Femme Bots

I'm not sure which is worse: the fantasy of a subservient female sexbot, or a real life mechanical assembly machine reported to have a "feminine touch".

Australian inventor Peter Hill has created machines for his factory that are modeled after the female brain:

These ‘Fembots’ are experts at multi-tasking, a skill in which women have long claimed superiority over men. But the female traits don’t end there. These robots also have a gentle touch and they talk all day as they work. And amazingly the father of the Fembots taught himself how to create these new robot brains.

Uhuh. Because we all know ladies talk more than men.....

Men's and women's brains are more similar then they are divergent. Yet, the media loves any story that feeds the myth that men and women are hard wired to behave differently. Whether it's using more words, having better depth perception, or being bad at math these stereotypes only further cement the notion of a rigid gender binary by trying to give them some sort of scientific weight. It's like trying to find the tag line "boys will be boys" written in the human gnome.

It's nice that someone is taking an interest in creating a mechanical helpmate based on a slightly different thought model. But it disturbs me that we're still carving up basic human traits that we should all posses into feminine and masculine.

You can read the full story here.