Buy Yourself a Teeny Holographic Girlfriend
Desire a girlfriend with no will of her own? Gatebox’s household hub is just the thing
by JANET JAY
Meet Azuma Hikari, the “20-year-old hologram communicator robot” who wants to take the place of household hubs such as Amazon Echo or Google Home … but while wearing a short skirt and stroking your ego.
A new product called Gatebox makes that fantasy a reality, albeit on a small scale — and limited to a coffee-maker-looking device that sits on your desk or bedside table.
Will Siri dance for you? It’s doubtful. But Azuma Hikari definitely will. On command. And that’s not a good thing.
“The reason why we developed Gatebox is not because we are just pursuing entertainment or convenience,” the Gatebox website explains. Gatebox is a Japanese company. They were unavailable for interviews in English and the translated website has some errors.
The site explains the project’s motivations. “We want the characters be naturally in our daily lives and spend relaxing time with us. ‘I want to live with my favorite character.’ We dreamed of such a world and we started this project.”
The world the company dreamed of was one with a digital woman holding a sign saying “seeking master.” Her “bio page” states that she is five feet, two inches tall, loves anime and donuts, hates insects, is good at cooking eggs and her “dream” is “to become a heroine to help people who are working hard.”
No weight mentioned.
Most important is her search for “a person who wants to become master of Gatebox, and accept me!”
The Gatebox unit uses a small projector paired with various visual and audio sensors to project this digital “waifu” who can recognize movement and speech and respond in kind. “Waifu” is a term for a two-dimensional or digital character whom a man considers his girlfriend or wife — which is where the word originated.
If you’ve seen the T.V. show Archer, just imagine Krieger’s holographic girlfriend. But tiny.
“She is a comforting character [who] is great to those living alone,” Gatebox’s website explains.
“With small scale projection technology and a diverse range of sensors, the character that comes to life within Gatebox recognises its owner’s movements, and moves automatically,” the site continues.
Take a look at one of the site’s main ads and one of the few in English — a day in a life with Hikari.
Hikari apparently “uses her own judgment” to talk to her master in her “ultimate healing voice” and as you spend more time with her, she recognizes your patterns and habits and adapts to your schedule. She can wake you up, adjust your lights, even text you when you’re away.
But Gatebox’s main selling point is not that she tells you to bring along an umbrella. Although the videos on the site are mainly in Japanese, they emphasises the “girlfriend” role the ’bot plays to bring happiness into what seems like an incredibly joyless life.
“You know, somebody’s home for me, feels great,” the sad-sack Japanese man says while sipping tea alone in a dark apartment.
“The Gatebox isn’t just a mere display or a P.C.,” the site assures you. “It’s a completely new device that was created with the focus of being able to call on and communicate with another character.”
“The Gearbox is equipped with human-detecting sensors and cameras, and is able to recognize the face and movements of its owner, and the moment this happens, the feeling of distance between the two, instantly fades.”
Gatebox projects the character’s image using a short-focal-point projector and a transmission screen with rear-projection technology. The unit is equipped with Bluetooth and infrared technology in addition to an HDMI cable that allows it to connect to all your devices, as well as with your household electronics and any other internet-of-things systems.
“It will operate household electronics,” the site explains, “and through the IoT network, the character will adapt to the real world.”
You can talk to her through messages in the controlling app, which works on both Android and iOS. To preempt the joke that some guy always makes — no, nobody has yet figured out a way to hook her into a robotic kitchen. Ha.
But that does bring up an interesting point. Hikari, with her “master wanted” sign, is only the latest incarnation of the helpful, subservient female A.I. And the way we treat such “fembots” reflects strongly on society’s attitudes toward actual women.
“Humanoid robots in the public imagination have long been a stand-in for any exploited class of person,” Laurie Pennie wrote in The New Statesman. “Even the word ‘robot’ is derived from the Czech word for ‘slave.’”
Those who interact with these A.I.s must consider: Are they ‘real’? Are they sentient? Do they have autonomy and rights? While Gatebox’s A.I. may not quite qualify as a personality, Pennie continues this line of thought.
If she is sentient, is it right for him to exploit her, to be serviced by her, to sleep with her? If she isn’t, can he can truly fall in love with her? Does it matter? And — most terrifying of all — when she works out her own position, will she rebel, and how can she be stopped?
These are questions that society at large has been asking for centuries — not about robots, but about women. The anxious permutations are familiar to most women who date men. We can see them, slowly, trying to working out if we are truly human, if we really think and feel as they do.
“This language of master-slave is at heart of a dominant form of relationship that is still present in our societies,” said Dr. Kathleen Richardson, a senior research fellow at the Center for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in United Kingdom.
“It is now what is reproduced in new forms of technology. For many in this world, females are not valued, they are instruments and nothing more. If you could develop a robot or A.I. that would be a version of the female without her subjectivity, many men — including those [men’s rights activists] — would find that ideal!”
“When I first presented my ideas on sex robots to an audience, one member of the audience, a man of about 60, said, ‘There’s not really much difference between buying the services of a prostitute and giving money to your wife,’” recalled Richardson, who is the driving force behind the Campaign Against Sex Robots.
“This view that women are really only instruments of men needs to be addressed and challenged in all the forms it arrives. The rise of sex dolls with animatronic motors, or virtual avatars like this one, show us that something problematic is at work in male-female relationships, with women’s purpose as nothing more to gratify and please a male.”
While Gatebox is currently only available with one character and in Japanese, men all over the world are posting about their excitement. Various men’s and anti-women groups online — Redpill, MGTOW, etc. — host excited threads about Gatebox serving this exact need. How to “have” a woman without that pesky sentience and needs of her own.
Or as Gatebox’s site obliquely puts it. “She will always do all she can — just for the owner.”
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