Nils Goseberg is very worried about the Siti Nurbaya Bridge in Padang. The 80-meter (262-foot) bridge spans the Arau River and anyone fleeing a tsunami would most likely need to cross it.
Goseberg, who works at the Franzius Institute of Hydraulics, Waterways and Coastal Engineering in the northern German city of Hanover, faces a problem that seems borderline absurd: How to evacuate Padang, a city of 800,000 people, in just 20 minutes? … More
Regional winners Europe are Philip Bethge, Rafaela von Bredow and Christian Schwägerl from Germany’s Spiegel magazine, who depict the current revolution in conservation: the discovery of nature as a marketplace. Meticulously researched, the article “The Price of Survival: What Would It Cost to Save Nature?” (SPIEGEL 21/2008) shows how pricetags are being put on corals, rainforests and rare plants for producing food, CO2 sinks and drugs. Our planet may be saved, because “destroying nature will no longer be profitable while protecting it will.”
By Philip Bethge
Emil Wiedenhöft’s bees know their way around the urban jungle. They buzz in, flying around the 71-year-old beekeeper’s head as they carry nectar and pollen to the hive. Then they swarm out again, heading back into the surrounding sea of buildings — a squadron of tiny, striped nectar collectors
“They have to fly out of here at a steep angle to make it over the buildings,” says Wiedenhöft, as he casually wipes one of the bees from his shirt and points up into the air. The gray wall of his apartment building towers over the beekeepers’ patio. Two beehives stand in front of his apartment window.
Wiedenhöft is a beekeeper in Berlin. “Beekeeping in the big city isn’t a problem at all,” says Wiedenhöft, who is retired. He has even managed to convince a few neighbors to take up the hobby. “I’ve trained six beekeepers in the eight years I’ve been living here,” he says, proudly. “A young beekeeper needs a role model.”
Still, despite Wiedenhöft’s efforts, there are too few beekeepers in Germany and, as a result, not enough bees. Experts already fear that the shortfall could have serious consequences for fruit farmers, because the industrious pollen collectors are no longer adequately pollinating their plants. But beekeepers like Wiedenhöft are bucking the trend. The profession, which includes a disproportionately high percentage of older people, is trying to recruit new blood with courses and special offers — especially in cities.
Hundreds of thousands of bees are constantly dashing through the backyards and courtyards of cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich. The densely populated Ruhr region is now home to more bees than the surrounding countryside. Bees are at home on Berlin’s balconies, rooftop terraces and hotel roofs. Bees are also popping up in larger numbers in cities around the world. In London, beehives can be seen on the roof of the Bank of England — honey from the London metropolitan area has even won the first prize at Britain’s National Honey Show. And in Manhattan, “Sheriff Beekeeper” David Graves sells his Rooftop Magic Honey at a premium price.
Armies of Bees
“Cities are ideally suited for bees,” says Jürgen Hans, chairman of Berlin’s beekeepers’ association. There are roughly 500 beekeepers in the German capital alone. Hamburg is home to at least 50 million bees from more than 2,100 bee colonies.
While many city dwellers are likely to gasp at such numbers, the armies of bees are hopeful signs for beekeepers. “The animals develop marvelously in the city, because it’s warmer there than in the countryside,” says Hans, adding that cities offer “a large and constant selection of flowers for bees searching for nectar.” Hans, a beekeeper himself, waxes lyrical about the chestnut, black locust and maple trees lining the streets, and the sweet pea, briar roses and knotgrass on playgrounds.
Hamburg’s trendy Ottensen neighborhood is the ideal place for lively city bees. On this early summer day, for example, beekeeper Georg Petrausch is checking his hives on the roof of the “Motte,” a neighborhood cultural center. “Nice flying weather today,” says the 45-year-old, as he gazes across streets and alleyways flooded with sunlight, the sound of traffic drifting up from the street below. It is a trendy quarter, with Moroccan restaurants across the street and numerous bars where hip urbanites hang out.
Petrausch lights a bundle of hemp straw in a pipe-like device. The beekeeper uses the smoke to calm the insects. Then he carefully removes a bee-covered honeycomb from the hive and opens a few of the hexagonal cells. Petrausch has lovingly dubbed the glistening honey flowing from the cells Ottenser Wildblüte (Ottensen Wildflower).
Bees and Bratwurst
He harvests between 150 and 200 kilos of the sweet stuff a year, often with the help of neighborhood children. A teacher, Petrausch has also founded a beekeeping program for kids. Once a week, young bee enthusiasts meet in the garden of a school nearby where the students handle the honeycombs without protective clothing while bees buzz around their heads.
“I’m not afraid at all anymore,” says 12-year-old Iris, “and the honey we make here also tastes better than honey from the store.”
As enthusiastic as members of the trade are about these young, budding beekeepers, they haven’t prevented the nationwide number from continuing its decline. Today there are only 82,000 beekeepers in Germany, and they manage about 700,000 bee colonies. Experts say this is far too little, and that Germany needs at least a million bee colonies. “The honeybee pollinates 80 percent of our flowering plants,” says Jürgen Tautz of the “Beegroup” at the University of Würzburg in southern Germany. “The loss of bees is a threat to diversity.” Declining bee populations can mean a drop in the numbers and quality of apples, cherries, berries and agricultural crops. Many wild plants also do not reproduce as efficiently without the industrious insects.
To make matters worse, bees are getting more sensitive. Like domestic pigs, they are now overbred, says Tautz, which makes them more susceptible to disease and environmental toxins. Only recently, clothianidine (sold under the commercial name Poncho), a pesticide used to treat seeds, was blamed for the deaths of large numbers of bees in southwestern Germany. The use of monocultures in agriculture is also detrimental to the insects. According to Tautz, “if bees can only find pollen from rapeseed and sunflowers, it’s about as harmful to them as it is for people to eat nothing but bratwurst.”
But the insects’ greatest enemy is a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. It infests the hive, sucks bee “blood” and weakens the entire colony. In the end, the bees are no longer capable of surviving winter. In the winter of 2002, for example, about 30 percent of all bee colonies in Germany died with infestations of these killer mites believed to have been one of the main causes.
Young Beekeepers Needed
Only experienced beekeepers are capable of controlling mite infestation, which is one of the reasons efforts to train new beekeepers are so important to the industry. The beekeeping profession is in rapid decline, with only about a dozen apprentices throughout Germany today. This highlights the importance of hobby beekeepers — about 95 percent of all bee owners — recruiting young people.
The latest trend is beekeeping on a trial basis. Experienced apiarists lease individual colonies to young beekeepers for a year and provide them with advice and support. At the end of this trial year, the young beekeepers can opt to continue or return the bees.
“We had 11 new beekeepers in our club last year,” says “bee godfather” Peter Schömbs of Berlin’s Zehlendorf Beekeeping Club, “and 10 of them decided to stay.” The 65-year-old trained Bert Kleinlosen. Although Kleinlosen is 58 himself, the bearded novice is, oddly enough, considered a young beekeeper. Beekeeping clubs are firmly in the hands of the 60 and old generation. Anyone who can bring down the average age is more than welcome.
In Berlin’s Schmargendorf neighborhood, experienced and novice beekeepers work side-by-side. Together they make small frames for the honeycombs, hunt down mites or prevent the bees from swarming. This happens when the beehive becomes too crowded and the queen escapes with part of the colony. Recapturing the swarm is an arduous task.
When bees swarm, they congregate in large groups in trees or on lampposts, as they search for a new place to start a hive. The mere sight of such a large concentration of bees leads many a city dweller to question the wisdom of urban beekeeping. What happens if the poisonous insects decide to sting, after all? Bee stings can be dangerous, even life-threatening to people who are allergic.
‘Don’t Try This Yourself’
“When people and bees begin living in closer quarters, the incidence of allergies automatically rises,” says Munich allergist Bernhard Przybilla. Wolfgang Sieger, an internist from the Bavarian town of Wörth an der Donau, warns “every beekeeper should find out if there are people who are allergic to bees living nearby.” But, Sieger adds, the problem isn’t as dire as some might believe, because only about one in every 100 people is allergic to bees. Compared to wasps, says Sieger, bees are “a very peaceful species.”
Beekeepers feel the same way. For decades, they have been trying to breed gentleness into these industrious insects. Apis mellifera carnica, or Carniolan bees, are the result of this ongoing breeding effort. “It’s the ideal city bee,” says Benedikt Polaczek, a bee researcher at the Free University of Berlin, “it’ll only sting if I try to turn it into a postage stamp.”
Polaczek, who has been keeping bees for 40 years, teaches university courses for beekeepers and regularly hosts groups of schoolchildren and even kindergarten classes. Recently, the 51-year-old bee expert was showing the youngsters how to extract honey. Using a tool called a frame lifter, he opened the cells of a honeycomb and then placed it into a honey extractor. The device uses centrifugal force to extract the sweet, amber-colored liquid from the wax.
“City honey has an outstanding aroma,” said the beekeeper, and gave his young visitors a taste. “And besides, it’s very clean, because they don’t spray pesticides as much in the city.” Then the researcher showed the children his hives. Using his hand, he carefully brushed several dozen worker bees from a honeycomb. The agitated animals crawled around on his fingers.
“Look, the bees are completely peaceful,” says Polaczek. But before his guests left, he gave them a bit of advice: “Just don’t try this yourself.”
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
The envoy from Europe can hardly believe his eyes. Butterflies the size of dessert plates are fluttering around his nose. Orchids hang in cascades from towering trees. Hornbills sail across the treetops. The tropical air is filled with the saturated scent of growth and proliferation.
Biologists have already tracked down more than 10,000 plant and 400 mammal species in the Congo basin. These plants and animals are part of the world’s second-largest uninterrupted rainforest, one of the planet’s most potent carbon storage systems. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that Hans Schipulle, 63, is tramping around in the wilderness near the Sangha River on a humid morning in the Central African Republic.
“This forest stores carbon dioxide, and thus helps to slow down global warming. It regulates the global water supply and holds valuable pharmaceuticals,” says Schipulle, a veteran environmentalist who works for the German government. “We must finally realize that these are services that are worth something to us.”
Schipulle is in the region on a sensitive mission. Since December, he has headed the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a group founded by Americans, Europeans and the countries along the Congo River. The alliance aims to prevent the Congo basin from being plundered and transformed into oil palm and coffee plantations by mid-century. The Congo rainforest is still largely in one piece, but investors from around the world have already discovered the region’s potential for big business — ore, diamonds, plantations and lumber. But Schipulle and his partners have other plans for the Congo basin. They want international financial institutions or the world community to fork over money to preserve the rainforest as it is today. The threat of clear-cutting poses a double risk for the world. First, destroying the Congo rainforest would eliminate one of the earth’s most important cooling systems. Second, the carbon dioxide (CO2) released as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture would further accelerate global warming.
Sometimes the solutions to humanity’s problems are only a mouse click away. “How do you feed half a billion people in the desert?” a graphic on the Web site of the Africa Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) project asks. The answer it proposes is: “Super Sorghum!” “Grow it!” the Web site, sponsored by a consortium of the agricultural industry and the scientific community, suggests succinctly. A happy, smiling child … More
The magic lies in the squinting eyes of the fox; she turns her head slightly away from the younger animal next to her, irritated and yet full of affection.
Like a queen she tolerates being humbled by the others. Her muzzle is still closed, and it looks like she could yawn at any moment. But this is where Dirk Opalka’s devotion ends. “I had to do them over,” Opalka, 40, says, referring to the yellow eyes of the fox, “they were seated wrong — and then the clay in the eyelids slid too.”
Opalka is an animal taxidermist. His mission could almost be called religious: He is seeking life in death. “The animal must look very much alive, that’s the secret,” says the man from Fuhlendorf, near Rostock, the German Baltic sea port. His great act of creation took eight weeks — and it paid off. Opalka has won a world championship of a particularly bizarre kind.
The World Taxidermy Championships came to an end on Sunday in Salzburg, Austria. One-hundred-forty participants from 25 countries had flooded into Salzburg, the city of Mozart, to find out who could best preserve the nostril of a stag, most perfectly model the lips of a hyena, or color the anal opening of a common pipistrelle (a small bat) the rosiest shade possible. Over 500 dead animals transformed a Salzburg exhibition center into the deck of a Noah’s Ark of absurdities — full of lifeless passengers.
(—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)
Animal cadavers are the objects of this eccentric craft; freezers, scalpels and de-greasing liquid the tools. And the craft unifies this unsettling passion with a nearly devout obsession for preserving the beauty of nature beyond death.
“Taxidermy is not just a craft, it’s an art,” says Larry Blomquist, the American doyen of taxidermists and organizer of the competition, which has taken place in Europe for the first time. “I am thrilled with the quality we get to see here.”
Practiced as far back as ancient Egypt, the art of taxidermy gained popularity in the 19th century when it became a way to preserve the trophies of colonial hunting societies. Today taxidermy — the preparing, stuffing and mounting of skin — is a multi-million-dollar business, especially in the United States, where it is estimated that 50,000 taxidermists preserve hunting trophies and other animals for American living rooms.
Germany’s national association brings together around 260 biological taxidermists. There are professionals like former world champion Berend Koch, who has created a menagerie at the Technical University in Darmstadt that is highly esteemed in the field. But above all there are the self-employed, who fervently bathe bagged does in polyethylene glycol or give deceased ducks new dark brown eyes, diameter 9 millimeters (0.35 inches), from the German company KL-Glasaugen (KL-Glass Eyes).
Measured against the World’s Best
They have all come to Salzburg, to this high-performance show of animal preservation, in order to measure themselves against the best in the world. The contest is carried out by people in outdoor clothes, whose greatest joy is pulling the pelt of an alpine marmot or a white-tailed deer over its head.
Rewind to two weeks earlier, and Dirk Grundler is preparing for the Salzburg event at his taxidermy workshop in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. His workshop has a low ceiling, and the carpeted floor is littered with hair and spare bits of foam. Paint brushes, forceps, resins, dyes, hairsprays and varnishes complete the chaos. It’s a whimsical zoo: magpies with fluttering wings, frozen in motion, dance on the floor; on the ceiling flies a huge raven. Alongside it are a bearded tit, a hoopoe and a large, black-billed Capercaillie.
“That one comes from Lake Baikal (in Russia),” says Grundler, 43. With a full beard, gray vest and sturdy build, he doesn’t look like a man who deals in fine motor skills. But his daily bread does indeed consist of detail work. “I only preserve birds,” says Grundler. He operates according to the motto: emptied and feathered. He skins the birds, cuts bodies out of polyurethane foam and sprays the legs with formalin (“so they don’t shrivel,” he explains). Then he molds the skin over the artificial body. As a final step, he applies a substance to protect the bird from insects. Any “naked areas of skin” are colored in with an airbrush.
The expertise of a taxidermist is vast. That’s the only way the work can succeed, says Grundler. He knows bird anatomy like the back of his hand. Neck length? “Female peregrine falcon 5.5 centimeters, mallard duck 19, ringed teal nine,” he says, ticking off data.
“It calls for the greatest possible perfection,” explains Grundler, who is self-taught in the profession. “You have to know: How does the bird look in nature? How would it move? For example, if a pheasant looks to the side, it gets a very certain kind of swing in its neck.”
The birds for Salzburg are already sitting ready in two boxes. Grundler wants to enter the most challenging division for the first time. Among his taxidermic preparations are a peregrine falcon, a kingfisher with iridescent blue plumage and an eagle owl, at least half a meter long. And where do all the animals come from? “All bred,” affirms the taxidermist, “anything else would be illegal.”
This is one of the basic problems faced by taxidermists: Exotic species are both a challenge and a curse. It’s not difficult to find someone preserving a freshly shot lion for a big game hunter. Indeed, taxidermists argue that without hunting tourism, many species would be worse off than they already are. But what are people supposed to make of a person like Ron from Texas, who bags a leopard, stuffs it and then says: “I just love being able to take something that’s lifeless and give it life again, make it look like it was, you know, out there in the wild”?
Still, whether it’s a tiger, a macaw or a Komodo dragon, taxidermy is all about high art. The work of Ken Walker, a Canadian who specializes in creating taxidermic representations of extinct species, is legendary. At the 2005 world championship, he wowed the crowds with an Irish Elk — a species that died out more than 7,500 years ago. To reconstruct the animal, Walker sewed together the skins of three stags.
More Obssessive than a Model Train Enthusiast
And then there’s Matthias Fahrni of Switzerland — a luminary in the art of fish taxidermy. “Since childhood” he has been obsessed with fish, says the taxidermist. “It is probably a genetic defect,” he jokes. Fahrni almost exclusively preserves scaled fish smaller than 15 centimeters. When it comes to his fastidiousness in terms of detail, he even outdoes model train builders.
With miniature scalpels and instruments used for eye surgery, Fahrni removes the fish skin with its scales still intact. Then, like anatomist Gunther von Hagens, creator of the “Body Worlds” exhibits of human bodies, he pumps in plastic. For the head, he keeps the original. The last step is to color the fish: living animals provide the model. “A fish changes its color and the expression of the eyes in the first five minutes after death,” says Fahrni. For this reason, he has developed a technique of anesthetizing the animal he wants to observe.
Fahrni has brought a bullhead and a perch to Salzburg and they rest, effectively lit, among the other mortal remains. A pair of men, their eyes hidden behind thick magnifying glasses, bend over the fish, whispering to one another. They are the jurors, designated experts who assign the points here.
And the Winner Is …
Further away, among the preserved deer, American Joe Meder shines a flashlight into the nostrils of a stag. The last fern of its life dangles from the animal’s mouth. Meanwhile, Peter Sunesen bends over a lilac-breasted roller. “This bird has problems with its anatomy,” deems the Danish judge. For this, points are deducted.
Or take Dieter Schön of Munich’s Museum of Man and Nature. The 46-year-old taxidermist was responsible for preserving Bruno, the brown bear shot in Bavaria in 2006. Now his critical eye falls on an Eversmann’s hamster. “The whiskers are very good,” Schön says to Berend Koch. But he is skeptical: “The body is far too compacted — the animal looks half starved to death.”
So what is taxidermy? Is it a morbid plundering of bodies or a celebration of the high art of life? It is the contrast between the loving devotion of the taxidermists and the macabre slaughterhouse atmosphere that simultaneously unsettles and fascinates.
At the end of the event, the taxidermists stock up on plastic bear tongues and artificial lion’s teeth at the exposition stands. Dirk Grundler is satisfied: For his kingfisher, he receives 88 out of 100 possible points. The jury also agrees on 96 points for Opalka’s fox, the overall winner.
“This entry captures the essence of the moment,” says Larry Blomquist, running his hand devoutly over the fox’s red fur. “You hardly ever get to see something like this in nature.”
By Philip Bethge
Andy, whose measurements are 101-56-86 centimeters (40-22-34 inches), has what many men want in a woman: “unlimited patience.” At least that’s what the manufacturer, a company called First Androids based in Neumarkt near the southern German city of Nürnberg, promises. Andy also comes with options, including a “blowjob system, with adjustable levels,” a “tangible pulse,” “rotating hip motion” and a “heating system with adjustable controls” to raise the body temperature.
“Except in the feet — they remain cold, just like in real life,” says David Levy. The British scientist’s interest in Andy is purely academic, he insists. For Levy, his high-tech sex doll is nothing less than a harbinger of a new world order.
Levy is an expert in artificial intelligence. He is fascinated with the idea of “love and sex with robots,” and his visions of the future include “malebots” and “fembots” as lovers and life partners. A chess champion and the president of the International Computer Games Association, Levy, 62, has just published a book, “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships” — that is provocative in the truest sense of the word. He is convinced that human beings will be having sex with robots one day. They will show us sexual practices that we hadn’t even imagined existed. We will love them and respect them, and we will entrust them with our most intimate secrets. All of this, says Levy, will be a reality in hardly more than 40 years from now.
Read original story at SPIEGEL Online International —>
“The mere concept of an artificial partner, husband, wife, friend or lover is one that, for most people at the start of the 21st century, challenges their notion of relationships,” says Levy. “But my thesis is this: Robots will be hugely attractive to humans as companions because of their many talents, senses and capabilities.” Given rapid developments in technology, Levy believes that it is only a matter of time before machines will be capable of offering human-like traits. According to Levy, “love and sex with robots on a grand scale are inevitable.”
The idea of love involving androids isn’t exactly new. In Greek mythology, the sculptor Pygmalion makes an ivory statue of his ideal woman. He prays to the goddess of love Aphrodite to bring the statue, which he has named Galatea, to life. Aphrodite agrees to help him and when Pygmalion kisses Galatea, she returns the kiss and the two marry.
The same thing could soon be happening with robots. Levy already sees signs of budding robophilia wherever he looks. According to Levy, the appeal of Sony’s Aibo robot dog and of Furby, a toy robot that looks like a ball of fur with appendages, and a built-in computer circuit board, shows the potential for technology to serve as a sounding board for human emotions. “Nowadays, it is relatively commonplace for people to develop strong emotional attachments to their virtual pets, including robot pets,” says Levy. “So why should anyone be surprised if and when people form similarly strong attachments to virtual people, to robot people?”
Even simple computers exert an almost magical attraction on some people. The dedication in Levy’s book reads: “To Anthony, an MIT-student who tried having girlfriends but found that he preferred relationships with computers. And to all the other ‘Anthonys’ past, present, and future, of both sexes.” What will computer nerds say when they can play with computers that move, talk, look like people and could possibly even experience emotions?
When it comes to sex, robots could soon supplant the original flesh-and-blood human experience, says Levy. The researcher has delved deep into the history of erotic machinery to document Homo sapiens’ susceptibility to mechanical sex toys. He discovered documented evidence of early vibrators powered by clockwork mechanisms and steam machines. Levy describes a pedal-driven masturbation machine for women designed in 1926 by engineers in the German city of Leipzig. In a late 17th-century pornographic anthology from Japan, the author read about a “lascivious traveling pillow.” The artificial vulva, known as “azumagata” (substitute woman) in Japanese, was made of tortoiseshell and had a hole lined with satin.
Dutch seamen shared their bunks on their globe-trotting trading journeys with hand-sewn leather puppets, which explains why the Japanese still refer to sex dolls as “Dutch wives” today — although today’s version is no longer made of leather. The Japanese company Orient Industry sells female dolls that are near-perfect replicas of young Japanese women — down to the tips of their hair and consistency of their skin. The company’s success is based on an earlier model known as “Antarctica,” a doll scientists used to take along to Japan’s Showa research station to keep warm during the long Antarctic winter.
The US company RealDoll, the market leader in the business of life-like sex dolls, sells its “Leah” and Stephanie” models for $6,500 apiece. Customers can order the dolls with bra sizes ranging from 65A (30AA) to 75H (34F). Each doll comes with three “pleasure portals.” Another model, “Charlie” even comes with a penis in various sizes, as well as an optional “anal entry.”
Are these all just erotic toys designed for the occasional quickie? Not at all, says Hideo Tsuchiya, the president of Orient Industry. “A Dutch wife is not merely a doll, or an object,” he insists. “She can be an irreplaceable lover, who provides a sense of emotional healing.”
Levy has a similar take on the issue. But will robotic women and men resemble humans so closely within a few decades that they will pass as an equivalent or even better alternative to a human lover?
Mimicking human appearance seems to be the least of the challenges. Two years ago, Japanese robot expert Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled his “Repliee Q1” robot. The awkward name is misleading. Ishiguro’s creation can easily pass as the first robot woman in human history. Thanks to 42 actuators driven by compressed air, the gynoid can “turn and react in a humanlike way,” says Levy. “Repliee Q1 can flutter her eyelids, she appears to breathe, she can move her hands just like a human, (and) she is responsive to human touch…,” he adds enthusiastically.
Much more difficult than external traits, however, will be the challenging of breathing something approaching a soul into the robots. The biggest stumbling blocks are some of the most fundamental of human behaviors. Current robotic sensors, for example, are incapable of reliably distinguishing between individual people, says Levy. He concedes that if a robot fails to recognize its partner, or possibly even confuses him or her with someone else, the relationship is easily ruined.
Nevertheless, Levy predicts that advances will come rapidly. For Levy, imbuing robots with such human traits as empathy, humor, understanding and love is merely a question of technology. Empathy, for example, is “essentially a learning task,” he says, and therefore “relatively easy to implement in robots.” All the machine has to do is observe its partner, make intelligent assumptions about the partner’s thoughts and react accordingly.
Levy sees a future in which artificial intelligence will enable robots to behave as if they had gone through the entire spectrum of human experience, without this actually being the case. He cites emotions as an example. “If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not,” he asks? “If a robot’s artificial emotions prompt it to say things such as ‘I love you,’ surely we should be willing to accept these statements at face value, provided that the robots other behavior patterns back them up.”
Levy finds the advantages of artificial companions over human partners appealing. Infidelity, moodiness, poor taste, poor hygiene, an unhealthy obsession with soccer — all of these relationship difficulties would be resigned to the dustbin of history. Robotic partners would even be immortal. Levy envisions backing up the entire personality of his androids on hard disks. If a robot is destroyed, it’ll be easy to order a new one.
And the sex! Always willing, never disappointed, goodbye migraines — and with the dirtiest possible fantasies available for download. A robot could be programmed to offer “sexual positions and techniques from around the world” or placed in “‘teaching mode’ for the sexual novice,” says Levy. Everything from vagina dimensions to penis size, body scent to facial hair could be available as options.
“Imagine a world in which robots are (almost) just like us,” says Levy. “The effect on society will be enormous.” He also addresses the potential ethical and moral issues in the days after the great robot invasion. Will it be unethical to lend sexbots to friends or, for instance, “using a friend’s sexbot without telling the friend?” Will it be permissible to deceive androids? What will husbands do when their wives tell them: “Not tonight darling, I’m going to make it with the robot?”
Levy is convinced that women, in particular, after initial misgivings, will welcome robots as an alternative to their sweaty husbands. The fact that their sexual appetites often go well beyond the mediocre performance of many men is reflected in the “staggering sales figures” for vibrators, says Levy.
And the men? Well, as far they’re concerned, all the fuss about artificial intelligence is wasted energy.
Men are willing to “have sex with inflatable dolls,” says Henrik Christensen, the coordinator of the European Robotics Research Network. It’ll be easy to do one better than that. According to Christensen, “anything that moves will be an improvement.”
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Indian and Bangladeshi fishermen appeal to Bonobibi, the goddess of the forest, before they set out into the swamps. They also send their prayers to heaven to placate Daksin Ray, the tiger god.
But no amount of prayer can deter the Bengal tiger. People are killed by tigers almost weekly in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, located in the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers. The region is one of the last refuges for Bengal tigers. Though still the masters of the forest, a gas could prove to be the tigers’ undoing. The gas is called carbon dioxide, and it’s warming the earth. … More