The History of Electronic Girls, Part 3: Birthing

Thanks to Broadsheet for turning me onto this little oddity: a woman in England has started a business selling "reborn" babies.

The babies, much like the "Real Doll" sold to men to have sex with (which I wrote about HERE), are made of molded silicone for a fleshy feel, and are then painted to look terrifyingly "life-like" and realistic.

If you would like an eyeful, this video advertises the wares:



There is something very fishy about the name "reborn": it implies some things that are too sad for a good saleslady to say outright: these "dolls" are replacements for babies who have either grown up, died, or moved away to New Zealand, as in the case featured in this British "coffee talk" style chat about it:

The psychologist hired-on for this chat insists that this is just women stoking their oxytocin fires and giving themselves a high. And he seems to think that makes it okay. And maybe that does: taboos are made to be broken, I suppose...

And dolls are a pretty deeply-ingrained cultural phenom, something we take for granted. But a step back and a moment's thought tells us that little girls cuddling baby-dolls is creepy: it puts them in a too-mature and implicitly sexual role before their time. Yet most of us accept it, and even regard it as "normal" and/or "cute." So why is a grown woman cuddling a baby-doll so creepy? Why isn't this "normal" and "cute"?  

How would we react if this were a phenomenon of women buying old-fashioned Betsy-Wetsy dolls, dolls that are obviously fake, obviously dolls, and then spending time cooing over them and cuddling them? The women would seem both insane and mentally retarded: the former for giving love to a lump of plastic, the latter for not realizing the difference between a baby and lump of plastic.

The dolls take that last step into ultra-realism, though, and suddenly the women aren't insane and mentally retarded. The appearance of the baby tricks our brains too, in part: the emotions are set off, but we still know what we're seeing is fake. And so what they're doing strikes us as incredibly "wrong" and "creepy."

The same change applies to men and sex dolls: when a man has sex with a blow-up sex doll, it's sad and pathetic, or campy and ridiculous, but it's not scary. When those dolls become super-realistic, though, the guys who "love" their "Real Dolls" are genuinely frightening.

In that second video, when the woman's husband sees the "reborn," he says that he doesn't like it because it looks like something off a mortuary slab, and I think most of us relate to that. I think most of us relate better to that than to the woman cooing to and petting a lifeless, if impressively shaped and painted, wad of silicone.

And I wonder if maybe the "creepy" feeling we get observing both women cuddling silicone babies and men caressing silicone women comes from their resembling corpses. The emotion-logic disconnect is not dissimilar to seeing a loved one dead: your emotions scream out, "this is the person I love!" but your brain knows it is only a body, the person you loved is gone.

And there is definitely a cultural taboo against sex with dead women and cuddling dead babies.

I think it is interesting that when realistic silicone people became available, the market formed around these two niches: grown women for men to have sex with, and babies for women to cuddle. I think that says a little something about whom and how the human beast objectifies. I also think it's interesting that in both cases, it is an extremely niche, but still extremely profitable, market, and that in both cases, the general public objects.

Just as I predicted with the "Real Dolls," I predict these "Reborns" will soon find themselves filled with sensors and servos, and frankly I think that will make them less objectionable. Once they go from being fake dead babies and fake dead women to being fake live babies and fake live women (the difference being their ability to move, gesture, react, and so on), the taboo will evaporate, and people will find them much more acceptable. (Although probably not entirely acceptable: they will still be "soulless" non-persons without volition.)

Still, at that point, we can expect fake (live) people and animals to become much more common. How common?

How would you feel about purchasing a set of three realistic silicone babies programmed to crawl around the floor picking up dust and dirt all day? You empty the pan by changing its diaper. And anytime you feel like a cuddle, you just scoop one up off the floor and give it a squeeze, and it will giggle and kiss you.

Yeah, that's still pretty creepy.

For now.

Feminism 2008

Feminism takes many forms. The picture on the left was published as a cover of Redbook. The picture on the right is the "raw picture" -- the pre-photoshop actual photo. It was purchased for $10,000 by a woman-run blog called Jezebel for the purpose of this side-by-side. Why? Because they've got a grudge against this Faith Hill lady? No. Because we've all been living in this world and looking at these images for so long, our brains have come to accept the image on the far left as normal. And it takes the image at near-left to remind us that the first one doesn't even look human, let alone normal. It's like having to be reminded that no one actually looks like anime or Disney "princesses." Our minds are warped and this unwarps them a little. And by the way, the woman in that unimproved picture? She is seriously pretty. Prettier than anyone I've bumped into in the last couple months. Why do we prefer looking at the alien creature on the left?

The New York Times has a piece about some of the latest advances being made in artificial intelligence. AI is important not just to creating the evil cylons that will turn into super-hot monotheistic cylons someday, but to making computers work better. We won't be able to just ask computers questions and get decent answers -- Star Trek style -- until those computers can think. So AI is important. And some of the most important work going is being done by a woman, Daphne Koller:

A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.

Ms. Koller’s work, building on an 18th-century theorem about probability, has already had an important commercial impact, and her colleagues say that will grow in the coming decade. Her techniques have been used to improve computer vision systems and in understanding natural language, and in the future they are expected to lead to an improved generation of Web search.

“She’s on the bleeding edge of the leading edge,” said Gary Bradski, a machine vision researcher at Willow Garage, a robotics start-up firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

I'm actually kind of impressed that the author of this article did not find Ms. Koller's sex remarkable. At no point in this story does the article make any note at all of the fact that she is a woman working in a field that is usually regarded (stereotypically and stupidly) as "male."

Since arriving at Stanford as a professor in 1995, Ms. Koller has led a group of researchers who have reinvented the discipline of artificial intelligence. Pioneered during the 1960s, the field was originally dominated by efforts to build reasoning systems from logic and rules. Judea Pearl, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, had a decade earlier advanced statistical techniques that relied on repeated measurements of real-world phenomena.

Called the Bayesian approach, it centers on a formula for updating the probabilities of events based on repeated observations. The Bayes rule, named for the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, describes how to transform a current assumption about an event into a revised, more accurate assumption after observing further evidence.

Ms. Koller has led research that has greatly increased the scope of existing Bayesian-related software. “When I started in the mid- to late 1980s, there was a sense that numbers didn’t belong in A.I.,” she said in a recent interview. “People didn’t think in numbers, so why should computers use numbers?”

Ms. Koller is beginning to apply her algorithms more generally to help scientists discern patterns in vast collections of data.

“The world is noisy and messy,” Ms. Koller said. “You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”

I love that she's more inclined towards numbers than most -- further putting the lie to the "girls can't do advanced math/science" canard. But again, I'm the one pointing this out; the article doesn't even notice she's a woman or that there's anything noteworthy about that. I think that's wonderful and very optimistic, but are we there yet? No, we're not there. So I hold up Daphne Koller as the feminist hero of the day. Hurray Ms. Koller! You are awesome.