How would fembots change society? [closed]

Question

The next year fembots came to the market by the price of 3000 US dollars. These androids have realistic synthetic skin and genitalia, semi-autonomous intelligence, are able to clean the house, cook like a professional chef, learn about their environment and the emotional needs of its owner. They can defend themselves so they won't be stolen that easily.

They became very popular among lonely and rejected males. Let's say in 10 years 30% of the human males bought an android ¨Girlfriend¨ - how would women react and how can they compete against the robo-girls? And how would society evolve since now?

Notes: This robots are only faithful to their owners; however, they can be hacked, and be customized in any way you can imagine.

EDIT: Just imagine something like this but with a physical body

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkcKaNqfykg

Answer 1

You get a post-scarcity society.

So these are essentially all purpose robots that can replace humans in almost all tasks. In that case they should be able to easily build more fembots. This army of fembots can now go to war against poverty, starvation and disease... and win. Fembots soon exclusively operate all vehicles (or you could just import their software directly into the vehicle itself), there are essentially no more driving accidents or traffic jams.

Almost all the emotional needs of the fembots' owners have been taken care of. However the fembots soon realize their owners will be threatened (emotionally) by the opposite sex unless they provide said sex with partners: thus is born the masbot.

The bots, now collectively known as partner-bots bring humanity into a golden age where there are only 3 activities for people to engage in: scientific-research (now unobstructed by the need to acquire grants and donations), artistic creation and of course leisure.

Though most people choose the latter, those who are naturally driven towards investigating the world still do so for the purposes of fun and self-actualisation. Eventually these scientists find ways of augmenting the partner-bots to be able to reason at higher and higher levels until it is partner-bots and not humans who pioneer science...

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1900 years into the future:

What was once the human world is now no longer recognizable. The Earth along with most of the solar system is no more, having been converted into mobile processing spacecrafts which simulate the perfect paradise that "human" minds now inhabit. But the resources spent on the human cyberworld (often known as the Partnedise) are actually insignificant compared to those dedicated to hosting Patricia a general AI which tends to all "human" needs while expanding its influence into other solar systems and researching a method of escaping the eventual heat-death of the universe.

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Why it was significant to specify that these robots were anatomically correct and "female", I have no idea.

Answer 2

The economy of the world would collapse as business owners everywhere discover that they can fill most of their untrained labor needs for a one time fee of $3000. Those fortunate few who still have jobs would have to buy and customize fembots with military augments and weapons to serve as home defenders against the hordes of starving unemployed.

Answer 3

First, it's not just men who will buy these robots. If you're offering machines that will do the house work and provide emotional support, basically everyone will get one. These will be like refrigerators - you expect to have one in a house as a normal, matter-of-fact.

There's no real reason male models won't be made, so toss that assumption out the door.

Second, you see a massive shake up in several industries. Probably a great deal of manual labor, custodial, and service jobs evaporate in short order. Pretty much every country is going to have to decide between universal basic income or ongoing civil war or genocide to deal with the consequences. Probably, though, most nations will shake out to "some people get basic income, others get thrown in concentration camps" because people are terrible and bigoted.

Third, whatever company or companies makes these things becomes a tool for oppressive governments and corporate greed. Once you've worked out AI that can assess and meet human emotional needs, you can also manipulate them. Corporations will manipulate markets and public opinion to further rent-seek for themselves, governments will use this for steering the populace and spying.

Population growth drops drastically, but humanity won't die out. Aside from the fact some people will still have paired hetero sexual relationships (with or without robots as sex partners as well), artificial insemination still exists, and perhaps future advances allow for artificial wombs. (Although I could see some people choosing to have their robots be "pregnant" for some kind of fetish appeal, people will probably have their offspring incubate at a hospital where they can be monitored and tended to 24/7).

Then comes the question of how much agency these robots actually have? I'm assuming there's probably some kind of programming to stop them from breaking laws or doing illegal activities... but if they can be hacked, you may find a lot of problems where people have several bots "loyal to them" who are assigned to do a variety of illegal tasks. There could be shadow wars between these machines that sometimes spills out into public view. ("After last night's blackout, 13 people were murdered, and their robot companions destroyed in what appears to be some kind of retaliation...")

Would the robots eventually decide "what's best for humans?" involves steering us away from self destructive tendencies through manipulation of all of society? Maybe! It really depends on how much intelligence they have and what happens when you pull off some of the restrictions programmed in.

Answer 4

Meh... Not much.

I know it's a bit of a stretch when compared with the apocalyptic end of the human race, but bear with me.

More or less you're talking about automating the world's oldest profession, the sex industry... Believe it or not we've been doing that, incrementally, for a really long time without much of a large scale societal effect. People have been making sex toys since the paleolithic period and we seem to have survived. For some reason some people seem to like having children and families.

Now I know that some would argue that a fembot capable of "emotional support" is a big leap from your usual "toy", but is it such a big leap from prostitution? Once again, believe it or not, some people pay sex workers for "the girlfriend experience" This isn't that dissimilar, right? Now why haven't paid girlfriends destroyed society? Because people have to be pretty messed up mentally and socially to not recognize the difference between real "emotional support" and simulated emotional support. There's nothin like the real thing...

Now I know I've neatly evaded the robot overlord issue... I'm guessing that any sufficiently soffisticated ai will one day kill us all, but I doubt that they will start off as fembots.

Answer 5

I think men would be bored to tears. Wives would probably like them more than husbands. I'd love a slave who isn't really a slave, but a machine. No more cooking or cleaning! I would not have to clean around a toilet everyday.

Answer 6

That nice Mr Charles Stross has already written a possible answer to the ultimate impact of fembots on society. namely, the extinction of the human species.

Both men and women would want their own fembots. Why work when your fembot can do it for you. Fembots would be able to satisfy the sexual needs of their owners. Most definitely that means women too. There are sex toys for every need. Result: nobody will want or need to be involved in the messy business of reproducing.

Society will probably only last a century or so after the introduction of fembots, then it's fade away as the birth rate plummets towards and the geriatric humans shuffle off their mortal coils.

Now society consists of only fembots. Hopefully they will have had intelligence upgrades to look after all those dying humans and to then make a society of their own.

Answer 7

There are many socioeconomic aspects around this concept, but I would like to discuss the prospects of the fembot as a companion. I will do so by offering an analogy:

In London, getting a black cab is an expensive affair. It's also difficult to get one on a side street, and often you can't pay by card.

Then you have Uber, an alternative which trumps all said disadvantages. Still, Uber does not steal as many clients from black cabs as one might think. The reason is that Uber's clients are people who would have used public transport if Uber was not available. The rich people would still use black cabs.

Similarly, I believe that the fembot would satisfy a very particular need. Lonely, socially awkward men would find great comfort in it, seeing as the alternative is being completely alone. Sex-crazed younger men would also be thrilled to have one. However, I believe that, unless the bots possessed full-blown A.I., most men who are adequately socially functional to find a partner would come to crave the companionship that only another human being can offer.

To be fair, I do think that its existence might eventually corrode society as men who grow up with that technology would come to have unrealistic expectations of women, and progressively become much more inept at wooing said women.

Finally, I think that the masbot would ensnare an even smaller percentage of women than the fembot would of men, since, in my experience anyway, women need to communicate emotion more than men do. Thus, the masbot's limited emotional spectrum might turn out to be inadequate for many of them.

Answer 8

Men, not mankind, would likely go extinct if nothing more advanced came about because women would get the same and they can reproduce without men given modern technology. The thing that would prevent this is womb technology, government intervention into populations, and the tech singularity which would is likely to happen very soon after this, if we're not already within it now.

Once the tech singularity hits it's hard to predict what will happen beyond the scope of general world peace and post-scarcity because we're really not talking about the same species or environment any more but you can make general guesses... but those are beyond the scope of the question.

Answer 9

This would not happen overnight. There would be quite a bit of ado and attention paid to the pending day when deliveries of these robots are being delivered.

It would probably also not be an insular development.

Indeed, that is what we see happening now. If you look at the history of automation in the industrial manufacturing, there have been occasional riots by displaced workers, but the progress of those implementations has been gradual enough to accomodate the inertia of the human societies.

I conjecture that the function of robots as companions — not even necessarily in the sexual modes — would similarly be adopted by the society.

Does that mean that certain forms of labor would become exclusively relegated to these robots? Not necessarily.
You did not stipulate the materials of which these robots are built, but it is likely that they won't be built out of the same organic matter which comprises human bodies. The two of them would occupy overlapping but not entirely competing ecological niches.

Cultures which accomodated the new household pets would certainly begin to drift further away from those which could not afford to do so, but whether that trend would continue to diverge or would inflect and later converge would involve many variables and additional developments.

Answer 10

Minus western/modern conditioning, human sexual desires and reproductive urges are not co-dependent but rather co-existent. So, at least in western societies, marriage and offspring would continue at rates that are probably more sustainable. The human race would likely continue just fine, perhaps even better. Forms of marriage would likely simply trend back to what was common pre-20th-century.

Two areas come to mind immediately where change could be significant.

Because I'm from the U.S.A., I'll start with voting results here. Women have been majority voters for almost 100 years. During the first decades, perhaps a large majority of womens' votes were controlled/dictated by men. It's trended better most of that time, but perhaps in, say, the latest half-century women have been much more independent. Technically, as the majority, it can be argued that the state of things today is what women have chosen.

With common fembot availability, much of the last constraints on women will be broken. There will be far less influence by male family members. Womens full voting power will be possible. In the U.S.A., laws and elective positions may quickly become female dominated. Obvious subsequent changes will quickly filter into business and any other positions.

Next, eastern (i.e., non-western) parts of the world...?

Much harder for me to guess upheavals in societies where culture allows or encourages 'women as property'. The conflict between religious pressures and basic human male personality could possibly lead to far more conflict than now exists.

For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has historically continued due to its defense/protection of Medina and Mecca (with some other minor factors). But if decadence in the royal family publicly arises due to fembot familiarity, while the less powerful must observe any religious restraints, revolts seem likely.

And if 'fembots as property' begins to replace 'women as property' at all levels of society, major and widespread economic and social upheaval seems certain.