
Originally Posted by
sam luis obispo
Basically, porn paid for every visual medium.
During the Civil War, the public's desire for images from the front lines fueled the rapid rise of photography. When the war ended, the market for photography waned. Having a photograph of something was considered a luxury....like making a multidimensional holographic film of a wedding would be considered today.
Black market porn paid for advance of photographic technology until about the turn of the century.
Porn paid for the grass roots propagation and development of everything: motion pictures, magazines with color pictures, home movies, Super 8mm, the instant Polaroid camera that spat out individual snapshots you had to shake, VCRs, laser discs, hand held video cameras, DVD, HD, the internet.
Men work. Men have disposable income. Men will pay for masturbatory aids. If a new technology will help men get off, their money will be used to make that technology cheaper and more accessible to the general market.
Same with robots. At first, they will expensive and clunky. But like the $2,000 VCR gave way to the $1,200 VCR, then the $500 VCR, and then the $300 VCR, and then the $79 VCR, they will get cheaper and better.
"More real than real," to borrow a line from Blade Runner, is the goal.
When they are that good, if our society is as soft and decadent as it is now, there will be a segment of our society that will imagine themselves as the abolitionists of 1800s, fighting for the dignity of the manufactured "people."
The new Battlestar Galactica tv series took us on that moral process. Most of the audience went from "Ahh...killer robots! Get them!" in season one, to rooting for some of them by season five.