Rambling Thoughts on Robo-Masochism

Robot fetish media is full of conscious gynoids that love to be dismantled, more or less violently, sometimes to the point of destruction. Among other things, this serves a narrative purpose by straightforwardly manifesting the tension between the gynoid’s human appearance and her mechanical nature. But I’ve often wondered: what diegetic motivations could explain this lust for damage? Would such a machine experience damage as something analogous to pain? What follows is a summary of my tentative thoughts on the topic, such as they are.

Physical pain in living organisms derives from nociception, a system for detecting tissue damage. Special nerves sensitive to mechanical disruption, damaging temperatures, and chemical threats send signals to the brain that are perceived as pain and trigger brain functions that, in addition to more immediate effects, selectively suppress the neural pathways of the behaviors that led to the painful stimulus. In human masochists, there’s some evidence that their nociceptive neural response is malformed, causing these signals to be mistaken for pleasurable stimuli. Physical pleasure works similarly, in that certain nervous stimuli trigger (different) neurotransmitters and neural patterns to strengthen the pathways for behaviors associated with those stimuli.

A robot could be designed with an analogous nociceptive sensory capability, even if implemented purely in software via the coding scheme for sensory signals. Assuming a human-like neuromorphic cognitive architecture with the above-discussed systems for inhibiting or promoting behaviors, such a robot might very well have the subjective sense that such signals are painful (pace David Chalmers on qualia isomorphism as a necessary consequence of functional isomorphism). But strict biomimicry isn’t the only route, especially in light of the different material considerations of a mechanical as opposed to a biological body.

Physical pain emerged as an answer to a particular set of problems. Biological organisms can heal even grave injuries, but this ability is limited. Healing takes time during which further damage can slow or reverse the progress of regeneration, so it’s vital that the affected area not be too stressed by further activity. The body’s healing powers are limited in their capacity, so it’s imperative to prevent additional injury lest a tipping point be reached beyond which full recovery becomes impossible. In the ancestral environment, each non-trivial injury came with a risk of death or serious debilitation. Under these conditions, the strength of behavioral suppression and aversion that result from the neural mechanisms associated with pain are worth their drawbacks.

Assuming technology of a more or less conventional nature and skipping over some edge cases, the situation is very different for robots. They don’t heal the way that biological organisms do: physical damage is remedied by dismantling a robot sufficiently to replace all affected components, followed by reassembly. Far from maintaining themselves despite use, or even strengthening as a result of it, their parts are worn down by their working and must be periodically replaced. Even damage severe enough to cause the robot to totally cease functioning lacks the finality of biological death unless the memory or neural-analogue hardware, the “brain” itself, is wrecked. Unlike our ancestors, the robot is necessarily embedded in a technological civilization on which it relies for the power, replacement parts, lubricants, and other consumables that sustain its existence, so even major damage is more likely to be repaired instead of leading to death. The set of problems to be solved is thus fundamentally different.

At minimum, damage is still inconvenient and probably costly to repair, so being completely oblivious or indifferent to it is not ideal. One possible approach is to implement a version of the pain mechanism that scales differently than ours with the degree of damage, perhaps similar in intensity at lower, ‘slamming your hand in the car door’ levels, but effectively capped not much higher than that. Imagine if having your leg severed was no more painful than a sprain.

Conditional suppression of pain mechanisms could also be implemented. Indeed, biological creatures have this capability: in situations of extreme stress people who have received grievous wounds often describe the pain as much less severe than it grew to be once the stressful situation ended. In robots, one obvious use for this is suppressing pain after the initial damage event, as continued activity poses far less danger to a robot than a wounded human. Other conditions might have to do with environmental or social cues, or the specific components affected by the damage.

Volitional suppression of pain would certainly make sense, too, albeit with hard-coded/wired constraints to prevent abuse (finding ways to override or circumvent these is a possible plot point). One way to realize such volitional suppression might be to design the robot such that, while the pain might still be occurring, their conscious mind, or “access consciousness” as the highest level mental thread that is aware of our other mental processes and sensations is sometimes called, is not forced to pay attention to it. In other words, the robot can choose to ignore the pain.

That brings us to solutions that don’t involve pain at all, or which act independently alongside it. Instead, stimuli associated with damage could force themselves to the center of attention, ensuring the robot is aware of them. They could persist there until some time has passed, or until some condition is met that allows them to be dismissed.

Since damage is still likely to be associated with physical danger, the robot should have analogues to the automatic responses that help us navigate such situations. Damage-prevention reflexes like those that cause us to pull our hand back after touching a hot stove are one example. Something akin to a rationalized version of the fight-flight-freeze reaction is another.

In humans (and probably other animals) the fight-flight-freeze response is often associated with a perceptual time dilation that makes it possible to respond to events much more rapidly than is normally possible. Foreseeable neuromorphic computer hardware is made up of electrical components capable of reacting orders of magnitude more quickly than biological neurons, though there are system level constraints (e.g. most neural processes are memory- and coordination-limited rather than processing-limited) that may prevent them from fully exploiting this. Furthermore, the tight power and cooling constraints that apply to humanoid robots will likely drive a design emphasis on the inherent high efficiency of such hardware (similar to that of brain tissue), meaning that in normal operation such a robot might only be using a fraction of its maximum theoretical cognitive speed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though, and it’s possible that the cognitive hardware of such robots might be designed to temporarily function at unsustainably high rates in crisis situations, such as when they have sustained damage.

Whatever is done with the resulting signals, damage can only be directly sensed in parts of the body that are equipped with sensors of some kind. Of course, this includes the places where a robot interfaces with the world: the skin, eyes, ears, and so on, but also internal sensors associated with balance, proprioception, and the positions of various actuators.

Which other internal parts might be instrumented, and to what degree, is less certain. The boundaries between fluidic and electronic systems, as well as leak-prone parts of the plumbing in general, seem like a good place for sensors that can detect moisture. A network of internal temperature sensors also seems advisable.

Different subsystems or components might at once provide direct sensor inputs to cognitive/neural processes akin to sensation, but also be able to use their own installed compute capacity to generate more detailed diagnostic data when requested. In other words, the behavior of a fluid pump might “feel odd” (the neuromorphic-based intelligence is experiencing that the stimulus provided by the pump’s sensors is atypical), which could prompt a request for the system to which the pump belongs to provide a detailed diagnostic report in a symbolic format (text or image based) that the conscious, symbol-manipulating mind can read.

Finally, we return to the original question: why might a conscious gynoid desire to be damaged?

It seems likely that context will play a central role in governing sexual receptivity. This is especially prominent in the context of BDSM as practiced by humans, but is true for sex in general—your lover touching your genitals in the bedroom elicits very different sensations than a stranger doing so in the checkout line at a convenience store. What frightens or disgusts in one context arouses in another, profoundly affecting the perceived pleasure of a given sensation.

If the pain caused by damage is not especially intense or prolonged, can be suppressed or ignored at will in the right context, or is simply absent, the problem becomes a matter of identifying the positive allure of the experience. Something about being damaged must seem pleasurable, whether by that we mean outright sensual pleasure or the satisfaction of some less immediate psychological hunger. I think the latter is too nebulous and contingent even for an exploration as speculative as this one to produce any useful generalizations, so for the time being let’s consider how physical damage might produce physical pleasure.

Damage implies extreme stimulation of sensors: a blow will produce a stronger sensation (higher magnitude signal from pressure sensors) than a caress. Internal damage will stimulate sensors that are usually dormant, or else produce routine signals that rarely rise to conscious attention during normal operation. In a psychologically receptive state, such extreme, atypical sensations could be perceived as powerfully pleasurable and delightfully unpredictable—feelings that would be subjectively amplified and extended by any damage-induced hyperarrousal and time dilation. Even if the sensation of damage itself is neutral, though, triggering these mechanisms might be desirable because of their effect on co-occurring, more conventionally pleasurable sensations.

Important too are the specific qualities of the gynoid’s sexual system. What set of physical stimuli produces pleasure for her in general? Is she made so that only the stimulation of a few erogenous zones can ever be perceived as sexually pleasurable or, like humans, does a state of growing sexual excitement open the gates to erotic pleasure from a wider range of sensual inputs? In the former case, only damage to those erogenous parts of the gynoid has the potential to result in direct extreme-stimulus pleasure. The latter provides a much broader scope for the enjoyment of damage as a part of sexual play.

If this capacity for experiencing damage as pleasurable is subject to the behavioral reinforcement mechanism so central to the causal-mechanical aspect of what we call “pleasure,” positive accidental or experimental experience could result in a self-reinforcing desire to explore more extreme manifestations.