I might not have thought so without seeing the majority of the episode — after all, I did watch the whole BBC America hour on women and their toy babies — but I finished the show with an odd unease.

While I do think some of the women are candidates for some therapy, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a layer of misogyny in the general premise. All of these stories were lumped together and they all seemed to have the same general tone: “Look at these crazy women! They have so many hormones that if they’re thwarted in some way, they just go bananas!”

There’s room to pity and room to sympathize and then just room to get out of the way here. A lot of folks profiled here at Boing Boing are fringe-dwellers, and that’s one of the reasons I think a lot of us come to the site: To gawp first — but to understand, second. In general, I don’t see these women, who are really just indulging in non-norm behavior, really hurting anyone. I don’t own a doll, haven’t done surrogate birthing and don’t breastfeed a child who can ask for it. But I don’t see the harm in people who do.

So what I was left with is this feeling that this is yet another way to undermine women overall. I know, I know — but I don’t go crying “misogyny” at the drop of a hat. It’s similar to the feelings I had post-election. I didn’t like Sarah Palin and think she was a mistaken choice. Hillary Clinton I know rubs some folks the wrong way. But there was a layer of misogynistic anger projected at them (like the criticism heaped on the women in this show) that went beyond their weaknesses and failings.

It was as if they needed to be ridiculed — so they could be put back in their place. And that doesn’t sit well with me.

It makes me uncomfortable. Uncanny valley much?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence

Gawd! I’m waiting for someone to create a Frankenstein’s monster merging one of thee with a Furby O_O

Heck with rate of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence we could start with a ‘Furby’ level of intelligence and within 10 years have the mental equivalence of a 10 year old :p

*laughs* If someone devises a better ‘input’ method for data such as used in some of the various ‘Bot’s’ such as the Alice Project, we may well see something like this in the near future anyhow.

This also reminds me of the Czech film “Little Otik” where the husband of a barren woman makes a “baby” out of a tree trunk and she cares for it as if it were real.

Ask the families, the husbands. I didn’t watch this version, but the one shown on channel 4, in the UK last year, clearly showed the strains this had on their relationships.

@#2 I don’t know about better but dogs are still living creature with a will. It is not possible to project all you want into them as much as it is in an inanimated object?

This *is* a form of mental illness, but the grief that 7 miscarriages brings would take its toll on anyone … we all do what we need to to cope

These dolls *are* therapy.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=UKkk07t-iC4

One of the main problems is, like the babies, the lady robot looks real up to a point, but the devil is in the detail, the small details like the rigor mortis fingers and jerky movement.

Boston robotics Big Dog on the other hand gets the movement right

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

yet it is so obviously a machine we relax our judgement and accept it at face value.

Currently technology isn’t advanced enough and neither is our understanding of how to advance it to make things look really real as opposed to virtually real.

This problem is also faced by game designers and CG film animators, no matter how good the 3d models look, or how well animated, the lack of small details, particularly facial expressions, mean any realistic human anything creates feelings of unease as it appears to be human yet clearly isn’t.

Most FPS games get round this by having aliens, zombies, people in space suits, or in some other way heavily stylised, and I wonder if there would be half as many zombie themed games around, were there to be a significant jump in understanding how to really fake reality.

CG films have similar choices to make, The Polar Express ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338348/ ) for example tried to be hyper real and got close, but you are still aware it’s CG. Pixar and Dreamworks, opted for heavy stylisation, where like with Big Dog, your brain stops trying to tell you why it’s strange.

Two films where the plot centred around the limits of technology and featuring exclusively computer generated protagonists appearing in monitors: MaxHeadroom ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092402/ )and S1m0ne ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/ ). They’re about 20 years apart on the tech tree but the directors both faced the same fundamental problem of having computer generated characters that viewers needed care about to carry the story and solved it by using a real actor to play the software generated entities.

These are exactly the people we don’t want breeding, so I think this is a win/win.