And there you have it. Just a taste of this episode of Dirty Poetry,

using the word poetry very loosely, of course. Stay with me for all

the rest.

The title of this episode of Dirty

Poetry - Love and Sex With Robots is intended to commemorate the

annual research conference of the same name, Love and Sex With

Robots. Recent advances in electromechanics, artificial intelligence,

speech recognition technology, have changed the nature of our

relationships to our non human, digital entities. This changing

relationship has raised an entirely new set of questions, that have

in turn, created a whole new field of research. Every year,

researchers and technologists come together in the month of November

to talk about these new questions at the annual Love and Sex With

Robots research conference. Some of them are entirely new questions

that we never thought to ask before. Others are old questions that

now have a newfound importance. Questions like, what does it mean to

give and receive pleasure? And what balance do we as humans need

between the two? Our next story examines just that question. Let's

take a listen.

All Dolled Up written by Shawna Hunter

That was All Dolled Up written by Shawna

Hunter. Shawna Hunter is Canadian from Toronto. Her greatest passion

is BDSM. Interrupted only by her passion for writing erotic short

stories. All Dolled Up is from the erotic short story anthology Love

Taps. Published 2020, in print and available at Dirty Poets

Bookstore.

We live in a time when digital

assistants have become ubiquitous. If you don’t have a Siri or

Alexa digital assistant, you probably know someone who does. There

has been a wave of recent advances in artificial intelligence and

speech technology. Among other things, this will soon allow digital

entities to judge your mood from your vocal inflection and delivery,

and to respond accordingly. Our digital assistants will soon become

full fledged digital companions. Couple that with recent advances in

robotics and electromechanics, it becomes possible that for many of

us, our digital companions will be embodied as android companions.

This raises all the questions of the human relationship to our non

human companions to a whole new level of importance.

As fascinating as all these new

developments are, we should recognize that human erotic fascination

and sexual arousal with machines is not new. For example, Washington

state in the US, a man named Edward Smith says that he has had sex

with hundreds of automobiles. Yes, full copulatory sex with hundreds

of automobiles, a few airplanes and even a helicopter. Not to be

concerned though, he has settled down to the quiet domestic life in a

committed, age appropriate relationship with a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle

that he calls the love of his life. And, there are a whole series of

other stories very much like that. Human sexual fascination with

machines has been in the popular culture for a long time. And as

recently as 2021, when the movie Titane received a controversial

award at the Cannes Film festival. Titane is in part, the story of a

woman impregnated by a Cadillac. She lactates a high viscosity motor

oil. And who can forget when Carmen Diaz had sex with a Ferrari in

the 2013 movie The Counselor written by Cormac McCarthy. Those of us

who go back far enough to remember 1996 will remember the blazingly

erotic movie, entitled “Crash” starring James Spader and Holly

Hunter. That also received a very controversial award at the Cannes

Film Festival. The story that movie was based on comes from the 1973

novel written by J. G. Ballard entitled