What Sex is Your Robot?

Ant writes "Technology Review has an article about how the more robots interact with humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes."

Re:Sex shops

[Anonymous Coward]

I know someone that works in a sex shoppe.

They say that 90% of the dolls sold are for gag-gifts.. and 10% to perverts who wind up being very dissapointed.

Re:Do you have to ask?

[Rick the Red]

We are offended that you would try to apply you limiting concept of gender on us.

Hey, pal, join the club. Most languages slap a gender form on all nouns, including inanimate objects like rocks. "Limiting concept" indeed, but that's the way those languages work. Teach humans to speak binary and then we'll talk (pun intended). In most (all?) latin languages, the word for computer is male -- I looked it up once. I don't know about the equivalent of "robot," but I'd bet it's also male.

For talking robots it might be unavoidable

[leob]

In some languages some constructs bear the mark of the speaker's gender; e.g. in Russian there is no way to say anything in the past or present perfect tense without revealing your gender: "I (male) have said" is "Ya skazal", but "I (female) have said" is "Ya skazala". To assign a gender to a talking robot is therefore a necessity.