Jeff Simmermon sent me the link to his email interview with David Levy, author of Sex with Robots:

Metal fingers in my body

What’s interesting about all these interviews and all the media around this book is how many interviewers start from the position of “this is a scary thing” or “this has such potential for abuse.” Questions like “what if the robot looks like a child” and “won’t your partner leave you if you have a robot” and “oh my god what about the children.” I haven’t seen a lot of people asking “how could a sexbot help me overcome the trauma of abuse” or “how could we augment or enrich our lovemaking with these devices” or “will ’sexbot sundays’ replace ’sextoy thursdays’ in our marriages” and so on.

I’m with Levy on this one. I think yes, of course we’ll have a huge backlash of anxiety, but overall the humanoid robots designed for sex are gonna be a lot of fun and not cause any harm to people or relationships. I mean, I’m sure we’ll find ways to break each other’s hearts that involve the sexbots, just like we’ve found ways using the internet, mobile phones, automobiles, and quills and parchment. And the robot angle will give the media a nice hook to hang the same old story on — er, I mean, a new lens through which to understand human beings.

That’s what I plan to use them for. Heh.

Dr. Petra Boynton answered my question about why I’ve suddenly been flooded with email from j-students seeking interviews on a quick turnaround — duh — it’s the end of the semester and your projects are coming due.

I’m always happy to help you but you gotta help me too, so read her post here for some guidelines on how to approach any source, not just for a school project but in your career. It’s amazing how many journalists contact me and ask things like “I’m writing about cybersex in video games, please send me everything you’ve written on the subject” and I’ll google the person’s email and find out they really are a writer for some paper somewhere.

For those of you stopping by after today’s Maxim Radio segment on “Sex Files” on Sirius 108, here’s a summary.

We talked about men bundling a sexy gift with a “regular” gift for their steady someone this Christmas, and I had time for three suggestions. If you’re already a Sex Drive reader you know about these, but hey, it never hurts to be reminded. Especially when you can still get this stuff shipped to you from Amazon in time for next week!

Aural Sex
Audio player + vibrator. Anything with a headphone jack will drive the vibrations in the OhMiBod and the iBuzz Two, you don’t even need a jack for the Talk2Me, just some noise. I believe the Audi-Oh is no longer available, but if you know of other audio-driven toys, feel free to post them in the comments.

Visual Sex
Digital picture thingie + sexy pictures. This can be a digital picture frame, a USB memory stick, a digital camera, a cell phone, a PDA, a smart phone. They even have keychains now with tiny digital picture frames on them. You can pre-load the album with naughty pictures — of yourself, or not. Download vintage erotica online or take a picture of the cleft in your chin or whatever she finds the most fun about your body. If you go for x-rated you can add them in secret later, when parents and children have gone home.

Physical Sex
Couples toy. A vibrating cock ring is a great oomph-booster for sleepy-yet-intimate holiday sex. You can get one-time-use versions at the drugstore packaged with a condom or splurge on a sturdier model at the adult boutique. For gift-giving, bundle it with massage oils, panties, lingerie, a rubber ducky … whatever ingredients say “romantic evening in” to you and your flame.

Amy and Yvonne have invited me in studio to be a guest on Sex Files on Maxim Radio, Sirius Channel 108. The show runs from 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern) until noon (3pm). If they do a listener call-in thing, I’d love to hear from you.

I wrote five predictions for “love in 2012″ for Tango magazine. It’s got great art and a nice layout in the print magazine, but for those of us who barely remember what a print magazine looks like, they done put it online. Yay! Tango is one of the few women’s magazines to take the tech seriously and print an article about it without fear.

True Love And Technology: A Look At What The Future Holds

Here are the five predictions:

Video kills the coffee first date

Online daters rent online yentas

Girl gadgets grow up

Long-distance lovers plug in

Long-term relationships gain new dimensions

This week’s column responds to the discussion that followed an earlier column about the porn industry following, rather than leading, web 2.0:

Next-Gen Sex Gets Its Jollies From Web 2.0
For many people, any type of sex or nudity with sexual intent counts as “porn” if you do it online.

That’s a lesson I learned a few months ago, after writing that porn is scrambling to catch up with Web 2.0, not driving it. Prior to that column, I’d been thinking of “porn” as “the porn industry” — sexual content produced by people with the intention of making money.

Couples recording themselves at home and uploading the video simply to share it with other people for fun don’t qualify as porn, in my view. Neither do the platforms developed to provide those couples with a space to play, even though the technology was obviously produced with the intent of making money. continued @ Wired

On a related note, see Audacia Ray’s blog post at Waking Vixen about another way the porn industry lets us down, and why we’re taking matters into our own hands with the ease of social networking and blog tools:

Seeing straight ahead: the porn industry’s sexuality blinders
Two years ago when I started to ponder directing and producing a porno film, I knew I wanted to make bisexual movies. When I said that word, “bisexual,” to people outside the porn industry, they’d respond with confusion: “Aren’t most porn movies bisexual, what with all the girl-girl action?” In pornoland, girl-girl action is coded as straight, unless of course some of the women have short hair and present as butches, in which case the mainstream industry ignores it. Except for that one time when S.I.R. Video won Best All-Girl Feature with their Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels. That was pretty sweet. In pornoland, bisexual means that the dudes touch each other too. And that’s what I wanted my movie to be. In pornoland, bisexual films fall under the rubric of “gay,” they aren’t included in the world of AVN, they are the propriety of GAYVN. Pornoland is trying to teach us something here: you’re either straight or you’re gay. continued @ Waking Vixen

I’m sorry. I know I should take this seriously. Or at least view it as column fodder. But instead I’m sitting here just … giggling.

Sigh.

I’m so going to hell.

Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the “bot” from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” PC Tools senior malware analyst Sergei Shevchenko said in a statement.

Among CyberLover’s creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator.” It can also lead victims to a “personal” Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.

In case you’re worried about being a victim, PC Tools has advice: “use good sense in general” and “use an alias to chat” and “don’t give out personal information.” Whew!

More seriously, though, does anyone ever write about the idea that you might divulge “personal information” (whatever that means to you) after a long time of getting to know someone? That maybe you chat online for a few months or a year, then exchange mobile phone numbers and talk for a while, and eventually you kinda forget you haven’t met in person? There’s this whole message about DO NOT TELL SOMEONE ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR REAL LIFE as if we’re all bursting to give out our full profile in the first 30 minutes.

If you’re not smart enough to let the relationship develop over time, and to see the person in times of sorrow or illness or irritation or irrational tantrums as well as in the good times, then you’re not smart enough to engage online without adult supervision. You might not be able to tell a robot suitor from a human suitor — or a genuine suitor from a fraud — in the first 30 minutes. Give it six months and you’ll begin to suspect something’s just a little bit … off … about him.

If you never, ever share personal information, the relationship can’t grow beyond a certain point. It all depends on your goals, your risk tolerance, and your life circumstances. One rule can’t fit all, when it comes to what to share and when.

TechDirt posted a good summary of a bad bill and the ridiculous ramifications — here’s a chilling excerpt:

Congress Rushes Through Law To Protect The Children… And Make Open WiFi A Huge Liability
So what’s so awful about the law? Well, like most “protect the children” legislation, it goes way overboard in terms of what people are expected to do, and like most legislation having to do with technology, seems utterly clueless about how technology works. The bill would require anyone providing an “electronic communication service” or a “remote computing service” to record and report information any time they “learn” that their network was used for certain broadly defined illegal activities concerning obscene images. That’s double trouble, as both the illegal activities and the classification of who counts as a service provider are so broadly defined. McCullough notes that anyone providing an open WiFi network, a social network, a domain registry or even a webmail service probably qualify under the law. Glenn Fleishman describes what the law could mean in practice, points out that anyone who runs an open WiFi network for the public is now basically required to snitch on anyone they think may be doing anything deemed “illegal” in this act, including viewing or transmitting certain obscene drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings. As Fleishman notes, it “sounds like viewing an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog could qualify.” Even worse, part of the snitching is that beyond sending a report and the images to the gov’t, you’re supposed to retain the “illegal” image yourself — which would seem to open you up to charges of possession as well if you somehow screw up (if you follow everything exactly to the letter of the law, you are granted immunity).

This can’t possibly pass. But then again, so many things that can’t possibly happen, have ….

ScienceDaily reports that single-person households drain our natural resources more than multi-person households.

A really inconvenient truth: divorce is not green
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2007) — The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment. A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.

If divorce creates single-person households, so does staying single. But we all know that living in large groups of roommates can get difficult, as without love binding us together it’s hard to tolerate people’s foibles and idiosyncrasies for the long term. Ergo, to save the planet, should we all start shacking up in polyamorous groups? Should “plural marriage” become the next threat to our national security and the innocence of children?

I happen to love living alone with my animals. I love having houseguests; and I love living solo. I could live next door to or on the same block with the love of my life, but in the same house? I’d hate to put a loved one through the torment of living with my PMS, my priorities (dog hair is an accessory, not a nuisance!), my absentminded professor style of home decor, my clutter. I live like a bachelor and love it — and yet now I find I’m one of those people deliberately melting the polar ice caps and killing off entire species because I’m too selfish to change how I live. All the recycle bins in the world apparently can’t justify my household preferences.

Sigh.

A robotic arm controlled by brain signals for people with paralysis? Rock on! Imagine not being able to touch yourself or your lover … and then being able to, with just your thoughts and a third arm.

Many researchers around the world have tried to build robotic devices able to help people with paralysis. Now, European researchers have developed a robot control system based on electroencephalogram (EEG). The patients using the Brain2Robot system might regain some of their lost autonomy. The users will control the robotic arm with their thoughts. To control the robotic arm, the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) developed at one Fraunhofer Institute in Germany is combined with an eye tracker. The signals are sent to a computer which performs the main learning task. According to the researchers, the robotic arm could become commercially available in a few years.

The ZDNet blog post about it has more details, plus an illustration and links to photographs.

I don’t know how refined the prototype is, or whether you’d have the delicate motor control for all sexual motions. Can you cup your cock without crushing yourself? Could you stroke her g-spot? Is it better for holding hands than wielding a flogger? (And will anyone have the guts to make it possible to use the arm in sexual ways, or will the culture insist that people with disabilities Must Not Be Sexual and prohibit such developments at first?)

But how cool to regain the ability to touch someone with one of your own body parts, at your own will. The intense sexual attachments we form in virtual spaces proves that the brain is more important than the body; imagine having a sexually active brain in a body you can’t move. And then acquiring an extension of one’s body that one can move at will, even if at first the technology only provides “crude” motions like lifting a sturdy coffee cup.

[via SmartMobs]