Archive

Virtual Futures Salon: Fucking Machines

We are here to talk about fuck­ing machines. In London, on a fog­gy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet anoth­er debate about fuck­ing machines. Another curat­ed dis­cus­sion under­lined by our own human inse­cu­ri­ty about ver­sions of us in sil­i­ca. Fucking anthro­po­mor­phic fuck­ing machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fuck­ing us, or so we seem to be told.

Forbidden Research: Sexual Deviance: Can Technology Protect our Children?

One of the big things that we’re going to talk about here is para­phil­ia. We’re going to talk about sex­u­al deviance. We’re going to talk about the prob­lem of peo­ple whose sex­u­al desires lead to attrac­tion to chil­dren, lead to attrac­tion towards vio­lent sex, lead to sex­u­al trans­gres­sion in one fash­ion or another.

The Automated Economy

Instead of hav­ing our chil­dren become con­sumers of robot­ics tech­nol­o­gy, con­sumers of prod­ucts, we’d have to train them to be pro­duc­ers, to real­ize that they can use robot­ic tech­nolo­gies to build some­thing with their intu­ition, their cre­ativ­i­ty, and their sense of pur­pose, that has mean­ing to them. Then we’d have a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly flu­ent society.

Kate Darling at The Conference 2015

What’s real­ly new about robots is that they’re going to be every­where. And it’s also noth­ing new that we can emo­tion­al­ly relate to objects. People have always had the ten­den­cy to fall in love with cars and gad­gets and stuffed ani­mals. But the new thing about robots is what we’re see­ing is this effect tends to be more intense.