gay or straight

Bonjour,

It’s that time of year again:

ily,

Writer: Natasha 
Editor: Deana and Miranda

Polygon is bringing India (yes, the country) onchain.

This week a company called 1x opened pre-orders for their humanoid robot called NEO.

The 10-minute campaign video showcases the robot’s capabilities, which include cleaning your house, loading the dishwasher, bringing in groceries, and more, all for the low, low price of $500 per month (or $20,000).

What became clear pretty quickly is that, at the moment, NEO is almost entirely operated by a remote, human agent.

As is customary, the meme factory got to work. And the timeline was littered with posts ranging from “this is the future, buckle up” to takes that could only be described as unserious. One tweet might have managed to do both.

This brand-new question, and others like it (see: the ethics of AI companions), are being debated and decided in real time, both on the timeline and in product meetings at the companies building LLMs.

The digital discourse around these topics is the guiding force in defining what’s socially appropriate, marking new and uncharted territory in the moral frameworks surrounding sex and intimacy.

As someone who grew up deeply religious, the moral frameworks that governed sexual ethics were explicit, rigid and, like most of Western society, took their cues from ancient texts interpreted by 40-year-old men.

Funnily enough, it does seem that, once again, the 40-year-old men are calling the shots.

One could make the argument that this is in fact not true, and that we’ve actually been here before with the proliferation of porn and the algorithmic reshaping of intimacy that followed. And to that I would say, let’s hope we do better moving forward.