ROBOTS: Would You Date A Robot?

December 14, 2021

Today we travel to a future where we can take a robot home for a good time, or a long time, depending on what you’re into.

Content note: today’s episode discusses sex and includes explicit language. This one is more “mature” than most episodes, so proceed accordingly.

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Guests:

Tina Horn: author of SFSX (Volume 2 out now) and host of Why Are People Into That?
Danielle Blunt: dominatrix and community organizer with Hacking//Hustling
Samantha Floreani: Program Lead at Digital Rights Watch
Ingrid Burrington: journalist and host of RIP Corp
Dr. Debbie Chachra: professor of engineering at Olin College
Render Man: hacker & founder of the Internet of Dongs

Voice Actors:

Rachael Deckard: Richelle Claiborne
Brad: Brent Rose
Halimah: Zahra Noorbakhsh
Malik: Henry Alexander Kelly
Summer: Shara Kirby
Ashoka: Anjali Kunapaneni
Eliza: Chelsey B Coombs
Dorothy Levitt: Tamara Krinsky
John Dee: Keith Houston
Dr. Marcia Eckers: Andrea Silenzi

Original X Marks the Bot theme music by Ilan Blanck.

Further Reading:

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That’s all for this future, come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

transcripts provided by Emily White at The Wordary

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FLASH FORWARD
S7E17 – “ROBOTS: Would You Date A Robot?”

[Flash Forward intro music – “Whispering Through” by Asura, an electronic, rhythm-heavy piece]

ROSE EVELETH:
Hello and welcome to Flash Forward! I’m Rose and I’m your host. Flash Forward is a show about the future. This is the second-to-last episode of the show and I really hope that you will join us at the party we’re having on Friday, December 17th. That is this coming Friday. Go to FlashForwardPod.com/Events to sign up and I will send you a link to join the party on Friday.

Every episode we take on a specific possible, or not-so-possible, future scenario. We always start with a little field trip into the future to check out what is going on, and then we teleport back to today to talk to experts about how that world we just heard might really go down. Got it? Great!

Just a quick content note, today we are talking about sex and there is some cursing, so proceed accordingly.

This episode we’re starting in the year 2042.

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[retro ‘80s-style poppy techno beat; robot voice sings “X Marks the Bot”]

RACHAEL DECKARD:
Good evening, and welcome to X Marks the Bot! Last time, three teams won the battle… but will they win the war? And we said goodbye to Team Reboot after one of their members went AWOL. Tonight, in the third round of our four-part competition, the remaining teams will experience a fatal bot-traction. Welcome, to the bot-light!

Seriously, who is writing these?

[transitional theme music]

Tonight, your challenge is to design a seductive robot that our guest judge would choose to go on a second date with.

HALIMA:
Uh oh.

BRAD:
Yeah, going on a date with a robot is not exactly my ideal challenge…

HALIMA:
It’s kind of the opposite of our whole… hating-robots thing.

ASHOKA:
How are we supposed to know if the judge wants to go on a second date?

ELIZA:
I hope they’re going to give more specific criteria.

RACHAEL:
Our guest judge this week is celebrity sex therapist Dr. Marcia Eckers! You know her from her hit TV show Dr. Marcia, as well as her award-winning podcast, You Want Me To Do WHAT!? Welcome, Dr. Marcia.

DR. MARCIA ECKERS:
So excited to be here.

[applause]

RACHAEL:
The criteria for this challenge are as follows. Your robots will each have an hour to impress our guest judge on their date. Each robot must be able to carry on a conversation with Dr. Marcia that leaves her wanting more. Finally, at the end of the date, Dr. Marcia will judge your robots’ kissing ability.

MALIK:
Listen, man, I’m all about the love, but… this seems weird.

SUMMER:
What if the robot doesn’t want to kiss her?

RACHAEL:
Dr. Marcia, tell us what you’ll be looking for to decide if you want to go on a second date.

DR. MARCIA:
Well, I always say, chemistry is key. I want to feel that connection with your robot, a spark, so to speak. It’s sort of ineffable, but you know it when you see it.

RACHAEL:
Everybody got it? Think swiping right, all that jazz. You’ll have 5 hours to design and build your robot. Your time starts… NOW!

[transition music plays]

[everyone running around, parts clattering, power tools and tinkering]

RACHAEL:
So, Team X, you’ve been doing well in the competition so far. I’m sure you feel like you have this one in the bag.

ELIZA:
Not exactly.

RACHAEL:
No?

ASHOKA:
The parameters are pretty vague. We don’t know anything about Dr. Marcia, so we don’t know what she likes, which means we don’t know how to design something she likes.

DR. MARCIA:
Ah, well, would you like to ask me some questions?

ELIZA:
Yes, please. What would make you want to go on a second date?

DR. MARCIA:
Oh, well that’s hard to answer. The experience on the first date would have to feel special.

ELIZA:
In what way?

DR. MARCIA:
I guess, at the very least, I’d want to feel like the other person was interested in me, and listening to what I had to say. I want them to add a kind of… complementary energy? So, not exactly like me, but on a similar wavelength.

ELIZA:
Can you be more specific?

DR. MARCIA:
Like if I were to make a joke about The Bachelor, I’d want my date to be able to follow up with a complementary joke.

ASHOKA:
Ah, I understand, thank you. Let’s get to work.

RACHAEL:
Okay… we’ll leave you to it.

ELIZA:
You understand what she was saying?

ASHOKA:
No, but I have a plan.

RACHAEL:
Let’s check in on Team Rust in Peace! How are your plans coming along?

HALIMA (sarcastically):
Oh yes, our robot is designed to sense and respond to human needs.

BRAD (sarcastically):
It does exactly what you want it to do and it can’t do anything else.

DR. MARCIA (earnestly):
Fascinating. What does this do?

HALIMA:
That’s the emergency self-destruct switch.

DR. MARCIA:
Oh… well then.

HALIMA:
Don’t worry, it’s going to have a lot of other features, too!

RACHAEL:
Just remember, the goal here is: Romance!

RACHAEL:
Moving on to Team Solarpunk. What can we expect from the two of you today?

SUMMER:
This is probably the hardest challenge for us. We’re really builders, not coders so much.

MALIK:
I’m great in conversation, but not great in coding conversation.

RACHAEL:
Well, good luck.

DR. MARCIA:
I certainly look forward to meeting whoever emerges from all this scrap metal!

RACHAEL:
Dr. Marcia, I have to ask… Would you ever date a robot in real life?

DR. MARCIA:
Oh, been there, done that! I find it’s not the material that makes the person, but the person that must decide what to do with the material they’re given, wouldn’t you agree?

I discuss it all in my book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like An Android.

RACHAEL:
And, that brings us to… TIME! Please put down your tools and join me in the green room. We’ll leave your robots here for their dates!

[theme music plays]

All right, contestants. It’s time to see how deep your love really is. Lock the door, turn the lights down low, and let’s see what these robots can do.

Team Solarpunk, you’re up first.

MALIK:
We spent pretty much the whole time trying to cobble together a basic conversation thing. I wound up using something I found in a code library, but it was French, and honestly, I have no idea if it will even work.

[romantic piano and harp music plays]

DR. MARCIA:
Hello there. It’s nice to meet you.

ROBOT:
Hello. Hello. Nice weather.

DR. MARCIA:
Yes, quite nice.

ROBOT:
Faire des galipettes?

DR. MARCIA:
Excuse me?

ROBOT:
Faire des pirouettes sur le nombril?

SUMMER:
Malik, what is it saying?

MALIK:
I don’t know. I don’t speak French.

DR. MARCIA:
Oh, I do and… it’s cutting right to the chase, shall we say? A frisky little robot indeed.

SUMMER:
And is that… good?

DR. MARCIA:
Sure! I like it. Who has time for small talk?

RACHAEL:
Uh… Okay… Unclear if we need to censor some of those phrases but… shall we move on to the kiss test? So… uh… please go ahead when you’re ready.

DR. MARCIA:
My pleasure.

[smooching sounds]

JOHN DEE (awkward):
This is genuinely very uncomfortable to watch.

RACHAEL:
Okay, well! That seems like enough, Dr. Marcia, if you’ll deliver your verdict?

DR. MARCIA:
I’ll certainly be seeing that robot in Paris later.

RACHAEL:
I don’t know what that means, and I’m not going to ask. So let’s move on to Team X!

DR. MARCIA:
Hello there. Nice to meet you.

ROBOT:
Nice to meet you as well. What is your name?

DR. MARCIA:
Marcia. And you?

ROBOT:
My name is X.

DR. MARCIA:
Nice to meet you, X.

ROBOT (interrupts):
Would you like to go on a second date?

DR. MARCIA (laughing):
Well, very direct! You know what, I admire the confidence! Sure.

SUMMER (a bit incredulous):
I cannot believe that worked.

ELIZA:
It was a risk, but we did not have enough information to actually achieve believable romantic conversation and write an algorithm in the limited time provided.

RACHAEL:
Dr. Marcia, I believe it is now time for the kiss test for Team X.

[smooching sounds]

RACHAEL:
Well?

DR. MARCIA:
Not bad! I’ll see you for our second date.

RACHAEL:
Rust in Peace, you’re up!

DR. MARCIA:
Hello there. Nice to meet you.

ROBOT:
Oh, the pleasure is all mine. I do have to ask, how do you feel about robots?

DR. MARCIA:
Oh, I quite like them!

ROBOT:
Ah, not me… I find them quite distasteful.

DR. MARCIA:
But aren’t you a robot?

ROBOT:
It’s true… and thus you can perhaps understand that I am a tortured soul who could use some help. Perhaps you can guide me toward happiness?

HALIMA:
Our theory is that women can’t resist a project.

BRAD:
This is all Halima. I want no blame or credit for this.

HALIMA:
Look, I’m sorry, but it’s true. We love a tortured, gentle soul.

ROBOT:
And, I might add… I do have an easy off switch.

HALIMA:
I’m telling you, this is literally all women want, affection and an off switch.

DR. MARCIA:
Well, that’s quite enticing. A tortured soul… poor thing could use a bit of guidance.

RACHAEL:
So what do you say, Dr. Marcia, are you going on a second date?

DR. MARCIA:
Oh, absolutely.

RACHAEL:
Well then, I think it’s time to kiss!

DR. MARCIA:
My pleasure.

[zap]

Ow! Fuck! What the hell?

HALIMA (cackling):
Don’t kiss robots! You can’t trust them!!!!

RACHAEL:
Dr. Marcia, are you okay??

DR. MARCIA:
Yes… I think so. Can I rescind my offer for a second date?

RACHAEL:
I think that would be perfectly reasonable.

BRAD:
No, I did not know that Halima had programmed our robot to shock the judge.

HALIMA:
Gotta keep the people on their toes, okay? I have no regrets.

RACHAEL:
Well, with that we’ll go to judging….

[transitional theme music plays]

Well, that was… exciting, wasn’t it?

DOROTHY:
Indeed, not quite what I was expecting, I don’t think.

JOHN:
A real mess out there.

RACHAEL:
Let’s do the highlights, the good stuff.

DOROTHY:
I was surprised by Team X’s strategy, but I suppose it worked.

DR. MARCIA:
They certainly had the best kissing robot.

JOHN:
Team Solarpunk was a bit of a mess out there. But it could have been worse.

RACHAEL:
Speaking of… I think it’s fair to say we know who’s going home this week?

DOROTHY:
Unfortunately, yes. I was quite impressed with the conversational element of Rust in Peace’s robot, but…

JOHN:
You cannot shock our guest judge! I mean… that was incredibly dangerous.

RACHAEL:
Right, well let’s bring the teams back out.

[theme plays]

Well teams, that was certainly something. I’m not sure I’m feeling the love tonight, but… we got through it? And I think it’s probably obvious to everybody that the team going home is the team that put our illustrious guest judge in harm’s way. Team Rust in Peace, please surrender your soldering irons and whatever zapping stuff you have left.

HALIMA:
Don’t trust robots. That’s all I have to say.

BRAD:
Also, please don’t sue us, Dr. Marcia. We’ll buy all your books, I promise.

RACHAEL:
And that means that next week we have our season finale! Team X and Team Solarpunk will battle it out for the title of X Marks the Bot Ultimate Robot Champion. Until next time!

[theme music plays and fades out]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
Okay, so maybe you saw this coming. If we’re going to do a robots mini-series, we’re going to revisit the sex robot thing. This is a topic that we’ve discussed on the show before; we’ve talked about everything from the warranties on these devices, whether you can repair them yourself, what the home storage situation looks like (do you have a closet for this thing?). How long can it hold a charge? And today, we’re going to talk about a few additional interesting – in my opinion – angles on the sex robot question.

But the first thing I think we have to do is actually define sex robot.

TINA HORN:
A sex robot is any machine that is either designed for sex or used for sex, even if it wasn’t designed specifically for sex.

ROSE:
This is Tina Horn, a sex educator, author and creator of the comic book series, Safe Sex, the second book of which is out now. Tina is also the host of a podcast called Why Are People Into That?! which answers… exactly that question.

And this definition of a sex robot, a robot that you can have sex with, might sound obvious. But I think it’s worth pausing to define this here because the phrase ‘sex robots’ really has a tendency to make people kind of freak out. But what exactly pushes something over from a sex toy to a sex robot? Tina says that it has something to do with interactivity.

TINA:
Like, you can interact with a sex doll, I suppose, but it’s like a little one-sided if it’s just, like, lying there prostrate, right? But yeah, the interactivity of the robotresponding to, like having responses and responding to input, so to speak… there are going to be so many puns to fall into here.

ROSE:
Today, already, there are sex toys that are programmed to “learn what you like” and replicate the specific pressure or vibration or movement. They are not super effective, but that is the theory behind them. There are also VR sexual experiences, some of which are connected to a sex toy of some kind. In the near future, it’s easy to imagine that you might have a device at home and then log in to a website where you could meet a virtual avatar, maybe even a deepfake, and have an interaction in which that digital character is making the device that you are using do things to you. Is that a sex robot? There aren’t humans involved, it’s all algorithm, and silicone, and data.

TINA:
My definition of a sex robot is that it’s a very advanced sex toy. One of the things that I imagine would be appealing about having a sex robot is the same thing that I find appealing about my favorite vibrator, which is that I don’t have to care what my vibrator thinks about our time together.

DANIELLE BLUNT:
When I was thinking about, like, what we would be talking about for this podcast, I have this very elaborate Turing Test torture scene that I really want to do in my work as a professional dominatrix. I was thinking, like, “Oh, it could involve a sex robot. It could involve like a sex robot version of me, and my client has to like, tell the difference.” And we can, like, play tricks on him. And I think it would be super fun.

ROSE:
This is Danielle Blunt.

BLUNT:
I go by Blunt. I am a co-founder and organizer of Hacking Hustling, which is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice.

ROSE:
And Blunt says that if you really want a sex robot to be designed well, to go beyond just a device that you can have sex with and actually into the realm of some kind of human-adjacent experience, you have to think about more than just the physical mechanics.

BLUNT:
So much of the labor is maintaining client relationships. And I don’t think that sex work has to involve emotional labor, but oftentimes it does. And oftentimes, the emotional labor that I’m asked to do in work is just as laborious as, like, physical sexual labor that I’m doing.

ROSE:
This is the ineffable quality of human interaction that robots aren’t that good at replicating.

BLUNT:
And I think that what sex workers are so skilled at is creating a space for you to feel attuned to, and holding this space for your sexual desires to happen. And I think what’s also so magical about the space that sex workers hold is that it’s just so rare to have a space to articulate what your desire is and have space for it to be met.

ROSE:
Just like we’re really far away from having an autonomous killing machine that can move around and track and kill you, we’re also really far away from having an autonomous love machine that can move around, and track, and have sex with you.

Before we got fully humanoid, autonomous sex robots that can both have sex with you physically and also, kind of, interact with you like a person, you’re probably going to see something sort of in between. So, in my imagination, I can kind of see a version of this future or a middle step kind of like a Peloton, where you buy the base device, and then you pay a subscription service, and when you use it you’re basically selecting a human sex worker who you like who is controlling it and talking to you.

BLUNT:
And you’re getting, like, “Yes, thrust on two. Ready. One. Two…” And you’re doing this, like, as a form of community building. I love that. (laughs)

ROSE (on call):
These devices will be expensive, and then you have, like, certain people who you can load? Like, “I want to see this person today,” load that in, and then… I don’t know how they do the face and whatever but…

BLUNT:
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. It’s like, is it a one-time purchase? Is it offline? But there’s no way that they would be able to do that as a profitable business with the way that our economy works, so it would probably largely be, like, uploading new personalities. Or like, “This week, your sex robot has read this book and you can talk about it over wine and then enact one of the sex scenes together.”

ROSE (mono):
We’re sort of joking here, but frankly, this is far more realistic than a full-on, fully humanoid walking, talking, sex-having robot that can also set the mood, and pick up on your cues, and be a convincing partner.

BLUNT:
I think about, like, the toys where you can kind of, like, stick your genitalia into something and feel someone from across the web stroking you in some way. That, to me, is kind of like a sex robot that’s mediated by a sex worker, but it’s not… But it’s still that desire for, like, authentic human connection that is leading that and leading the design of a lot of sex tech.

ROSE:
Sex robots are just fancy sex toys. So why are there constantly headlines about how these particular kinds of fancy sex toys spell the downfall of human civilization, or the end of feminism, or whatever?

TINA:
I think that when people think of a machine in the form of, let’s just say, a pretty girl, then people, I think, want to rally around this idea that if such machines were available, that people… and I think alot of this fear is the idea that men would start – start – thinking of objects like women and thinking of women as objects, and… we don’t need sex robots for that.

ROSE:
This is one of the main arguments that you read in opposition to sex robots, this idea that they will encourage men to think of women as objects more than people are already encouraged by popular culture to think of women as objects. And that, of course, would lead to sex trafficking and human women being bought and sold on a market.

TINA:
It kind of reveals the way that people reduce the victims of rape culture to objects, right? Instead of the opposite where they’re imbuing… they’re using their imagination to imbue people or machines with agency, they’re actually reducing women to objects, ironically, in an attempt to protect them, liberate them.

ROSE:
But this drive to protect people – and in the conversation, it’s almost always phrased as protecting women – from sex trafficking, has led to a lot of laws and regulations that actually do the opposite. A few years ago, for example, there were two big bills passed that were meant to try and combat online sex trafficking. They have kind of unwieldy names, one is: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act – FOSTA – and the other is the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, SESTA. They are commonly referred to together as FOSTA-SESTA

BLUNT:
But everything that the laws have done, and speaking as a public health researcher who has studied the impact of FOSTA-SESTA, is when folks lose access to these online spaces, it actually makes them more vulnerable to labor exploitation and trafficking. And so we’ve seen an increase in violence in community spaces, lack of access to resources.

ROSE:
Now, sex trafficking and rape are both real problems that exist in the world, and there are things that can be done to hold people accountable and reduce these kinds of abuses. But it’s not clear to me from any of the research that exists that having a sex robot would inherently mean that we might treat humans as objects more than we currently do.

Today, you can already buy replica vaginas or penises anatomically correct to your favorite porn stars. And while there certainly are some people who have worked to ban sex toys in general, including Ted Cruz, I think most people probably agree that having sex toys for sale doesn’t necessarily contribute to sex trafficking. In the same way that buying a Roomba doesn’t make people suddenly think that indentured cleaning servants are more okay, right?

TINA:
Human trafficking and forced sexual labor exists, but when people use the existence of that to advocate, or call for, or lobby for the total abolition of the sex industry and, like, all forms of adult entertainment, those people are definitely failing to acknowledge that there is forced labor in the garment industry. But like, these people aren’t calling for the abolition of fashion or clothes; like wearing clothes being an endorsement of the exploitation of forced labor in garment factories. And like the same goes for, like… literally insert like any industry.

ROSE:
This debate actually echoes an older conversation in feminism about porn.

SAM FLOREANI:
What role does porn play in feminism? Is porn inherently harmful to women and contrary to gender equality? Or can it be something that’s more sex positive?

ROSE:
This is Sam Floreani, a digital rights activist who works with a group called Digital Rights Watch in Australia.

SAM:
And how, you know, if it’s permissible for people to treat a sex robot badly, is it then going to encourage someone to treat a human being badly, and those kinds of big questions. I think we’ll see those play out a lot more in feminist circles as well.

BLUNT:
It’s so interesting too, because that same logic is used to dehumanize sex workers where it’s like “Sex work should exist because men are violent and they need an outlet. And sex workers are willing to do this.” And it’s like, that is so ridiculous, Sex workers are not a receptacle for violence.

ROSE:
Humanoid robots are often used, rhetorically, as a way to ponder what it means to be alive, or to own another person, or to mistreat another living being. And while I find some of those questions interesting to a point, I do personally struggle sometimes with these conversations because… you don’t need to invent a fictional futuristic robot to grapple with these questions.

INGRID BURRINGTON:
There are already humans who are not being treated like human beings, like right now in the present. So, speculating on what might happen with this other life form made out of a computer that we may or may not ever get to feels like maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves? Maybe we should deal with that right now, with the not-treating-actual-people-like-people.

ROSE:
This is Ingrid Burrington, a writer and host of the podcast RIP Corp.

INGRID:
We already live with, like, sentient artificial intelligences that control our lives. They’re called corporations, right? Like, they’re human, but they’re not human, and they’re people in the sense of, like, the law thinks they’re people, so… Yeah, these problems already exist; you just can’t fuck them.

ROSE:
Other times, you see people arguing that, actually, sex robots are good because they can put an end to human sex work, which is supposedly bad.

BLUNT:
I think of all of these conversations that we’re having about sex work in a larger conversation of one of labor, that same rhetoric needs to be applied for all types of labor. And when I think of, like, that call for “Sex work is work,” it’s also like, “Sex work is work, and work is bad,” and that applies to all work and all industries are vulnerable to labor exploitation.

ROSE (on call):
Are you worried about a robot taking your job?

BLUNT:
I would love for a robot to take my job. (laughs) But I don’t think that that’s a reality at any point in the near future. But like, I would love to have a Robot Blunt go out and do my work and I can just indulge my hedonistic desires at home while it’s making us money. I don’t know. That sounds great.

ROSE (mono):
And then of course, there’s the fear that these robots are going to become sentient and kill us all. And somehow that is more frightening if they are sex robots.

TINA:
Are they going to rise up against us? Are they going to have daddy issues, mommy issues? Are they going to try to kill God?

ROSE:
There are certainly still feminists who believe that porn is evil and contributes to violence against women, but in general, that argument has faded. And I would argue that one of the big reasons it has faded is that porn has gotten a lot more diverse. There’s a lot more independent work created by and for women, trans people, folks of color, than there used to be. And many of those people find that empowering rather than the opposite.

And I think this might happen with this idea of sex robots too. Right now, the majority of devices that come close to a sex robot – things like Real Dolls or Roxy – they generally look like a very stereotypical white, cis, straight man’s ideal of a porn star. You can probably imagine what I’m describing. But if sex tech gets more diverse, if more people start building more things and thinking about these devices in new ways, we might see the conversation shift.

When you think about sex robots as a toy or a tool rather than some terrifying human sex slave – which we’re going to get to in a minute – you can also imagine more interesting uses for them, I think. Like Blunt’s Turing Test interrogation scene.

BLUNT:
And I actually think that sex robots could be super interesting in, like, gender exploration sessions. A lot of folks who come to me for gender exploration or crossdressing sessions are exploring their own gender, and more and more folks have been coming out to me as trans or non-binary who have been doing like crossdressing sessions with me. So, I feel like having a sex robot could be a really interesting way to play with and incorporate gender.

SAM:
A lot of people are very hesitant or, you know, for whatever reason, don’t necessarily know or understand their own bodies or are comfortable exploring their sexuality and being able to get to know what they like, and what works, and what feels good. And so I think it’s going to be quite interesting to see how that could potentially evolve if we get to the point where we have technology that is able to learn what we like by collecting heaps of information about what our body is doing, and how we orgasm, and then essentially reverse engineer an orgasm.

Will that be empowering in the sense that we’ll learn more about our bodies? Or will it, you know, leave us in a situation where you, kind of, don’t even have to think about what you like, you don’t even have to do the homework of figuring out your own body? You can just sort of strap on this toy or this device. I think that will be potentially really interesting.

ROSE:
It’s like we talked about on the sports episode. These robots aren’t going to replace our favorite athletes, or our partners, or sex workers. But they can offer up interesting new experiences.

SAM:
Maybe instead we should be asking: how should these robots exist? How could we make them better? How could we leverage this kind of technology to be something that enhances our experiences as humans, that enhances our ability to connect with each other, to be able to experience sexual pleasure in ways that are meaningful to us? That is so much more interesting than, “Are sex robots bad, and should they exist at all?”

ROSE:
And if we are going to build these things, there are some big technical questions to answer. Like, what kind of battery do you use? And how do you even make that much skin? Do the cameras go in the eyes or does it make more sense to put them somewhere else?

INGRID:
And you’re telling me that, like, most of their eyes, just come from this one in LA who just, kind of like, has a weird cold lab that, I guess, makes eyes? Like, this seems… unsafe.

ROSE:
And that is what we are going to talk about when we return.

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ROSE:
So let’s set aside the philosophy and ethics for a second and talk logistics. What would you make a sex robot out of?

DEB CHACHRA:
I think I would have to think really hard about the types of interactions it’s going to have. Like, what does it mean to be a humanoid robot?

My name is Debbie Chachra. I’m a professor of engineering at Olin College.

ROSE:
And I called Debbie not because she is a sex robot manufacturer or anything like that – she is not. But because she is a) the person I call for all of my weird materials science questions, and b) because she does have experience working on biological materials that can exist in and around the human body.

DEBBIE:
When I’m thinking about a humanoid robot, I don’t think I can think about what materials I would begin to make it out of until I had a sense of what types of interactions it would be having.

ROSE:
Debbie gave this answer a lot; the materials you use would depend entirely on what exactly you want the robot to do. Does it need to be nimble and light and move quickly? Or does it need to be strong and stable? Just like with human bodies, there are tradeoffs with different sizes and shapes when it comes to capabilities. And when you add the element of sex, you have to think about, for example, how much bodily contact are we talking about? Does it need to be able to move around a room, or just lay down on a bed? Do you want the robot to be able to pick you up? Or is it more important that it is flexible and soft?

DEBBIE:
If the contact is a companion robot where you’re, for example, holding hands with the robot, potentially for long durations, you might want to choose a different type of material than for something that’s more, sort of, intimate contact, but potentially for shorter durations.

ROSE:
The same goes for the internal structure; the materials that you choose will depend on what you need the robot to do.

DEBBIE:
So, humans have a density of about 1 and change, right? So we’re, like, denser than water, mostly, but pretty close to the density of water. Some of us float, some of us sink, right? On average, we’re pretty close to water. So, one way of thinking about it is it needs to move and it needs to have a density of approximately 1. At this point it might be more about having the right surface tactile properties than what’s underneath the hood, right?

INGRID:
It’s sort of neglected when imagining, maybe, like a cybernetic organism that has, like, more digital and mechanical parts than necessarily, like, bioengineered parts, is: metal’s heavy, right? If you want to– That robot can’t get on top of you. It will kill you.

ROSE:
That’s Ingrid Burrington again. To make a sex robot that is approximately human-weight, you would probably wind up using lighter materials like carbon fiber and maybe aluminum.

INGRID:
Which is, like, a pretty energy-intensive material to mill. You could probably… If you look at, like, aluminum smelting, a lot of it happens in Iceland because there’s geothermal there and it’s a process that basically requires, like, 24/7 electricity.

ROSE:
Then, you’d have to power the robot and you’d want to think about what type of battery you put inside.

INGRID:
I’m also, frankly, a little wary of putting a lithium battery in a sex robot, simply because lithium can be a very volatile material. There was a period in, like, the early years of iPhones where they would just burst into flames.

ROSE:
But lithium batteries are also fairly likely to be used in whatever sex robots we have because they are the batteries that go into most fancy tech. Smartphones, laptops, electric cars, scooters, these batteries are all over the place. So let’s assume that your sex robot will be powered by a lithium battery. Lithium batteries have several crucial components.

INGRID:
Obviously lithium, and one of the challenges with lithium, particularly in what’s called the lithium triangle of South America, is that those that desert is also, like, a home to lots of Indigenous communities whose water source, whose primary water source, comes from the same place that this lithium is being pulled out of.

ROSE:
Extracting lithium takes a ton of water – about 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium. One mine in Bolivia, the San Cristóbal Mine, is estimated to use 13,000 gallons of water every day. Many of the places that these mines are located in are already facing water scarcity issues. In other places, lithium mining has polluted the water. In 2016, in Tibet, locals noticed fish, cows, and yak floating dead in the Liqi river after a toxic leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium Mine contaminated the water.

Another thing required for these batteries is cobalt.

INGRID:
And currently, the conflicts around cobalt mining mostly have to do with a lot of that mining happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the Democratic Republic of Congo has a very long history of minerals being part of proxy wars, minerals being sold to fund militia groups in civil war settings.

ROSE:
Cobalt from this region comes from either industry-run mines or what’s called “artisanal mining,” which often involves child labor. Conditions in both of these cases are usually pretty terrible.

Another element in this battery is something called tantalum.

INGRID:
In the early 2000s, specifically mining for coltan, which was like the mineral that had tantalum in it, in the Democratic Republic of Congo was linked to funding of militias that were involved in the First and Second Congo War. And that’s where the campaigns around, like, basically blood in your phone started.

ROSE:
The constant desire for these materials continues to put places like the DRC in the crosshairs of modern colonial powers like the United States and China who want control of these resources.

And that’s just the battery. Your sex robot also probably needs a brain, right? And that brain will involve silicon chips.

INGRID:
So, silicon chips you’re going to need, like, high purity quartz, which used to be mined extensively in Brazil seems to now… the primary source for that is going to be this small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains called Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

ROSE:
And in order to get and process all this stuff, you need the magic sauce of hydrofluoric acid.

INGRID:
None of these minerals are going to be usable in electronics if you do not have a steady supply of petrochemicals and acids. That assumes a steady supply of, like, extractive industry in fossil fuels.

ROSE:
And then there’s this question of waste. These are big robots, human-sized, sort of by definition. They’re full of electronics and components. How do you actually get rid of one of these things when it’s reached the end of its useful life? Ingrid says that, probably, given just how many components and how expensive these things probably will be, you’d likely wind up taking your old sex robot back to the place that you bought it rather than to the dump.

INGRID:
If you’re dealing with something that’s got biological and mechanical components, that’s a fairly complex commodity, like, you’re really going to need deep vertical integration, right? Like, you have to handle that recycling and you have to have facilities for doing that.

ROSE:
And that’s just the inside. We haven’t even talked about the outside yet, the part that you are going to actually see and touch. Many sex toys on the market today are made of silicone. And if you look at the handful of humanoid-ish robots out there, they’re also generally using a silicone-based skin. Take Sophia, the robot, for example.

INGRID:
Her skin is made of a proprietary material called Frubber. It’s like Flubber, but not. My guess is it’s some kind of like… mostly like a petrochemical based, like polymer plastic, or maybe like a silicon plastic.

ROSE:
Now, Sophia is not a sex robot. There are no fully humanoid sex robots on the market right now. The closest you’re going to come is something called a Real Doll, which, as its name suggests, is a lot more like a doll than a robot. And Real Doll has its own proprietary skin.

INGRID:
So I ordered… Real Doll sells a sort of sampler pack, and it’s actually so that you can pick which skin tone your real doll is, which is also like… Okay. That’s whole other conversations about the implications therein. In terms of, like, weight and, kind of, texture, I was like, “Okay, yeah. I could see how this is like flesh.” But in terms of being like skin, that… I mean, first of all, like, there’s no wrinkle. There’s no texture. There’s certainly no hair. Yeah, it was a little more like Gak, the Nickelodeon stuff.

ROSE:
But in a lot of sci-fi about humanoid robots, they’re not covered in rubber or silicone. They’re covered in skin. Something like real human skin. Think Blade Runner or whatever that white stuff in Westworld is. These are biological robots. Or at least partially biological.

Now, figuring out how to grow skin is something that lots of people are working on – and almost all of them have nothing to do with sex robots.

DEBBIE:
Tissue engineering, which is about having synthetic scaffolds that are the substrate for cells and then the tissue produced by those cells, is an active area of research, right? This is an area where we’re looking at things like replacing… people with bone cancer, replacing the bone tissue, people with kidney failure, replacing those tissues, replacing parts of livers. So all of this is really important, including skin.

ROSE:
But right now, doctors can’t easily grow large areas of human skin. Your skin might seem simple, but it’s a really complex organ of its own.

DEBBIE:
And I promise you, you know, there are many, many people in the biomedical field who are working really hard to come up with these tissues because of life-changing injuries, because of degradation with age. And they’re not going to… Like, yes, we agree these are super important technologies. They are not going to show up magically for this application.

ROSE:
And even if you could grow living skin, figuring out how to integrate that tissue onto a synthetic skeleton, like a robotic frame, would be really hard.

DEBBIE:
It is hard to create tissue-engineered scaffolds that integrate with the body and the body has all of the rest of what you need to keep tissue alive, right? You have a blood supply; you have an immune response. So, to think about integrating natural tissue with a synthetic sort of substrate or synthetic system would be a whole other level of challenge. And you know, one way of thinking about this is the idea that the body is a single integrated organism.

But when we think about designing… like designing a robot, it’s about putting components together in a particular way, right? It’s not necessarily about it being an integrated, you know, unified whole in the same way that organisms are unified wholes. So, having the conceptual mismatch between having, sort of, tissue on the outside or tissue as a component and then having synthetic components is not a challenge that we’re even close to being able to address.

ROSE:
So humanoid, biological robots are still really far away. But if we open our minds a little bit and think about robot forms that can have sex or be useful in a sexual experience, we might be a lot closer to having sex robots.

A few weeks ago, we talked on the sports episode about building robots that do the thing that you want without making them look exactly like humans. You met Brent Verdialez and his boxing robot, which doesn’t look like a human. But it doesn’t have to in order to be able to convincingly do the thing that it is designed to do. And the same might be true here. We’ve talked a lot about building a humanoid robot, a robot that looks just like a person not just on the outside, but on the inside too. But that might not be necessary.

Even if you want the outside to look like a person, you don’t necessarily need the inside to be skeletal in the way our human skeleton works.

DEBBIE:
There’s no a priori reason why you would make a humanoid robot that would be an endoskeleton, a human-type skeleton with stuff on top of it, right? If it’s possible for you to make a different mode of actuation and the… And again, this is definitely getting out of my space, right? It’s sort of opening up the conceptual space of “No, just the outside needs to have the right shape, but the inside can be a different thing.”

ROSE:
I might argue that chasing after this human replica, when humans are already really good at being humans, is sort of silly.

DEBBIE:
And certainly, there are organisms that move in very different ways, right? Invertebrates are a really good example. They just move using a fundamentally different… the same basic building blocks, fundamentally different approach.

TINA:
I like the idea that sex robots could have, like, other… could have, like, any human form that you could imagine enjoying having sex with, but also, like, human hybrids or non-human forms that, you know, all kinds of people are hot for; for fantasies about non-humans or hybrid humans. I’m not personally into tentacles, but it is kind of fun to imagine that, like… The possibilities areendless.

ROSE (on call):
It doesn’t have to be a person. (laughs)

BLUNT:
Yeah, you could fuck a cloud, or like, the Moon. That sounds great. I would love to fuck a cloud.

ROSE (mono):
Why not lean into the stuff robots are really good at, that we can design for, that humans can’t do?

TINA:
When you think of sex robots as something that someone else would have sex with, it’s a lot easier to be judgmental. When you start to think about what a sex robot can do for you, all of a sudden you’re thinking about things that are deeply intimate and important to you, and it might help you to have more empathy, both for the existence of the robot, sympathy for the robot, but also empathy for why other people might want that.

ROSE:
Now, we just spent, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so talking about the logistical, material properties of these robots. And you might be wondering, “Why? Why spend a third of the episode on materials science and mineral sourcing?” Well, for one thing, I just think it’s interesting and shows how far we’d have to come in terms of research and development to get the kinds of technologies that sex robots require.

But the other reason is because of something Ingrid mentioned in a story she wrote about supply chains and humanoid robots, which is this idea that tech journalism tends to focus on the harms of software and kind of ignore the harms that come from the physical production of the hardware.

INGRID:
And that partly has to do with where people feel like they have agency, I think. But because of that, there’s the places where narratives about lithium mining or, like, shitty conditions like Foxconn, factories come up, tends to be in this way that’s about, sort of, consumer guilt.

ROSE:
Think of a lot of messaging around blood diamonds for example. The focus is generally on shaming the consumers for buying these items rather than pushing the owners of the diamond mines directly.

Another reason that the focus tends to be on software is because it feels a lot more malleable, from a power perspective.

INGRID:
Some of the things that are really fucked up in the manufacturing supply chains of consumer electronics and future hypothetical humanoid robots would require transformations to the world that would probably create power imbalances that powerful people don’t want to see, right? The concern is not, like, “I feel bad about my phone, but these labor conditions are not okay.” What we actually have to have a conversation about is, “Who owns this land and who’s profiting off of it? And how are those profits being distributed?” Which is a conversation that has way more at stake than, like, “How do we make the algorithm less biased?”

ROSE:
And Flash Forward is totally guilty of this too. On this show, we’ve talked a lot about the potential harms of technology. But we almost always focus on the algorithm, or the model, or the data that’s being used. I think that sometimes that’s because those areas feel changeable because the people who do that work and that programming still feel reachable to us. Whereas the people who control vast swaths of land in the DRC… don’t. The systems that prop them up are huge.

INGRID:
That’s not a fun thing to think about because that’s… Problem solving that is not… would mean, like, no less than overhauling most of capitalism.

ROSE:
You know, no big deal.

Now, the one upside of not being anywhere close to humanoid robot partners is that we have plenty of time to answer not just the moral and ethical questions, or the economic questions, or the materials questions about these devices; we also have time to figure out how to think about the privacy settings that will be required.

RENDER MAN:
Literally, you now had ransomware around your junk.

ROSE:
More on that when we come back.

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You might think that a fancy, prestigious journal like Nature would not have much in their archives about sex robots, but I did go and look, and in fact, in 2017, they published a Nature editorial called “Let’s Talk About Sex Robots.” And that editorial argues that there should be more academic research into this topic and that by not doing this work, scientists are potentially missing out on important elements of human-robot interactions. I will link to that editorial in the show notes.

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ROSE:
In January of 2021, users of a chastity cage called the Cellmate started receiving a pretty terrifying message. Their devices had been taken over by hackers, who wanted a ransom to unlock the device.

RENDER:
And because of the design, if you couldn’t log into your account to get that key, you couldn’t unlock it. And there was no, like, manual release, there was no manual key, or emergency, or anything like that.

The only way out is with bolt cutters in a very, you know, sensitive location.

ROSE:
This is Brad Haines, also known online as Render Man.

RENDER:
My mother calls me Render on most occasions so… I guess you can call me Render. I am a security researcher and penetration tester, meaning I break into systems to try to find the problems before the bad guys do.

ROSE:
And Render was not surprised to hear that these Cellmate users were in trouble. In fact, he was kind of, at least partially, responsible for these hacks. A few months before all of this happened, Render and another security researcher had reached out to the company, informing them that their mobile app’s security was terrible, and it would be pretty easy to hack users’ devices.

RENDER:
And where the real problem came in was the company had built their software so poorly in terms of authentication that, through various API calls, you could find out what their passwords were. You could ask it for literally, like, you know, “Tell me every user that’s on here what their login name is, change their password, find out who they were connected to, force unlock or lock these devices.”

ROSE:
They shared these findings and were like “Hey, you really have to fix this, otherwise people are going to get hacked.”

RENDER:
We just wanted them to give us a plan. They were like, you know, “Because of the pandemic, we’ve got only a couple of people on staff, it’s tough…” Like, we get it, but show us a plan because they were bypassing their own deadlines and such. And so, we basically had to go public with this to warn people before something bad happened.

ROSE:
When they published their findings, they didn’t detail exactly what the problem was, or how to break into the devices, but if you know what you’re doing, it wasn’t that hard to figure it out.

RENDER:
And yeah, you’re seeing reports of people being locked out of their accounts and literally being held ransom for bitcoin to unlock these devices. Frankly, I felt horrible that was happening, but I would have felt more horrible if that happened and we hadn’t reported these things. You know, we tried.

ROSE:
Render has been working on hacking sex toys since 2016, and it started as just a way to teach himself a new skill.

RENDER:
I had been working at a job and wanted to learn more about web applications, mobile applications, and particularly IoT stuff, the Internet of Things. Well, the vast majority of it or IoT devices, the common ones, your baby monitors, refrigerators, thermostats, those had already been done. And I had done some research years before where I had seen some of the first initial connected adult devices and thought, “Huh, Okay. This is an area that is ripe for connected devices. I wonder if anybody else has looked at this,” and there really hadn’t been. So it was new territory.

ROSE:
A local sex toy store gave him their floor models to work on and it didn’t take long for him to find that the vast majority of high-tech, internet-connected sex toys on the market at the time were… not secure at all.

RENDER:
Every one of them I looked at… And there were many, many very serious and very basic problems. Of the major eight, I think seven of them, I was able to walk up to them, and reach out to them, and have their user database on a platter kind of thing.

ROSE:
For most of history, sex toy companies have been making devices that stand alone. They do their thing in their space and they don’t talk to servers, or phones, or have apps. But now, more and more sex toys are getting those bells and whistles. Sex toys have now entered the Internet of Things.

SAM:
The Internet of Things is kind of widely regarded as being a bit of a privacy and security dumpster fire. Like, they are often very vulnerable. They often, you know, don’t get the sort of required security updates happening enough. Often they have very wildly broad privacy policies that, you know, would enable that information to be shared with third parties and things like that.

ROSE:
That’s Sam Floreani again.

SAM:
One of the examples that I think is really interesting is from a company called SVAKOM, and they released the Siime Eye in 2016. And so, this is a vibrator that has a camera on the end of it that can be controlled remotely via an app on a smartphone, or a tablet, or a computer. And so, what happened was research that was demonstrated at a conference in 2017 showed just how easy it was to hack the toy and to take control of the device, take control of the camera, and use it to record and things like that.

ROSE:
One of the reasons it’s relatively easy to hack the Siime Eye is that the default password is just 88888888, which, they say, explicitly on their website, encouraging people to change it. But not everybody reads this stuff carefully, and so you’re just advertising the default password to the public.

Now, I have some questions about what exactly the turn-on is for a vibrator that records the inside of the vaginal canal while it’s being used. Like, go ahead and call me a prude, and maybe some people are into this, but I’m just not sure how sexy it is to see a pretty dark, kind of fleshy canal? I did look up footage from this vibrator just to see what it looks like, and I can confirm that it really is just dark, and kind of red and fleshy.

And if that’s what you’re into, no shame; go for it. But with a lot of internet-connected sex toys, I think it’s worth asking the question of, like, why? Why add a camera to this? Why does it have to connect to the internet? Sometimes there are really good reasons for this stuff.

SAM:
In the pandemic, a lot of couples are separated by distance or are, you know, socially distancing. And so, these kinds of smart sex toys can allow people to connect and play remotely without having to be physically with each other.

ROSE:
But in a lot of other cases, the answer to these “why” questions seems to just be: Because we can!

And when it comes to sex toy manufacturers, many of them aren’t actually well versed in the security issues they’re walking into when they start to add chips, and cameras, and internet connectivity.

To publish his findings on sex toy vulnerabilities, Render started a project called the Internet of Dongs, which I think is very funny. And the good news is that in the last five years, Render says that many of these companies have realized that they have to take this stuff way more seriously.

RENDER:
But it’s much better now than it was then. And I like to think that I had some matter of effect on that.

ROSE:
But not every company has their security and privacy in order.

RENDER:
There’s some devices that allow for remote or anonymous remote connections where you can… you know, it’s like a Tinder-like thing. You can invite somebody to connect your device. Well, in this, I actually found that it was leaking the GPS coordinates for every user that showed up in the search. So, you know… You plug that into Google Maps; I could tell you what room of the house you were masturbating in, basically. And it’s like, “Okay, that suddenly gets a lot scarier.”

ROSE:
Even if you’re not talking about being able to seize control of a device remotely, there are still privacy implications with your data being associated with certain companies or devices. On the one hand, we should not care what kind of sex toy anybody has; we should try and destigmatize that stuff. But on the other hand, you should be able to choose who knows that information because it’s not really anybody’s business.

And when you talk about the Internet of Things, and the various privacy nightmares that this presents, sometimes people will just be like “Okay, whatever. Who cares?”

RENDER:
You know, a connected fridge. Most people wouldn’t care if the manufacturer knew how many times a day you open the fridge. But how many times a day you use your sex toy has a very different connotation associated with it.

ROSE:
And this is especially true for marginalized communities. Imagine, for example, someone using a toy to explore a sexuality that they aren’t “out” about at the moment. Or a situation in which it’s not safe for a person to be outed as a sex worker because that could be used against them by landlords or courts.

SAM:
When we think about privacy in that context, it really can play an important role in, sort of, community care and harm reduction, as well as just protecting me, the individual, and my data, and my interests.

ROSE:
And that is before you’ve added all the things that you would need to add to make a fully humanoid sex robot.

RENDER:
But all of this scares me because, from a privacy and security standpoint, you’re now talking things like, you know, cameras in eyes so it can recognize what’s going on. You’re talking a lot more complexity because now you’re dealing with an articulated, motorized skeleton underneath with actuators and such.

If that gets hijacked, there’s a potential that, you know, somebody could be very deeply harmed by this. I mean, you’ve got to think, a mouth orifice with an actuator on it, if they’re not doing the controls for opening and closing that… because oftentimes a linear actuator will have a lot more force than, say, a human bite. And if you slam that shut at an appropriate time, ooh, I would not want to be in earshot of that scream.

ROSE:
These sex robots would also likely employ machine learning. Which means they’re not only gathering data about you; they’re also creating data about you.

RENDER:
If you’re doing any sort of machine learning or, you know, AI, you’re talking a lot of processing. Speech-to-text is not an easy thing. Things like Alexa or Google Home, that data, that recording, is sent for processing to their servers to get back. So now all the, you know, dirty little things that you say when you’re interacting with this are now being sent to a third party for analysis.

SAM:
And then, all the information that would be generated on top of that is where I think it gets particularly interesting, because then it’s not just collecting what is happening while you are using the device or the sex robot, but it’s also creating more personal information. And it would be doing that by, essentially, learning what you like, learning how to respond to you, and adapting, and all of that, and then having to essentially make predictions based on the information it’s collected to be able to act on that. So, the kinds of new information that it could generate then, I think, creates additional privacy risks.

ROSE:
I think that, in some ways, sex robots help really clarify the importance of thinking about privacy and security in advance, of making sure that we are careful before devices are deployed, not after.

They also show us that by protecting the information and identities of folks with the most to lose – people who are already at high risk for violence, or poverty, or oppression – that makes us all safer.

SAM:
You know, historically, privacy has really been seen as this kind of very individualistic thing. “It’s about me, and it’s about my data, and it’s about me being able to control that.” Whereas I think we are starting to see a shift in how we think about privacy as more of a collective good, which I think is a really important shift because, really, you know, regardless of what happens on an individual level… and of course, individual rights, you know, they are important and they do need to be protected.

But on a larger scale, when we’re thinking about information asymmetries and power imbalances, privacy is one of the key ways that we can, sort of, look at information flows and be able to sort of interrogate these systems of power and be able to push back against them when that when they’re used in ways that are unfair. And so, I think there’s a very real and very strong need to consider privacy as something that is a collective good that can help protect us, not just as individuals, but also as members of communities.

ROSE:
Sex robots aren’t coming any time soon. Or they’re already here, if you consider a sex robot just a fancy sex toy that can learn and respond to you autonomously. And so I hope that the next time you see a headline freaking out about sex robots, you ask yourself a couple of questions: What is actually happening here? What tech exists and what is just vaporware? Are there any actual experts quoted in this piece?

BLUNT:
Just kind of, like, diversify where you’re getting your news from and listen to the folks who are impacted and what they have to say because sex workers are completely capable of telling and sharing their own stories. It’s more so just like an access to who is willing to share those stories with us.

[Flash Forward closing music begins – a snapping, synthy piece]

Flash Forward is hosted by me, Rose Eveleth, and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Mattie Lubchansky. The voices from the future this episode were played by Andrea Silenzi, Brent Rose, Zahra Noorbakhsh, Richelle Claiborne, Henry Alexander Kelly, Shara Kirby, Anjali Kunapaneni, Chelsey B Coombs, Tamara Krinsky, and Keith Houston. You can find more about all of those people in the show notes.

If you want to discuss this episode, some other episode, or just the future in general, you can join the Facebook group. Just search ‘Flash Forward Podcast’ and ask to join.

And if you want to support the show, there are a couple of ways that you can do that too. Head to FlashForwardPod.com/Support for more about that. We are making some changes to how the supporting tiers work as we move into this next phase of Flash Forward. You can find more about that on the Patreon page and soon on a blog post that I have not finished writing yet but will be up soon. If financial giving is not in the cards for you but you want to do one last nice thing for Flash Forward, you can go to Apple Podcasts and leave a nice review, or just tell your friends about the show. That really does help.

That’s all for this future. Come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

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