The 4 Creepiest Ways We'll Inevitably Use Robot Servants

4 Sex

I can't stress enough not only how plausible it is that robots will be used for sex, but how it actually exists right now in a way that's even weirder than that robo humpathon Michael Sullivan art I used in the header there. . Let me ask you this -- how many human-shaped robots can you go out and buy right now that will drive a car for you, or clean your house, or toil in your salt mines? Not a damn one. How many robots can you buy and put the hump on? Some!

For a few grand, you can buy Roxxxy, a robot girlfriend that has a pre-built personality and can carry on conversations with you. Also it's on par with polio and One Direction for awful things that mankind has had to endure. Behold this video, in which a guy who fate demanded had to work at this company demonstrates her sex seizures:

Hey chum, does your wife know you do this? Is she allowed out of the basement?

If a handful of sex robots doesn't convince you, it's worth noting that people who are experts and probably being funded by tax dollars are also weighing in on the thrills of man/juicer love. AI researchers in the Netherlands pulled the year 2050 out of their asses as the year human/robot marriage will likely be legalized. Probably based on 80 percent science and 20 percent history of jacking off on an air conditioner. If that prediction seems lame, also know that in 2006, the founder of the European Robotics Research Network predicted that humans would be having sex with robots by 2011. Roxxxy up there existed in 2011. Did you feel that? That was science's big, robot boner sticking it in real deep-like.

3 Crime

Once you're done having sex with your robot, what's left to do? The answer is obvious -- give it a gun to help you rob a bank so you can afford more robot sexbots for robosexbotting. You depraved son of a bitch.

Robot criminals are likely to be as plentiful as robot cock mittens in the future, thanks to the fact that when a robot commits a crime, no one cares if it gets shot. And also it doesn't need to be as conspicuous as a T-1000. In fact, as demonstrated at a robotics challenge in 2010, a simple flying robotic device able to come in through your window, access your computer, steal important files and then upload a virus is all that's needed to cripple a corporation or steal massive amounts of money electronically.

Want something more disturbing? Avatars! Like the movie, only with less blue kitty people who need to cock socket other blue kitty people to make friends. Researchers right at this second are working on something called "beaming," where your actions and movements are beamed to a robotic avatar somewhere else in the world that physically takes your place. So you could use it to attend meetings in a physical manner, or families could spend time with soldiers in a war zone with no danger to themselves. Hell, you could play soccer with your kid while he's away at college. You could go away to college without going away. Or, and this is a wild idea, you could hack someone else's avatar and rob a bank with their ID written across your shiny, miscreant chassis. You could slip into their sex avatar and do their wife while she has no idea her husband is missing. You could light Detroit on fire and dare anyone to notice.

Also a fun thought exercise is, if you are in China and you access an avatar in Texas to hold up a Piggly Wiggly, who has prosecutorial jurisdiction?

2 Care

If you've ever spent time near a baby, you know how much you wished you were not spending time near a baby. Did you know most of them can't even talk or make sandwiches? What the fuck, babies? Good luck getting a job with such a slack-ass approach to life.

Fortunately for you, and likely unfortunately for that baby, technology is ever improving adult ways to take a slack-ass approach to life. And while the TV is a pretty functional babysitter right now, imagine what happens when the TV sprouts legs and can put the baby to bed and jam a bottle in its maw when it seems to require nutrients. You'll never have to leave the trailer to see if the kid has been plucked from the lawn by eagles ever again.

Because neglect is a booming industry, it seems like putting your children in the cold, calculating hands of robots is the wave of the future. Already (and predictably), the Japanese have implemented a number of nanny bots in places like department stores to allow you to shop while abandoning your child in a corral with numerous other children to be attended to by a 4-foot-tall robot that surely can keep them totally safe.

At the other end of the spectrum (and still in Japan) are robots that are designed to help the elderly in their day-to-day care, because the last thing grandpa should see before walking toward the light is the cold, uncaring visage of Powerman and his clamp hands wiping his ass. Basically, as a species, we're leaning toward wanting to have nothing to do with people who can't care for themselves and pawning them off on robots, which I think is exactly how every fictional robot uprising started out.

I don't like when the robot doctor gives me a prostate exam and I don't have to explain why!

U.K. surveys show that eight in 10 kids watch TV for over two hours a day by themselves, and 70 percent of parents who responded admitted they let the TV babysit their kids and they don't feel guilty about it. And that's just a machine that projects dumb shit at your face. Imagine the versatility (a fancy word for horrible abuse) of a machine that could broadcast those same shitty images, but could also stop your kid from eating lead paint and cigarette butts, and maybe it could poop granola bars and Kool-Aid, ostensibly the only thing that keeps you checking on your kids every few hours right now.

In fairness, if you're reading something I wrote on Cracked, then you're obviously intelligent and probably very attractive as well and would never be so irresponsible, but do you have that much faith in the rest of humanity? The people who aren't as smart and breathtaking as you? Yeah, you gotta watch those people. Because they don't even watch their kids. Or their grandparents.

1 Cartoon Villainy

I needed to include this, distinct from crime, because calling it crime doesn't do it justice and isn't really what I mean at all. Cartoon supervillainy is really the best way to evoke the right feeling of where this is going to go wrong. And when I say wrong, I mean terribly, horribly wrong. Bad things are going to happen, in your lifetime, because of robots.

Humans want to be liked and respected and loved. Maybe sometimes feared, depending on your own personal quirks. We want to be important, and we have a deep driven tendency to anthropomorphize everything. Every pet owner will tell you unequivocally one of the best things about having a pet is unconditional love. But can an animal even feel love the way you understand it? No doubt that animal does feel something about you -- if you're a good pet owner, it associates you with security and sustenance, but can you ever know if it's love? And what about those people who name their Roombas and apparently rearrange their furniture or pre-clean the house to make it easier on the robot vacuum cleaner? If that's still too refined an example, go look at a cloud until you see a face. Humans want to see that in everything, something real and relatable, even though we're often only just projecting. The same thing happens with robots.

A professor at MIT faced the unsettling reality of what our mind can do with a robot one day when she realized she wanted a robot programmed to do nothing more than turn toward the sound of someone's voice to pay attention to her and not someone else in the lab. It wasn't really paying attention to anyone, and she knew that when she thought about it. The problem was that she was expecting it, because of its ability to seem like it was interested in her, to be interested in her. To return her emotions the way we expect that Roomba or a budgie to. But it won't because it can't.

Know what "cheep" means in budgie language? Means eat shit and die!

But how does that lead to cartoon villainy?

What happens if you, say, run a small dictatorship somewhere in the world and you have the ability one day to start producing very adept, very dangerous robots, and maybe they're so super lifelike to you, and they agree with everything you say because they're not really human and will never have the ability to dissent or object on any grounds, and you feel like their support bolsters any questionable ideas you may have had about how to treat your own people, your neighbors and the world at large? Too crazy? What if you're just a slightly unstable loner with a knack for building robots, which are as much as 80 percent cheaper to build today than they were 20 years ago, and that robot becomes your only friend, your sounding board and your only emotional connection in the world -- and it can only ever do and think and regurgitate to you exactly what you've programmed it to do, in a way that you process as being real and alive? What if you want to hurt someone and talk it over with your trusted friend who only agrees with you?

And you're probably going to be porking it, too. Sick.

As robots get cheaper, they're going to become more viable options for all sorts of things that normally we would, and likely still should, use a human for. And because we have this ingrained desire (which we're only aware of when we stop to reflect on it) to make these machines human, we're going to try to accommodate them in increasingly bizarre ways. And all it takes is one person who programs a robot to be creepy from the get go for that unstable friendship to turn into something bugfuck crazy weird.

Are you ready for a world with religious zealot bots? Imagine the Westboro Baptist Church with a humanoid robot that spouts hatred but can also lift a car. Imagine if it was programmed with every line of every religious text they believed in. Or worse, if someone tweaked real Bible verses just enough to fit their messages so that when it shouted hateful gospel, you couldn't refute it without fact checking, but to everyone else it sounded pretty legit. After all, he's a robot and can't really lie.

Now what if it's a group of white supremacists who get inspired by Robot Monster and make a big, bubble headed monkeybot that hates minorities, or some militia group has a few well armed Patriot-bots? And to those people they'll be as real as you are, and the things they say just as important or even more so, because there will also be an implicit sense of ownership. If that sounds scary and insane, it's because it so creepily is.

For more Forteyian terror, check out 8 Horrifying Uses of Branding (Feat. Hello Kitty Pads) and The 7 Most Horrifying Things Found in the Homes of 'Hoarders'.