’d want to be one of those girls, and of course that would mean I should transition. If FaceApp had been around when I was younger, I mused, might I have avoided going through the wrong puberty altogether?

That perspective isn’t especially helpful for me, of course. What’s done is done, and I’ve been settling into my little slice of womanhood at my own pace. But what about modern trans kids? Might neural networks like FaceApp help Generation Z, in some way, understand and embrace their own ideal gender presentations? To be sure, this particular iteration of the technology isn’t all the way up to the task, given its tendency toward problematic stereotypes and its lack of nonbinary nuance. But none of that precludes future advances, which could propel us beyond FaceApp’s pure novelty use.

I’m just one voice, though. What were my peers thinking? I ran a short Twitter poll to get a sense of how a slice of the trans community responded to FaceApp’s potential:

Trans folks, how does FaceApp make you feel?

???@SamusMcQueen

Leaving aside the substantial chunk who had managed to let this particular fad pass them by, the results were about what I’d expected. The general consensus has been that FaceApp is a veritable factory of dysphoria; nothing like running a current picture of yourself through an idealized filter to feed those demons. But along with those reservations came optimism: this concept is one that can give some solace and direction (and admittedly, some distress as well) to trans people who are in the closet — to the outside world and/or themselves.

With that eye towards the future, I tried one more experiment. Queuing up a picture I’d taken in November to celebrate one full year on hormones, I ran it through the “old” filter, grimacing for fear I’d still see that old dude from my collage.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw instead: my mother’s face. Or at least, something like it that I might grow into.

And that’s what I hope neural networks still to be built will do for others: show them a possible future that affirms their deepest desires, and silently reassure them that it can be their reality. FaceApp was a fleeting trend because it didn’t offer this concept in a truly transformative way. But conceptually, it’s an early step toward what I hope will be a fascinating new frontier in photographic technology — one that could fundamentally redefine the self-love of selfies.