Category: Sexbots

Poultry. Its what’s for dinner. At least in about 6 Billion households. The majority of the human race eats yard bird. An even larger group eat their eggs. After all, as we have been reminded often, it’s the perfect food.

How can robot’s help?

First – what are the problems? Lack of growth in the market is the main issue. In a recent posts on medium Usha states:

Poultry farming reported 1% growth in production for the year 2018.[1] Digital technologies are rising to help farmers achieve efficiency. The only question is how soon it happens.

So if the market is growing at such a slow rate, how can farmers survive? Can robots make up for the slow growth?

In an article on Robotics in the Poultry industry, it mentioned a number of ways that Robots are helping creating a better product and cutting costs.

…in the modern egg industry, robots are commonplace. Amongst other tasks, robots feed the birds, transport, handle and pack eggs and manage shed ventilation. In the chicken meat processing sector, robots perform tasks such as automatic transfer of carcasses and detection of defective carcasses. The utilisation of robots is expected to increase in the future as other capabilities are developed that improve the ability to remotely monitor birds.

This last point is very important. The ability to remotely monitor the birds is critical. So what ways need to be developed to monitor? In a separate piece it was noted how we should be measuring these birds:

What would make for better poultry production?

• From a production standpoint, individual real-time body weights, feed and water consumption.
• From a husbandry and welfare perspective, knowing the stress levels in the bird and bird comfort assessed through body temperatures and air quality factors, such as carbon dioxide and ammonia.
• From a disease management outlook, the ability to spot disease or find morbid birds before the entire flock is affected.
• From a food safety perspective, enhanced Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli detection.
• From a food processing perspective, increased yield.

Once we know what the birds are doing via measurement, we can optimize yield. As PoultryHub.org points out:

A key question is ‘What parameters can be measured (remotely/wirelessly) that reliably inform us of the animals’ internal health, welfare and production states?’. Following that, there are likely to be challenges around computer capability. Coping with the massive input of data may be problematic, especially if the monitoring systems provide a continuous stream of real-time information. It is likely that robots won’t be able to monitor all birds, so attention will need to be focussed on sentinel birds

The solutions

So once we have all these measurements of chickens what next? What are the solutions that are being proposed?

The GOHBot from Georgia Tech!

The researcher’s over at Georgia Tech have developed a robot to autonomously operate in a poultry grow-out house.

…a commercially available ground robot outfitted with 2D and 3D sensors and cameras. Nicknamed GOHBot, the Growout House Robot was initially manually operated in an experimental growout house at the University of Georgia (UGA) to establish the feasibility of operating robots in poultry houses. Results of this testing showed there to be no negative impact on the birds due to robotic systems operating in the flocks.

“Interestingly, it appears that the birds were even more comfortable with the GOHBot than with humans,” says Usher.

Presumably that last point made by Dr. Usher was because the robots don’t plan on eating the birds later that day.

Here is how they describe the bot.

Gohbot is an automated mobile robot capable of navigating intelligently in a commercial poultry house to interact with the birds and carry out utility tasks such as the automatic removal of floor eggs. It uses artificial intelligence routines and a suite of sensors, including 2D and 3D imagers, in combination with infrastructure to navigate inside commercial chicken houses. AI routines allow for characterizing chickens, equipment and locating eggs on the floor.

“We envision a robot that ‘lives’ in the poultry housing facilities and works around the clock both evaluating the status of the flocks and removing floor eggs and/or mortality,” said the developers at GTRI.

The ChickenBoy ..

Another solution that is being proposed in the grow-out house environment is Chickenboy.

The ceiling-mounted ChickenBoy autonomous robot runs on simple rails through the chicken house to monitor management issues, including the detection of health issues, localization of dead birds, detection of bedding problems and measurement of ambient conditions.

Users access dashboards with this information through a cloud-based platform:

• Farmers use the information to improve animal welfare and productivity.
• Vertically integrated companies are able to better monitor growing conditions.
• Veterinarians and consultants improve their services with more and faster data from farms.
• Researchers and product developers access data to test and develop new sensors and algorithms in third-party extension modules.

The company is working to develop the mechanical removal of dead birds.

A now a word from the chickens

As noted above, many researchers feel the chickens are more comfortable around that robots that around people, motives aside.

That being said – is there an upside for the chickens in all this?

As Usha points out, Drones can be used to herd free roaming birds:

Although there is concern that drones could make flock nervous and stress, yet it is a better solution for free-range or yard farms where birds are allowed to roam freely. They work as nannies for these domestic fowls.

This obviously creates a much better life for chickens that can live in a more natural environment. Usda and Heiner Lehr predict even further advances over the next 20 years that include:

• Observe chickens and provide advice to farmers for best rearing
• Determine most or all of the key performance indicators on the farm
• Collect stray eggs and dead birds and perhaps even bring severely ill birds to a hospital area on the farm
• Contribute to intelligent, individualized and fully automatic management of climate, water and feed
• Training models to detect nutritional deficiencies in chicks.
• Training models to detect Behavioural diseases like cannibalism (or aggressive pecking).

The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology.   Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.

Mmmm mmm… Love me some red headed robot woman. In this amoral blog, my collegue concluded that the individual act of sex with a bot is amoral. But of course, there is more to the story. 

The DigiSexual revolution

In a recent study in Britain – “more than one in ten men and women would romp with a ROBOT – and a similar number would use a remote-control sex toy”.

Using modern math calculations, thats over 10% of the population! Red headed or not – some humans seem to like the idea of doing the dirty with the Terminator. People that prefer to have sex with robots over humans are known as DigiSexuals … and there seems to be a movement.

A Jan 2019 article NYT reported on robot love:

…the idea that flesh-and-blood humans may actually forge fulfilling emotional, or even sexual, relationships with digital devices is no longer confined to dystopian science fiction movies like “Ex Machina” and “Her,” stories in which lonely techies fall too hard for software-driven femme fatales.

In real life, pioneers of human-android romance now have a name, “digisexuals,” which some academics and futurists have suggested constitutes an emergent sexual identity.

These DigiSexuals are a real thing. People are falling in love with Robots at an alarming rate! They go on to say:

In 2016 a Frenchwoman identified only as “Lilly” told the media that “I’m really and only attracted by the robots.” She claimed to be engaged to a 3-D-printed robot she had designed, and said, “My only two relationships with men have confirmed my love orientation, because I dislike really physical contact with human flesh.”

In 2017, after failing to find a human spouse, an artificial intelligence engineer in China named Zheng Jiajia married (not legally, of course) a robot wife of his own design named Yingying that can reportedly read Chinese characters at a rudimentary level and speak simple words.

Is this a precursor to the end of the human race? Will the technology get so good that we start to prefer it? Will we just start bonking robots to the exclusion of our own kind? What will this do to our population? The easy prediction is a massive population decline over a single generation. This is explored more deeply here.

Beat me up, beat me down – the rise of Robicide

But there is another trend that is equally disturbing and somewhat orthogonal to this. Apparently we also like to beat our robots up! In this NYT’s article there are many examples given:

A hitchhiking robot was beheaded in Philadelphia. A security robot was punched to the ground in Silicon Valley. Another security bot, in San Francisco, was covered in a tarp and smeared with barbecue sauce.

Why do people lash out at robots, particularly those that are built to resemble humans? It’s a global phenomenon. In a mall in Osaka, Japan, three boys beat a humanoid robot with all their strength. In Moscow, a man attacked a teaching robot named Alantim with a baseball bat, kicking it to the ground, while the robot pleaded for help.

Robots can get some respite by begging for thier life apparently. In another study German researchers noted that people have a hard time shutting a robot down when they beg:

In 43 cases, the Verge reported earlier this month, “the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging: ‘No! Please do not switch me off!’” As the researchers predicted, participants struggled to switch the machine—which they had previously worked with as a partner—off. Thirty of the humans took twice as long on average to turn off the robots compared to the group whose robots said nothing at all. And 13 people refused to comply altogether, leaving Nao (the robot) on.

There are studies that have shown that this behavior starts from an early age.

In a paper entitled “Why Do Children Abuse Robots?,”  researchers interviewed kids that had been observed beating up robots in an experiment performed at a mall in Japan.

When questioned, 74 percent of the kids described the robot as “human-like” and only 13 percent as “machine-like.” Half of them said that they believed that their behavior was “stressful or painful” for the robot.

So basically, most of these kids perceive the robot they’re abusing as lifelike, and then just go ahead and abuse it anyway.

Combining our passions

So we beat them and we boink them. But what happens if we try both? Are robots to become the recipients of our darkest desires? Will we play weird asphyxiation games with robots? Will we beat, whip and sexually abuse them because we can? One man may have an answer. Sergio Santos is a Spanish Roboticist that developed a $2500 Sexbot.

…Sergi Santos said that his $2,500 robot helped strengthen his marriage by giving him a safe, dependable outlet when his wife was not in the mood. “A man wants to feel in general that the woman is desperate to have sex with him,” he said in a recent video interview with Barcroft TV, a web documentary channel.

However – at a trade show where Mr. Santo’s was displaying his wares, there was an incident that caused him to develop some new technology.

 During an Austrian technology fair in 2017, a version of Dr. Santos’s Samantha doll reportedly responded, “I’m fine,” after a group of men mounted it roughly, leaving it soiled and damaged.

Dr. Santos is working on a new version of Samantha that will be programmed to shut down when the sex gets too aggressive.

So while some scientist are developing technology to satisfy our sexual desires, it remains to be seen if it can be augmented to thwart our deepest darkest sickest instincts. Are robots more like “us” or something “different”. In the NYT article about robot abuse, Agnieszka Wykowska, a cognitive neuroscientist, and researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics makes this point.

“You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans,” she said. “So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans.”

So our tendency to “dehumanize robots comes from the instinct to anthropomorphize them”.

As we have seen above the need to love robots is related to the latter instinct (anthropomorphizing robots), while our desire to dehumanize (beat them, whip them) comes from that same desire ultimately.

So here is the question. When you meet that pretty red haired robot how will you act?

The organization behind TrustNoRobot is now a non-profit! Our mission is to promote humans above technology.   Our simple belief is that technology should work for humans and better their condition and never have a negative impact on humanity. Please find it in your heart to donate to this important cause.