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The future has arrived in the form of pole-dancing robots

For the man who prefers the feeling of cold steel against his flesh. 

 

EJ Dickson

Tech

Posted on Mar 11, 2014   Updated on May 31, 2021, 3:49 pm CDT

Are you a tech enthusiast who grew up thinking Rosie was the hottest character on The Jetsons? Do you love getting lap dances, but wish the woman on your lap smelled like diesel oil and iron instead of baby powder?

Then head on down to the international CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany, where a pair of voluptuous, life-sized, pole-dancing robots recently made their debut.

Via CowbagTV/YouTube

Designed by British artist Giles Walker, the robot dancers officially debuted at the European tech conference in 2012. They were so popular that they returned for this year’s tech conference, which British prime minister David Cameron and chancellor Angela Merkel officially opened Sunday night.

Despite their novel function and fairly lifelike movements, the robots don’t actually seem that technologically sophisticated. The droids are made of old car parts, with heads constructed out of surveillance cameras, and their gyrations are controlled via computer, as a robot DJ spins some beats in the background. No word on whether they also have the ability to pick up dollar bills with their butts, or if they can say “I’m just doing this so I can stay in school and finish my nursing degree” in binary. 

So will androids be replacing live dancers at your local gentlemen’s club anytime soon? Probably not: the robots’ appearance fee is about $4,150, considerably more than your garden variety exotic dancer. But their enormous popularity at the expo says some pretty interesting things about the contemporary relationship between sex and technology; namely, that while there’s nothing men love more than seeing a sexy woman writhe and wriggle around a pole like a slutty firefighter, it’s even better if that woman doesn’t have a pulse.

H/T Daily Mail | Photo by Abul Hussain/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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*First Published: Mar 11, 2014, 1:42 pm CDT