Should Governments Ban Sex Robots?

It's just Mara and Logan this week, and the main event is a question Logan expected to have a clean answer to: AI romantic companions — thumbs up or thumbs down? Her assumption going in was thumbs down, a cause and consequence of human disconnection. It didn't survive the hour intact.

The numbers do a lot of the arguing. In a new BYU/Institute for Family Studies survey, 15% of young adults in committed relationships admitted to romantic engagement with an AI chatbot on the side. A 21-year-old woman in China went on 200 dates with AI boyfriends in a year and told the New York Times she wonders how she's supposed to date in real life. And UBTech just unveiled a full-sized humanoid companion with silicone skin: the top-line male version costs $145,000, the female $129,000. As Mara put it, "even in fabricated-women life, men are worth more than women."

We get into the manosphere and Korea's 4B movement squeezing romance from both fringes, legal scholar Inyoung Cheong's paper "Would You Marry Superintelligence?", and the Alain Badiou idea she builds on — that love is a construction built from difference, whose meaning depends on the risk of failure. A companion architected to never disagree with you forecloses exactly that. Also: the sex robot speakeasy, and whether we all just need to be polyamorous.

First, the news: Palantir published a manifesto on AI sovereignty, and a viral post by Arnaud Bertrand called it the canary in the coal mine for two assumptions propping up the US economy — that AI labs can keep charging rent on closed models, and that other countries will stay structurally dependent on US tech without pushing back. Sovereignty, it turns out, is one word doing three jobs: nations, corporations, individuals.

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