Radar Love
I was watching television and saw a trailer for a science show focusing on peculiar sexual habits. One of them was about people who have relationships with simulacrum; that’s a life sized doll. In the trailer, some poor intellectually challenged individual was bragging that he never had a relationship with an “organic person.” Given the amount of preservatives and chemicals we ingest as a species, I’m not sure anyone ever has a relationship with an organic person. But this guy was talking about a foam rubber human likeness that he dressed up to the point of giving it glasses.
I really don’t want to be judgemental, but holy cow. And I say that as a man who surrounds himself with buzzing, clicking, whirring robots. If anyone should appreciate synthetic humanity, it’s me. But I don’t sleep with my robots, I just program them and watch them suffer from my coding errors. I don’t quite make it to the whole relationship paradigm. How do these guys find their pseudo-dates? Do they put a personals ad in Popular Mechanix?
Actually, humans have a long tradition of loving machinery. Not quite to the extent of finding them reproductively attractive, but we give things names and just love, love, love them to death. I’ve never really fallen into the quagmire of inter-species admiration on that level. I have really liked cars, and the ones I really, really like may get a nickname. I called a Triumph Spitfire I once owned ‘the Spitwad.’ Granted, it’s tasteless and unfeeling, but so was the Spitfire. I had a Fiat 850 sedan that I called ‘the Flea’ and a Ford Fairlane I called ‘the Parade Float.’ But not once did I ever call them for a date. In typical male fashion, I used them and had my fun and then abandoned them to new keepers.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons we humans have so much trouble in life. Too many of us are falling for the wiles of devices rather than their fellow bipeds. Heck, people even give GUNS names and baby them like they were newly delivered babies of their own blood. How strange is that?
I could go on and on about this, but I think I’ve made my point. Besides that, there’s a really cute toaster in the kitchen and I want to get its number.
