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Robot Hookers of the Near Future
by Kathy Shaidle
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Jean Harlow’s final, deliciously pre-Code exchange with matronly Marie Dressler in 1933’s Dinner at Eight endures as one of cinema’s choicest comedy morsels.
Harlow’s Kitty, a ditzy platinum blonde gold digger, fairly knocks Dressler’s Carlotta off her feet when she pipes up:
Kitty: I was reading a book the other day.
Carlotta: Reading a book?!
Kitty: Yes. It’s all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?
Carlotta: (Looks Kitty up and down) Oh, my dear, that’s something you need never worry about.
It’s funny cuz it’s true—but for how much longer? . . .
“‘Where’s my flying car?’ jokes every barstool bore ever. We already have “flying cars,” moron. They’re called ‘helicopters.’ Personal aviation technology isn’t what’s lagging—it’s the infrastructure of chopper-friendly landing pads and fueling stations(and reams of new legislation, regulation, and insurance underwriting) that would make them feasible automobile substitutes.” . . .
But these are not really the greatest problems. The problems forgotten by Kathy Shaidle and futurologists alike, overpopulation and resource limitations, are the same reasons why most futurology is utopian bunk.
Just having come back from a harrowing drive to San Francisco and back for a doctor’s appointment, leaving at 4 a.m. and arriving at 8:45 a.m., for what should really been a three-hour trip, the only worse thing I can imagine is if everyone had been using countless flying cars.
On the approach to the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza, one driver–happened to be black–was so involved with talking and laughing with his female passenger that his back was to his left side window, from which he would occasionally reach back out of and place his drink on the car's rooftop, as he was moving, and merging in the ever-narrowing and disappearing lanes as we approached the toll booths.
I just visited someplace called the Helicopter Forum and it says that you can get a small used helicopter for 150,000 dollars. Who knows, maybe greater mass production could bring them down to $100,000. I’ll have to wait until I have a little more in my checking. Even sane intelligent people tend to forget that prices are partly a factor of scarce resources. For example the cost of labor and technology reflects the availability of those resources.
Of course when you talk about being satisfied by a sexual robot, a person may be be talking about something with semi-functional orifices and/or protuberances. That’s one thing. But I would surmise that anything approaching human robots is way, way in the future. When they have carried out this competition, I guess it is, where people will sit down and have a conversation with someone not knowing if they are human or robot, some people are fooled, but, tellingly, it is usually people wishfully thinking that a human is a robot.
One factor is that humans are very, what would you call it, agile and particularistic. As one person pointed out, you might tell some unknown entity that you were born in, say, Tucson, Arizona. A human might likely instantly start rattling on about how his brother-in-law lives in Tucson, and do you know about some crazy biker bar out on 210, or the like. While a robot would maybe tell you that the largest employer in Tucson is Raytheon Missile Systems. That could be reprogrammed, but you’d run into the same problem down the line, where the robot side of the conversation would at least sound stilted.
Although not all futurology is utopian rather than dystopian, most is and reveals that two of the main factors that built Western civilization, extreme optimism and individualism, which obviously have natural selection advantages among Westerners and in competing with other groups as groups, is now one of the major things destroying the West. Since resource limitations and being thoroughly mixed up with and overrun with non-Westerners changes the rules.
Whites are sort of like some exotic flightless island birds that suddenly find that they are the main course in a big buffet for newly introduced carnivorous land animals. These big colorful fluffy birds keep endearingly doing what has always worked for thousands of years in the past. They think to themselves, ‘Be very quiet. Stand very still. Blend in. Be very quiet . . .’ Until, GULP!–the last one is gone.
So the final problem, very rarely grasped by futurologists or their critics, is that most of these exciting future predictions, like flying cars or lifelike robots, will have to be developed in places like Japan or China, once Western nations have completed their demographic decline into third-world nations. Just as Rhodesia and South Africa are sinking ever farther down into the corrupt violent ignorant fetid pre-Western civilization swamp.
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