perfidy

I applaud science's efforts to quantify attraction. Beyond the obvious relationship of quantity of dough being proportional to the raw attractiveness of the dough-holder. I get that. But spending alot of time and effort to determine the patently obvious, for its own sake, makes me want to eat my own shoe in sheer frustration.

After a stiff drink and a percodan, and with a little reflection, I realized a greater shortcoming here. What the study fails to take into account is that different cultures value different gifts, particularly in the awkward cultural judo that courtship can be. The study really only applies to places where wining and dining is an accepted, or indeed feasible, practice. Nor does the work draw a distinction between eateries. At Outback, say, dinner for 2 can be kept under $40; a decent steak dinner in, say, Japan can run around $170,000.

But why have to deal with exchange rates and kooky foreign currency and decent meats at all if you don't have to? Leave it to the Japanese to build their own dates.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro has gone the extra mile in building life-mimicking features into his design:

Um, the dude with glasses is *not* the robot.

The robot exhibits several tiny mannerisms that we all share- blinking, laughter- and that we pick up on when others don't do them. It even simulates breathing, which I definitely notice when people I'm speaking to don't do it.

So okay, this cat built hisself a lady. And yes, that's quite cool enough all on its own. But looking forward, it doesn't take a crystal ball to see the most lucrative aspect of this technology. And it ain't mining ore or building cars.

Look, consider a company like Vivid Entertainment. As a private concern it doesn't have to make its financials available, but $100 million in sales is entirely plausible if not conservative. And that's just to look at Jenna Jameson. How much could they make by building a simulacrum that mirrors Jenna's look, physique, and...talents...perfectly? How much is the porn-bot market worth, when DVD and On-demand sales or rentals can run into billions?

Then, consider other ramifications of life-like bots. Would someone be a pedophile if he bought one that looked like a child for sexual purposes? It's not totally off the mark, by the way: the fembot in the pic is that professor's second design. The first one simulated a five-year old girl. What copyright issues would be at work when licensing not merely your likeness, but your simulation? Could you draw a paycheck if you sent your robotic doppleganger to your job to work in your stead? Could I marry one in Massachusetts? If I had sex with one that was a reproduction of myself, would I be a homo, or masturbating? Could you design a robot so advanced it didn't know it was a robot, then make it a cop who assassinated other robots after giving them a weird psych test...?

Or might it be possible to build a 'bot so true to life it would supplant women altogether? And not like a Stepford Wife- I mean, they could talk, after all; speech should be a bug, not a feature- I mean perfect. Arguably, men have been trying to replicate women for quite some time, although the robust materials and scale at play here have been significantly refined of late. Can the perfect woman be built from plastic and silicone?

Don't get too irritated with me, ladies. It's taken menfolk millenia to approximate you, but you've had a reliable and simple substitute for us for eons.