£6,900 is the price of true companionship

AndroidThe price cited above is now attached to a product you can buy in the US and Japan. TrueCompanion is an android robotic sex doll, which represents the state of the art in eroticism, or degeneracy if you’d rather.

This brings to mind a crude American limerick: “There was a young man from Racine// Who invented a f***ing machine,// Both concave and convex,// Able to suit either sex,// The goddamnest thing ever seen.”

What used to be a perverse fantasy has now become a reality, but that’s how modernity operates. It’s called progress, in case you’re wondering.

The android comes in two models, male Rocky and female Roxxxy. Both Rocky and Roxxxy can be customised to your specifications, including hair colour, facial features and some other things you’re too young to know about.

Rocky and Roxxxy are life-sized, but for now they feature only limited speech recognition. I couldn’t find out what kind of limited speech they recognise, and wouldn’t venture a guess out of decorum.

However, if you’re looking for an android whose vocabulary extends beyond the words that only appear in unabridged dictionaries, wait a year or two. Sex robots will become infinitely more sophisticated, as electronic devices tend to do.

Roxxxy will be able to say “Can we talk first?” She’ll demand flowers and chocolates before, and respect after. She may also ask what sexual variant you prefer, rather than just move docilely to a key stroke.

For the sake of verisimilitude, she’ll give you a hard time if you’re late from work and say “Not tonight, love, I’ve got a headache”. If you go ahead anyway, she could be programmed to claim marital rape.

And Rocky will be gentle and tender or, if the woman prefers the rough stuff, vigorous and powerful. Either robot will know how to deviate from the trodden paths into such areas as S&M, B&D, water games and homosexuality. The opportunities are limitless.

Neither android will demand exclusivity or being treated like a person, rather than just a sex machine. Roxxxy won’t inspect her man’s shirts for traces of lipstick, and Rocky won’t ask his woman why she comes home all dishevelled every time she goes out with her girlfriends. Neither will insist on expensive gifts or dinners out.

If Rocky could open tins and lift heavy furniture, or Roxxxy do washing and ironing, who could wish for a better companion. No one, I dare say.

However, Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, has his reservations about this startling breakthrough: “It’s not a problem having sex with a machine. But what if it’s your first time, your first relationship? It will get in the way of real life, stopping people forming relationships with normal people.”

Noel ‘Frankenstein’ Sharkey doth protest too little, methinks. He ought to be struck off and, ideally, flogged for his first sentence. Yes, Professor, having sex with a machine is indeed a problem even if this isn’t one’s first relationship. It’s not a relationship at all, for the word presupposes intercourse between two humans.

Sharkey’s colleague, Dr Kathleen Richardson, shares his misgivings, such as they are. However, the way she words them is an inadvertent explanation of how we’ve created a society in which a sex robot could be thought up, never mind created: “We think that the creation of such robots will contribute to detrimental relationships between men and women, adults and children, men and men and women and women.”

She left out men and pigs, women and Shetland ponies, and two transsexuals, which is an inexplicable oversight in someone who speaks the modern jargon with such fluency. With all that attention to detail, no one seems to be bothered that such degenerate perversions drive nails into the coffin of our civilisation, with its every founding moral tenet.

Granted, Jesus didn’t say “That whosoever looketh on a robot to lust after it hath committed adultery with it already in his heart” – the possibility simply didn’t occur to him. Or rather I’m sure it did, but he didn’t expect his audience to understand. But there’s little doubt how he – or anyone raised in the culture he inaugurated – would feel about this technological advance.

However, one doesn’t have to a be Christian to deplore this dehumanisation of man – or to believe that there has to be a limit to what science and technology are allowed to do.

One of Lenin’s letters features the phrase “We can and therefore must…” He applied it to confiscating church valuables and murdering as many priests as possible in the process. But modernity seems to live according to the same principle when it comes to anything material.

Civilisation is all about putting a limit on things we do, even if we can do them. Science and technology should be subject to the same restraints: we mustn’t do certain things just because we can do them.

At the risk of upsetting my libertarian friends, I say ban the bloody things. No one will of course. The barbarian is no longer at the door – he’s squatting inside every house. And there’s no limit to what he’ll do, just because he can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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