guys & dolls

Wow. What strange synchronicity had Kendal reporting on "Love Dolls" and sex robots in FoL on the same day I had posted this comment:

...a master storyteller like Richard Powers can make a Turing scenario very lively indeed. Read Galatea 2.2, a hugely clever updating of the Pygmalion (“My Fair Lady”) story, if you doubt it. (Dennett is a fan.) Modern sculptors beware: even if it walks and talks like a lady it may still be hardware.

Or a soft facsimile.

Is this where we're headed? From virtual "friends" to inanimate lovers? Are these pathetic guys objectifying women, feminizing mannequins, or just de-humanizing themselves? Are they the front edge of a trend, related to what Kendal described as the decline of real face-to-face intimacy as evidenced by youngsters who prefer to exchange text messages to spoken words, even when they are side-by-side? Or, let us hope, are they aberrations who will scare the rest of us back into line?

For the moment, I don't know what else to say about this. It's stunning and disturbing, and I'm still half-expecting it to turn out to have been a hoax. "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?"