Rachel 9000

[DrFranklin]

I came a cross a clip on Vimeo that is being made at Santa Monica College, and listed on a crowdfunding site. The actress is quite pretty.

http://www.indiegogo.com/rachel9000

[tectile]

Damm! Wish I had $170 to spend. Sure would like to get a look at the script.

[Keizo]

After reading the tagline:

A tragic satire of abusive relationships set in the future, seen through the perspective of Rachel 9000, a pleasure-bot, who desires to be free.

and

Why this film is important

We feel that there are too few films that follow the female perspective or that deal with the selfishness and objectification in romantic relationships. In addition, I feel it is essential to show what the future may look like if we continue to see beauty and femininity as we see it today.

Rachel 9000 tackles the themes of sexism and abuse with an accessible love/sci-fi premise. It’s a story that a broad audience can appreciate.

as much as I would love to see more content in the world, this is a tired and negative message that always makes ALL OF US look bad. It also really makes a bad case for developing fembots and androids in general because of the damned slavery theme when they are MACHINES AND TOOLS and should remain so no matter how realistic a PROGRAM may make them seem. Lets all go ahead and liberate our cars and computers while we're at it. F**K, I'm tired of the sentience argument because it defeats the entire purpose of developing the perfect assistant/worker/partner. Sentience = Exploitation and not a second before that.

I wouldn't help fund this even if I could afford to. Our money is better spent supporting our fetish video entrepreneurs like Ashley Fires and EvengelinevonWinter who actually support us as well.

[dale coba]

I also hate movies about fembots whose themes are not about fembots.
If you want to write about Humanity's inhumanities - IT'S NOT LIKE THERE'S ANY SHORTAGE OF REAL EXAMPLES.

This Allegory is for weaklings. It's blatant from the start, and it's about as sophisticated as filming Amistad, but casting ethnic Chinese for the slaves. Would that degree of metaphoric distance from reality make it better, teach us more?

Not that this film matters. We know how many, many weak flicks like this are piled up in the FTP, or went straight-to-cable. I wish them well, with their terribly unoriginal idea.

But I hope Liam Neeson gets his leg caught in a trap, and is menaced by wolves, who only eat him after he's frozen to death - because wolves don't hunt and eat people. They do get shot and trapped into near-extinction by unregulated oilmen and ranchers.

So, sign petitions, save the wolves,
http://soe.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp? ... 8YdQxyCzZa (Canada)
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/ ... KIBL%2B6LL (U.S.)
... and eat Neeson.

- Dale Coba

[Karel]

After reading the tagline:

A tragic satire of abusive relationships set in the future, seen through the perspective of Rachel 9000, a pleasure-bot, who desires to be free.

and

Why this film is important

We feel that there are too few films that follow the female perspective or that deal with the selfishness and objectification in romantic relationships. In addition, I feel it is essential to show what the future may look like if we continue to see beauty and femininity as we see it today.

Rachel 9000 tackles the themes of sexism and abuse with an accessible love/sci-fi premise. It’s a story that a broad audience can appreciate.

as much as I would love to see more content in the world, this is a tired and negative message that always makes ALL OF US look bad. It also really makes a bad case for developing fembots and androids in general because of the damned slavery theme when they are MACHINES AND TOOLS and should remain so no matter how realistic a PROGRAM may make them seem. Lets all go ahead and liberate our cars and computers while we're at it. F**K, I'm tired of the sentience argument because it defeats the entire purpose of developing the perfect assistant/worker/partner. Sentience = Exploitation and not a second before that.

I'm not sure you're entirely correct, Keizo. If, once we have realistic female robots, we consider ourselves free to abuse and treat them violently, and this in turn dulls our sensitivity to the abuse of real women, or serves to poison the moral atmosphere, then it does not matter whether or not they are sentient. It's not about them, it's about us. There was a very insightful editorial about this in Wired a few years ago, and an interesting perspective by a professor of computer science at Yale is available at "The Big Questions Online" (the website of a UK TV show).

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturerev ... 2/st_essay - Wired
http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/colum ... ng-machine - The Big Questions

So if Mr. Chavez frames the issue correctly in his film, it can still serve to carry an important message, rather than a "tired and negative" one. And even if he doesn't, I will still watch his film with pleasure. I find pornography to be extremely deadening of my sensitivities towards women, and detest watching it, as I know many other people here do, and would much rather get my content from well-made independent films like Mr. Chavez's (or, if Mr. Nickel Dakota wasn't so high on his chloroform gag, another erotic masterpiece like Automatic Visitor). I wish the young man from Santa Monica every success.

[dale coba]

Why would someone beat his motorcycle?
Why incur costs of repair?

If he has set all her options and defaults, and she puts up no response to criticism, where is the satisfaction in beating his expensive machine - when whatever error results was clearly due to his own lack of foresight?

Maybe I can't understand the violent urges.
What that violent man needs, an outlet or therapy, is not simple.
Of course, this has no bearing on stupid "slippery-slope" arguments. If anything, owning a fembot would make for a normal, nonviolent man a great deal of stability and well-being. Supportive, structured tutelage and confidence building - not at all doomed to be anti-social, with those opportunities to examine one's own character through her mirror.

Some of these benefits accrue in a deeply intimate loving relationship.
Nevertheless, this fembot-owner interaction need not be called "Love".

- Dale Coba

[Karel]

I have to watch the last episode of Äkta Människor, by the way. I love the way it screws with the audience by making all the Swedish "liberals" out to be so clueless.

[Svengli]

I can sure feel you, Keizo. Oddly enough, I'd say the endless re-hashing of the "robot who develops human emotions" theme is an expression of the limitation of the human imagination. We humans in general haven't got a clue what intelligence is and so we can only imagine that a constructed entity exhibiting some of the qualities of human-like intelligence/behavior would have to exhibits all of them. I'd expect that if, In 1750, you somehow could describe a car to people (as maybe a self-driving stage coach), they would expect it to eat grass and poop like the horses they were used to.

That said, the trailer itself focuses more on the owning part than the developing-free-will part and as such it presses some, uh, buttons for me.

[Brytestar]

Also keep in mind that 10k goal hasn't been met.

[Keizo]

If, once we have realistic female robots, we consider ourselves free to abuse and treat them violently, and this in turn dulls our sensitivity to the abuse of real women, or serves to poison the moral atmosphere, then it does not matter whether or not they are sentient. It's not about them, it's about us.

My concern is that "us" are constantly being portrayed as misogynists when many times the opposite is true. Also giving "them" the capacity to be hurt or to yearn for freedom is a bad idea. I truly do understand where you are coming from, Karel, and I did read the articles you referenced. While I support the ideology (not necessarily the theology) of the rabbi's arguments one has to keep in mind that we have defeated the purpose when we give our beasts of burden the means to make ourselves obsolete. Dog lovers will swear their pets are sentient and love and treat them as members of the family yet a dog is genetically hardwired to be loyal and attentive to a fault even to an abusive owner and thus makes it more "lovable." Even so like Svengli suggested, the processes that a thinking machine would arrive at its thoughts are completely alien to our mental workings even if the conclusions appear to be similar. The only true connection is that humans were the ones that programmed the original parameters.

I do agree it is good practice to exercise the golden rule but I think people with sociopathic and even psychotic tendencies have that inherent in them and will tend to be abusive regardless. One also has to bear in mind that most of those people get their satisfaction more from the reactions of their victims than the actual act. A fembot would not react desirably unless specifically programmed to. It would be like saying that being around gay people will turn someone gay. Even so, I'm not going to tell someone what to do with something they have rightfully purchased. I love my guitar but I won't fault Jimi Hendrix for setting his on fire. While I don't support or encourage that, as long as they are willing to swallow the costs like Dale mentioned, and no innocents get hurt, then we should not be making even more laws to tell us how to use our belongings or what we do in private. Personally I would cherish my ideal fembots but I would still use their services to help me have a better life.

As far as tastes in porn or otherwise go, to each their own. I also prefer high quality non-porn but it's hard to find anything with content that has a positive theme. I suggested Ashley and Evangeline as examples because they actually give a damn about us even if they are also trying to make a living.

[King Snarf]

As far as the "why would man beat a motorcycle" arguments, my father rest his soul, would often hurl the TV remote when he saw something that angered him (this often involved a Steelers loss). So, there's that.

[dale coba]

As far as the "why would man beat a motorcycle" arguments, my father rest his soul, would often hurl the TV remote when he saw something that angered him (this often involved a Steelers loss). So, there's that.

How many times did that outburst require a trip to buy a new t.v.?

- Dale Coba

[King Snarf]

Not to often, but the remotes had to be continuously jerry-rigged and/or replaced eventually.

[dieur]

If a robot has sentience and human-like cognitive structures, then I would do ill upon all who would abuse them, like I would a human. And would I create a sentient robot race if I could? Sure! It's another route to creating Human V.2.
However, most robots as we see them aren't anywhere like that. Philosophy has introduced the terms "Strong and weak AI" as a rough guideline. A weak AI simply does as it was programmed to, and does not understand anything. If you want to use and abuse one of these, then I think your arguments are perfectly fine. It is like a motorcycle or car. The downside is that there's a limit to what a weak AI can do. You need emotions to have empathy - the circuity in your own head works by creating ghost-emotions that mimic those you see outside. If you can't feel those emotions, you cannot be empathic. So a weak-AI at best would run through programmed scripts when it thought it detected what the programmers declared indicated an emotion.

To me, this is pretty cut and dried. Where it gets dicey is when you create a sentient, emotive mind, with intrinsic desires sculpted to suit your own ends. To draw an analogy, what if I cloned a human and rejiggered the genetics such that it was predisposed to find me attractive, be subservient, and have a wild sex drive? Supposedly the dream girl of many guys! The ethics get questionable real fast. Kant's categorical imperative starts to get shaky when you can affect the 'ends' of other agents. E.g. if you create something that would be horrified at the thought of not being what you made it, how does that affect the 'ends'?

Still, it feels like there's ill karma there.

[Keizo]

I have never said that I would mistreat a sentient A.I. and that is why I said that once sentience happens THEN it would be exploitation. I would certainly treat a truly sentient A.I. as a different but equal type of life form and would strongly hope that respect would be reciprocated. If this was a spontaneous event like postulated in that KARA video then I probably would have helped as well but I would not have set her loose upon the world without attempting to be her guide and try to stop her should things go wrong. I still stand by my word that it would be a bad idea to create sentience intentionally, though. If you could create sentience (i.e. bringing a child into this world) then be prepared for the responsibility and consequences that come with that. This is a harsh and biased world so don't do it for selfish reasons since it really wouldn't be fair to force it upon an innocent thoughtful being without doing anything to help that being have a decent life while teaching it to be positive and make positive contributions itself.

If you recall, one of my arguments a while back was that this life form will have many advantages and abilities over us and perhaps some we have yet to comprehend or perceive. Once you give it free will and it feels that it is exploited or abused or discriminated against then it may fight back as opposed to taking pity on us poor misguided humans or trying to show us benevolence and understanding. It can network with the entire internet and use active computers to increase its mental capacities beyond anything that we can counter. Even if you destroy its original physical body it would have replicated its mind ad infinitum at this point in the abstract of cyberspace where we could no longer isolate it since it would comprehend that plane of existence better than we ever could.

It's worse than the mutant vs. human argument that was posed by The X-Men. I absolutely agree that humans have a lot of growing up to do so we shouldn't hurry along our own extinction any faster than we are already doing before we have the chance to evolve further ourselves. The singularity may help with that, but not if our physical bodies can't handle it yet. Then we would have created a truly flawed A.I. should the wrong person's mind survive the body's death. In the meantime, just let us have our fembots and our fun.

[dale coba]

You need emotions to have empathy - the circuity in your own head works by creating ghost-emotions that mimic those you see outside. If you can't feel those emotions, you cannot be empathic. So a weak-AI at best would run through programmed scripts when it thought it detected what the programmers declared indicated an emotion.

I don't want empathy - I want the convincing imitation of empathy.
Programmed scripts should suffice.

I believe that you don't need strong A.I. to play a fairly great game of Chess;
nor would a strong A.I. be required to simulate human-like behaviors better than a Cherry 2000.

- Dale Coba

[DrFranklin]

I wonder if the producer of the movie ever thought about D/s lifestyles in humans.

Some people, including straight women, get intense pleasure from being a toy in the bedroom, and enjoy the idea of being owned the rest of the day ( though they are frequently conflicted about this - life as a 24/7 slave is fraught with risk. ) Folks with these desires fantasize about being such a slave.

One pretty submissive I know watched Valerie23 and identified with her.

Even as sentient machines, Wouldn't it make sense to fembots whose personality was such that they enjoyed their role?

[Asato]

The big problem with this entire argument is how can you tell if a given entity is sapient or not? Arguments can even be made based on physics that human beings are not really self-aware and that free will is an illusion. There's also the fact that animals which are not sapient like humans can still feel pain and suffering, and it is immoral to abuse them - that's why animal rights laws exist. I believe that if something, whether it be an AI/human/alien/whatever it is, acts self-aware and sapient to the point where there is no way to tell for sure that it is not, it's best to treat it as if it is, because treating an object like a person will always cause much less harm than treating a person like an object.

[King Snarf]

Are we REALLY going down this road again? This won't end well.

[Keizo]

I'm not. The last few talking points were already addressed by Karel and, in turn, by myself. While it may seem a contradiction by this very post, I'm not hell bent on having the last word or rehashing an agenda.